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

Power. That is the word that comes to mind. We're the new technologists. We have a lot of data, so we have a lot of power. How much power do we have? Scene from a movie: "Apocalypse Now" -- great movie. We've got to get our hero, Captain Willard, to the mouth of the Nung River so he can go pursue Colonel Kurtz. The way we're going to do this is fly him in and drop him off. So the scene: the sky is filled with this fleet of helicopters carrying him in. And there's this loud, thrilling music in the background, this wild music. ♫ Dum da ta da dum ♫ ♫ Dum da ta da dum ♫ ♫ Da ta da da ♫ That's a lot of power. That's the kind of power I feel in this room. That's the kind of power we have because of all of the data that we have. Let's take an example. What can we do with just one person's data? What can we do with that guy's data? I can look at your financial records. I can tell if you pay your bills on time. I know if you're good to give a loan to. I can look at your medical records; I can see if your pump is still pumping -- see if you're good to offer insurance to. I can look at your clicking patterns. When you come to my website, I actually know what you're going to do already because I've seen you visit millions of websites before. And I'm sorry to tell you, you're like a poker player, you have a tell. I can tell with data analysis what you're going to do before you even do it. I know what you like. I know who you are, and that's even before I look at your mail or your phone. Those are the kinds of things we can do with the data that we have. But I'm not actually here to talk about what we can do. I'm here to talk about what we should do. What's the right thing to do? Now I see some puzzled looks like, "Why are you asking us what's the right thing to do? We're just building this stuff. Somebody else is using it." Fair enough. But it brings me back. I think about World War II -- some of our great technologists then, some of our great physicists, studying nuclear fission and fusion -- just nuclear stuff. We gather together these physicists in Los Alamos to see what they'll build. We want the people building the technology thinking about what we should be doing with the technology. So what should we be doing with that guy's data? Should we be collecting it, gathering it, so we can make his online experience better? So we can make money? So we can protect ourselves if he was up to no good? Or should we respect his privacy, protect his dignity and leave him alone? Which one is it? How should we figure it out? I know: crowdsource. Let's crowdsource this. So to get people warmed up, let's start with an easy question -- something I'm sure everybody here has an opinion about: iPhone versus Android. Let's do a show of hands -- iPhone. Uh huh. Android. You'd think with a bunch of smart people we wouldn't be such suckers just for the pretty phones. (Laughter) Next question, a little bit harder. Should we be collecting all of that guy's data to make his experiences better and to protect ourselves in case he's up to no good? Or should we leave him alone? Collect his data. Leave him alone. You're safe. It's fine. (Laughter) Okay, last question -- harder question -- when trying to evaluate what we should do in this case, should we use a Kantian deontological moral framework, or should we use a Millian consequentialist one? Kant. Mill. Not as many votes. (Laughter) Yeah, that's a terrifying result. Terrifying, because we have stronger opinions about our hand-held devices than about the moral framework we should use to guide our decisions. How do we know what to do with all the power we have if we don't have a moral framework? We know more about mobile operating systems, but what we really need is a moral operating system. What's a moral operating system? We all know right and wrong, right? You feel good when you do something right, you feel bad when you do something wrong. Our parents teach us that: praise with the good, scold with the bad. But how do we figure out what's right and wrong? And from day to day, we have the techniques that we use. Maybe we just follow our gut. Maybe we take a vote -- we crowdsource. Or maybe we punt -- ask the legal department, see what they say. In other words, it's kind of random, kind of ad hoc, how we figure out what we should do. And maybe, if we want to be on surer footing, what we really want is a moral framework that will help guide us there, that will tell us what kinds of things are right and wrong in the first place, and how would we know in a given situation what to do. So let's get a moral framework. We're numbers people, living by numbers. How can we use numbers as the basis for a moral framework? I know a guy who did exactly that. A brilliant guy -- he's been dead 2,500 years. Plato, that's right. Remember him -- old philosopher? You were sleeping during that class. And Plato, he had a lot of the same concerns that we did. He was worried about right and wrong. He wanted to know what is just. But he was worried that all we seem to be doing is trading opinions about this. He says something's just. She says something else is just. It's kind of convincing when he talks and when she talks too. I'm just going back and forth; I'm not getting anywhere. I don't want opinions; I want knowledge. I want to know the truth about justice -- like we have truths in math. In math, we know the objective facts. Take a number, any number -- two. Favorite number. I love that number. There are truths about two. If you've got two of something, you add two more, you get four. That's true no matter what thing you're talking about. It's an objective truth about the form of two, the abstract form. When you have two of anything -- two eyes, two ears, two noses, just two protrusions -- those all partake of the form of two. They all participate in the truths that two has. They all have two-ness in them. And therefore, it's not a matter of opinion. What if, Plato thought, ethics was like math? What if there were a pure form of justice? What if there are truths about justice, and you could just look around in this world and see which things participated, partook of that form of justice? Then you would know what was really just and what wasn't. It wouldn't be a matter of just opinion or just appearances. That's a stunning vision. I mean, think about that. How grand. How ambitious. That's as ambitious as we are. He wants to solve ethics. He wants objective truths. If you think that way, you have a Platonist moral framework. If you don't think that way, well, you have a lot of company in the history of Western philosophy, because the tidy idea, you know, people criticized it. Aristotle, in particular, he was not amused. He thought it was impractical. Aristotle said, "We should seek only so much precision in each subject as that subject allows." Aristotle thought ethics wasn't a lot like math. He thought ethics was a matter of making decisions in the here-and-now using our best judgment to find the right path. If you think that, Plato's not your guy. But don't give up. Maybe there's another way that we can use numbers as the basis of our moral framework. How about this: What if in any situation you could just calculate, look at the choices, measure out which one's better and know what to do? That sound familiar? That's a utilitarian moral framework. John Stuart Mill was a great advocate of this -- nice guy besides -- and only been dead 200 years. So basis of utilitarianism -- I'm sure you're familiar at least. The three people who voted for Mill before are familiar with this. But here's the way it works. What if morals, what if what makes something moral is just a matter of if it maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain? It does something intrinsic to the act. It's not like its relation to some abstract form. It's just a matter of the consequences. You just look at the consequences and see if, overall, it's for the good or for the worse. That would be simple. Then we know what to do. Let's take an example. Suppose I go up and I say, "I'm going to take your phone." Not just because it rang earlier, but I'm going to take it because I made a little calculation. I thought, that guy looks suspicious. And what if he's been sending little messages to Bin Laden's hideout -- or whoever took over after Bin Laden -- and he's actually like a terrorist, a sleeper cell. I'm going to find that out, and when I find that out, I'm going to prevent a huge amount of damage that he could cause. That has a very high utility to prevent that damage. And compared to the little pain that it's going to cause -- because it's going to be embarrassing when I'm looking on his phone and seeing that he has a Farmville problem and that whole bit -- that's overwhelmed by the value of looking at the phone. If you feel that way, that's a utilitarian choice. But maybe you don't feel that way either. Maybe you think, it's his phone. It's wrong to take his phone because he's a person and he has rights and he has dignity, and we can't just interfere with that. He has autonomy. It doesn't matter what the calculations are. There are things that are intrinsically wrong -- like lying is wrong, like torturing innocent children is wrong. Kant was very good on this point, and he said it a little better than I'll say it. He said we should use our reason to figure out the rules by which we should guide our conduct, and then it is our duty to follow those rules. It's not a matter of calculation. So let's stop. We're right in the thick of it, this philosophical thicket. And this goes on for thousands of years, because these are hard questions, and I've only got 15 minutes. So let's cut to the chase. How should we be making our decisions? Is it Plato, is it Aristotle, is it Kant, is it Mill? What should we be doing? What's the answer? What's the formula that we can use in any situation to determine what we should do, whether we should use that guy's data or not? What's the formula? There's not a formula. There's not a simple answer. Ethics is hard. Ethics requires thinking. And that's uncomfortable. I know; I spent a lot of my career in artificial intelligence, trying to build machines that could do some of this thinking for us, that could give us answers. But they can't. You can't just take human thinking and put it into a machine. We're the ones who have to do it. Happily, we're not machines, and we can do it. Not only can we think, we must. Hannah Arendt said, "The sad truth is that most evil done in this world is not done by people who choose to be evil. It arises from not thinking." That's what she called the "banality of evil." And the response to that is that we demand the exercise of thinking from every sane person. So let's do that. Let's think. In fact, let's start right now. Every person in this room do this: think of the last time you had a decision to make where you were worried to do the right thing, where you wondered, "What should I be doing?" Bring that to mind, and now reflect on that and say, "How did I come up that decision? What did I do? Did I follow my gut? Did I have somebody vote on it? Or did I punt to legal?" Or now we have a few more choices. "Did I evaluate what would be the highest pleasure like Mill would? Or like Kant, did I use reason to figure out what was intrinsically right?" Think about it. Really bring it to mind. This is important. It is so important we are going to spend 30 seconds of valuable TEDTalk time doing nothing but thinking about this. Are you ready? Go. Stop. Good work. What you just did, that's the first step towards taking responsibility for what we should do with all of our power. Now the next step -- try this. Go find a friend and explain to them how you made that decision. Not right now. Wait till I finish talking. Do it over lunch. And don't just find another technologist friend; find somebody different than you. Find an artist or a writer -- or, heaven forbid, find a philosopher and talk to them. In fact, find somebody from the humanities. Why? Because they think about problems differently than we do as technologists. Just a few days ago, right across the street from here, there was hundreds of people gathered together. It was technologists and humanists at that big BiblioTech Conference. And they gathered together because the technologists wanted to learn what it would be like to think from a humanities perspective. You have someone from Google talking to someone who does comparative literature. You're thinking about the relevance of 17th century French theater -- how does that bear upon venture capital? Well that's interesting. That's a different way of thinking. And when you think in that way, you become more sensitive to the human considerations, which are crucial to making ethical decisions. So imagine that right now you went and you found your musician friend. And you're telling him what we're talking about, about our whole data revolution and all this -- maybe even hum a few bars of our theme music. ♫ Dum ta da da dum dum ta da da dum ♫ Well, your musician friend will stop you and say, "You know, the theme music for your data revolution, that's an opera, that's Wagner. It's based on Norse legend. It's Gods and mythical creatures fighting over magical jewelry." That's interesting. Now it's also a beautiful opera, and we're moved by that opera. We're moved because it's about the battle between good and evil, about right and wrong. And we care about right and wrong. We care what happens in that opera. We care what happens in "Apocalypse Now." And we certainly care what happens with our technologies. We have so much power today, it is up to us to figure out what to do, and that's the good news. We're the ones writing this opera. This is our movie. We figure out what will happen with this technology. We determine how this will all end. Thank you. (Applause)

What I'm going to try and do in the next 15 minutes or so is tell you about an idea of how we're going to make matter come alive. Now this may seem a bit ambitious, but when you look at yourself, you look at your hands, you realize that you're alive. So this is a start. Now this quest started four billion years ago on planet Earth. There's been four billion years of organic, biological life. And as an inorganic chemist, my friends and colleagues make this distinction between the organic, living world and the inorganic, dead world. And what I'm going to try and do is plant some ideas about how we can transform inorganic, dead matter into living matter, into inorganic biology. Before we do that, I want to kind of put biology in its place. And I'm absolutely enthralled by biology. I love to do synthetic biology. I love things that are alive. I love manipulating the infrastructure of biology. But within that infrastructure, we have to remember that the driving force of biology is really coming from evolution. And evolution, although it was established well over 100 years ago by Charles Darwin and a vast number of other people, evolution still is a little bit intangible. And when I talk about Darwinian evolution, I mean one thing and one thing only, and that is survival of the fittest. And so forget about evolution in a kind of metaphysical way. Think about evolution in terms of offspring competing, and some winning. So bearing that in mind, as a chemist, I wanted to ask myself the question frustrated by biology: What is the minimal unit of matter that can undergo Darwinian evolution? And this seems quite a profound question. And as a chemist, we're not used to profound questions every day. So when I thought about it, then suddenly I realized that biology gave us the answer. And in fact, the smallest unit of matter that can evolve independently is, in fact, a single cell -- a bacteria. So this raises three really important questions: What is life? Is biology special? Biologists seem to think so. Is matter evolvable? Now if we answer those questions in reverse order, the third question -- is matter evolvable? -- if we can answer that, then we're going to know how special biology is, and maybe, just maybe, we'll have some idea of what life really is. So here's some inorganic life. This is a dead crystal, and I'm going to do something to it, and it's going to become alive. And you can see, it's kind of pollinating, germinating, growing. This is an inorganic tube. And all these crystals here under the microscope were dead a few minutes ago, and they look alive. Of course, they're not alive. It's a chemistry experiment where I've made a crystal garden. But when I saw this, I was really fascinated, because it seemed lifelike. And as I pause for a few seconds, have a look at the screen. You can see there's architecture growing, filling the void. And this is dead. So I was positive that, if somehow we can make things mimic life, let's go one step further. Let's see if we can actually make life. But there's a problem, because up until maybe a decade ago, we were told that life was impossible and that we were the most incredible miracle in the universe. In fact, we were the only people in the universe. Now, that's a bit boring. So as a chemist, I wanted to say, "Hang on. What is going on here? Is life that improbable?" And this is really the question. I think that perhaps the emergence of the first cells was as probable as the emergence of the stars. And in fact, let's take that one step further. Let's say that if the physics of fusion is encoded into the universe, maybe the physics of life is as well. And so the problem with chemists -- and this is a massive advantage as well -- is we like to focus on our elements. In biology, carbon takes center stage. And in a universe where carbon exists and organic biology, then we have all this wonderful diversity of life. In fact, we have such amazing lifeforms that we can manipulate. We're awfully careful in the lab to try and avoid various biohazards. Well what about matter? If we can make matter alive, would we have a matterhazard? So think, this is a serious question. If your pen could replicate, that would be a bit of a problem. So we have to think differently if we're going to make stuff come alive. And we also have to be aware of the issues. But before we can make life, let's think for a second what life really is characterized by. And forgive the complicated diagram. This is just a collection of pathways in the cell. And the cell is obviously for us a fascinating thing. Synthetic biologists are manipulating it. Chemists are trying to study the molecules to look at disease. And you have all these pathways going on at the same time. You have regulation; information is transcribed; catalysts are made; stuff is happening. But what does a cell do? Well it divides, it competes, it survives. And I think that is where we have to start in terms of thinking about building from our ideas in life. But what else is life characterized by? Well, I like think of it as a flame in a bottle. And so what we have here is a description of single cells replicating, metabolizing, burning through chemistries. And so we have to understand that if we're going to make artificial life or understand the origin of life, we need to power it somehow. So before we can really start to make life, we have to really think about where it came from. And Darwin himself mused in a letter to a colleague that he thought that life probably emerged in some warm little pond somewhere -- maybe not in Scotland, maybe in Africa, maybe somewhere else. But the real honest answer is, we just don't know, because there is a problem with the origin. Imagine way back, four and a half billion years ago, there is a vast chemical soup of stuff. And from this stuff we came. So when you think about the improbable nature of what I'm going to tell you in the next few minutes, just remember, we came from stuff on planet Earth. And we went through a variety of worlds. The RNA people would talk about the RNA world. We somehow got to proteins and DNA. We then got to the last ancestor. Evolution kicked in -- and that's the cool bit. And here we are. But there's a roadblock that you can't get past. You can decode the genome, you can look back, you can link us all together by a mitochondrial DNA, but we can't get further than the last ancestor, the last visible cell that we could sequence or think back in history. So we don't know how we got here. So there are two options: intelligent design, direct and indirect -- so God, or my friend. Now talking about E.T. putting us there, or some other life, just pushes the problem further on. I'm not a politician, I'm a scientist. The other thing we need to think about is the emergence of chemical complexity. This seems most likely. So we have some kind of primordial soup. And this one happens to be a good source of all 20 amino acids. And somehow these amino acids are combined, and life begins. But life begins, what does that mean? What is life? What is this stuff of life? So in the 1950s, Miller-Urey did their fantastic chemical Frankenstein experiment, where they did the equivalent in the chemical world. They took the basic ingredients, put them in a single jar and ignited them and put a lot of voltage through. And they had a look at what was in the soup, and they found amino acids, but nothing came out, there was no cell. So the whole area's been stuck for a while, and it got reignited in the '80s when analytical technologies and computer technologies were coming on. In my own laboratory, the way we're trying to create inorganic life is by using many different reaction formats. So what we're trying to do is do reactions -- not in one flask, but in tens of flasks, and connect them together, as you can see with this flow system, all these pipes. We can do it microfluidically, we can do it lithographically, we can do it in a 3D printer, we can do it in droplets for colleagues. And the key thing is to have lots of complex chemistry just bubbling away. But that's probably going to end in failure, so we need to be a bit more focused. And the answer, of course, lies with mice. This is how I remember what I need as a chemist. I say, "Well I want molecules." But I need a metabolism, I need some energy. I need some information, and I need a container. Because if I want evolution, I need containers to compete. So if you have a container, it's like getting in your car. "This is my car, and I'm going to drive around and show off my car." And I imagine you have a similar thing in cellular biology with the emergence of life. So these things together give us evolution, perhaps. And the way to test it in the laboratory is to make it minimal. So what we're going to try and do is come up with an inorganic Lego kit of molecules. And so forgive the molecules on the screen, but these are a very simple kit. There's only maybe three or four different types of building blocks present. And we can aggregate them together and make literally thousands and thousands of really big nano-molecular molecules the same size of DNA and proteins, but there's no carbon in sight. Carbon is banned. And so with this Lego kit, we have the diversity required for complex information storage without DNA. But we need to make some containers. And just a few months ago in my lab, we were able to take these very same molecules and make cells with them. And you can see on the screen a cell being made. And we're now going to put some chemistry inside and do some chemistry in this cell. And all I wanted to show you is we can set up molecules in membranes, in real cells, and then it sets up a kind of molecular Darwinism, a molecular survival of the fittest. And this movie here shows this competition between molecules. Molecules are competing for stuff. They're all made of the same stuff, but they want their shape to win. They want their shape to persist. And that is the key. If we can somehow encourage these molecules to talk to each other and make the right shapes and compete, they will start to form cells that will replicate and compete. If we manage to do that, forget the molecular detail. Let's zoom out to what that could mean. So we have this special theory of evolution that applies only to organic biology, to us. If we could get evolution into the material world, then I propose we should have a general theory of evolution. And that's really worth thinking about. Does evolution control the sophistication of matter in the universe? Is there some driving force through evolution that allows matter to compete? So that means we could then start to develop different platforms for exploring this evolution. So you imagine, if we're able to create a self-sustaining artificial life form, not only will this tell us about the origin of life -- that it's possible that the universe doesn't need carbon to be alive; it can use anything -- we can then take [it] one step further and develop new technologies, because we can then use software control for evolution to code in. So imagine we make a little cell. We want to put it out in the environment, and we want it to be powered by the Sun. What we do is we evolve it in a box with a light on. And we don't use design anymore. We find what works. We should take our inspiration from biology. Biology doesn't care about the design unless it works. So this will reorganize the way we design things. But not only just that, we will start to think about how we can start to develop a symbiotic relationship with biology. Wouldn't it be great if you could take these artificial biological cells and fuse them with biological ones to correct problems that we couldn't really deal with? The real issue in cellular biology is we are never going to understand everything, because it's a multidimensional problem put there by evolution. Evolution cannot be cut apart. You need to somehow find the fitness function. And the profound realization for me is that, if this works, the concept of the selfish gene gets kicked up a level, and we really start talking about selfish matter. And what does that mean in a universe where we are right now the highest form of stuff? You're sitting on chairs. They're inanimate, they're not alive. But you are made of stuff, and you are using stuff, and you enslave stuff. So using evolution in biology, and in inorganic biology, for me is quite appealing, quite exciting. And we're really becoming very close to understanding the key steps that makes dead stuff come alive. And again, when you're thinking about how improbable this is, remember, five billion years ago, we were not here, and there was no life. So what will that tell us about the origin of life and the meaning of life? But perhaps, for me as a chemist, I want to keep away from general terms; I want to think about specifics. So what does it mean about defining life? We really struggle to do this. And I think, if we can make inorganic biology, and we can make matter become evolvable, that will in fact define life. I propose to you that matter that can evolve is alive, and this gives us the idea of making evolvable matter. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Just a quick question on timeline. You believe you're going to be successful in this project? When? Lee Cronin: So many people think that life took millions of years to kick in. We're proposing to do it in just a few hours, once we've set up the right chemistry. CA: And when do you think that will happen? LC: Hopefully within the next two years. CA: That would be a big story. (Laughter) In your own mind, what do you believe the chances are that walking around on some other planet is non-carbon-based life, walking or oozing or something? LC: I think it's 100 percent. Because the thing is, we are so chauvinistic to biology, if you take away carbon, there's other things that can happen. So the other thing that if we were able to create life that's not based on carbon, maybe we can tell NASA what really to look for. Don't go and look for carbon, go and look for evolvable stuff. CA: Lee Cronin, good luck. (LC: Thank you very much.) (Applause)

What I want to talk to you about is what we can learn from studying the genomes of living people and extinct humans. But before doing that, I just briefly want to remind you about what you already know: that our genomes, our genetic material, are stored in almost all cells in our bodies in chromosomes in the form of DNA, which is this famous double-helical molecule. And the genetic information is contained in the form of a sequence of four bases abbreviated with the letters A, T, C and G. And the information is there twice -- one on each strand -- which is important, because when new cells are formed, these strands come apart, new strands are synthesized with the old ones as templates in an almost perfect process. But nothing, of course, in nature is totally perfect, so sometimes an error is made and a wrong letter is built in. And we can then see the result of such mutations when we compare DNA sequences among us here in the room, for example. If we compare my genome to the genome of you, approximately every 1,200, 1,300 letters will differ between us. And these mutations accumulate approximately as a function of time. So if we add in a chimpanzee here, we will see more differences. Approximately one letter in a hundred will differ from a chimpanzee. And if you're then interested in the history of a piece of DNA, or the whole genome, you can reconstruct the history of the DNA with those differences you observe. And generally we depict our ideas about this history in the form of trees like this. In this case, it's very simple. The two human DNA sequences go back to a common ancestor quite recently. Farther back is there one shared with chimpanzees. And because these mutations happen approximately as a function of time, you can transform these differences to estimates of time, where the two humans, typically, will share a common ancestor about half a million years ago, and with the chimpanzees, it will be in the order of five million years ago. So what has now happened in the last few years is that there are account technologies around that allow you to see many, many pieces of DNA very quickly. So we can now, in a matter of hours, determine a whole human genome. Each of us, of course, contains two human genomes -- one from our mothers and one from our fathers. And they are around three billion such letters long. And we will find that the two genomes in me, or one genome of mine we want to use, will have about three million differences in the order of that. And what you can then also begin to do is to say, "How are these genetic differences distributed across the world?" And if you do that, you find a certain amount of genetic variation in Africa. And if you look outside Africa, you actually find less genetic variation. This is surprising, of course, because in the order of six to eight times fewer people live in Africa than outside Africa. Yet the people inside Africa have more genetic variation. Moreover, almost all these genetic variants we see outside Africa have closely related DNA sequences that you find inside Africa. But if you look in Africa, there is a component of the genetic variation that has no close relatives outside. So a model to explain this is that a part of the African variation, but not all of it, [has] gone out and colonized the rest of the world. And together with the methods to date these genetic differences, this has led to the insight that modern humans -- humans that are essentially indistinguishable from you and me -- evolved in Africa, quite recently, between 100 and 200,000 years ago. And later, between 100 and 50,000 years ago or so, went out of Africa to colonize the rest of the world. So what I often like to say is that, from a genomic perspective, we are all Africans. We either live inside Africa today, or in quite recent exile. Another consequence of this recent origin of modern humans is that genetic variants are generally distributed widely in the world, in many places, and they tend to vary as gradients, from a bird's-eye perspective at least. And since there are many genetic variants, and they have different such gradients, this means that if we determine a DNA sequence -- a genome from one individual -- we can quite accurately estimate where that person comes from, provided that its parents or grandparents haven't moved around too much. But does this then mean, as many people tend to think, that there are huge genetic differences between groups of people -- on different continents, for example? Well we can begin to ask those questions also. There is, for example, a project that's underway to sequence a thousand individuals -- their genomes -- from different parts of the world. They've sequenced 185 Africans from two populations in Africa. [They've] sequenced approximately equally [as] many people in Europe and in China. And we can begin to say how much variance do we find, how many letters that vary in at least one of those individual sequences. And it's a lot: 38 million variable positions. But we can then ask: Are there any absolute differences between Africans and non-Africans? Perhaps the biggest difference most of us would imagine existed. And with absolute difference -- and I mean a difference where people inside Africa at a certain position, where all individuals -- 100 percent -- have one letter, and everybody outside Africa has another letter. And the answer to that, among those millions of differences, is that there is not a single such position. This may be surprising. Maybe a single individual is misclassified or so. So we can relax the criterion a bit and say: How many positions do we find where 95 percent of people in Africa have one variant, 95 percent another variant, and the number of that is 12. So this is very surprising. It means that when we look at people and see a person from Africa and a person from Europe or Asia, we cannot, for a single position in the genome with 100 percent accuracy, predict what the person would carry. And only for 12 positions can we hope to be 95 percent right. This may be surprising, because we can, of course, look at these people and quite easily say where they or their ancestors came from. So what this means now is that those traits we then look at and so readily see -- facial features, skin color, hair structure -- are not determined by single genes with big effects, but are determined by many different genetic variants that seem to vary in frequency between different parts of the world. There is another thing with those traits that we so easily observe in each other that I think is worthwhile to consider, and that is that, in a very literal sense, they're really on the surface of our bodies. They are what we just said -- facial features, hair structure, skin color. There are also a number of features that vary between continents like that that have to do with how we metabolize food that we ingest, or that have to do with how our immune systems deal with microbes that try to invade our bodies. But so those are all parts of our bodies where we very directly interact with our environment, in a direct confrontation, if you like. It's easy to imagine how particularly those parts of our bodies were quickly influenced by selection from the environment and shifted frequencies of genes that are involved in them. But if we look on other parts of our bodies where we don't directly interact with the environment -- our kidneys, our livers, our hearts -- there is no way to say, by just looking at these organs, where in the world they would come from. So there's another interesting thing that comes from this realization that humans have a recent common origin in Africa, and that is that when those humans emerged around 100,000 years ago or so, they were not alone on the planet. There were other forms of humans around, most famously perhaps, Neanderthals -- these robust forms of humans, compared to the left here with a modern human skeleton on the right -- that existed in Western Asia and Europe since several hundreds of thousands of years. So an interesting question is, what happened when we met? What happened to the Neanderthals? And to begin to answer such questions, my research group -- since over 25 years now -- works on methods to extract DNA from remains of Neanderthals and extinct animals that are tens of thousands of years old. So this involves a lot of technical issues in how you extract the DNA, how you convert it to a form you can sequence. You have to work very carefully to avoid contamination of experiments with DNA from yourself. And this then, in conjunction with these methods that allow very many DNA molecules to be sequenced very rapidly, allowed us last year to present the first version of the Neanderthal genome, so that any one of you can now look on the Internet, on the Neanderthal genome, or at least on the 55 percent of it that we've been able to reconstruct so far. And you can begin to compare it to the genomes of people who live today. And one question that you may then want to ask is, what happened when we met? Did we mix or not? And the way to ask that question is to look at the Neanderthal that comes from Southern Europe and compare it to genomes of people who live today. So we then look to do this with pairs of individuals, starting with two Africans, looking at the two African genomes, finding places where they differ from each other, and in each case ask: What is a Neanderthal like? Does it match one African or the other African? We would expect there to be no difference, because Neanderthals were never in Africa. They should be equal, have no reason to be closer to one African than another African. And that's indeed the case. Statistically speaking, there is no difference in how often the Neanderthal matches one African or the other. But this is different if we now look at the European individual and an African. Then, significantly more often, does a Neanderthal match the European rather than the African. The same is true if we look at a Chinese individual versus an African, the Neanderthal will match the Chinese individual more often. This may also be surprising because the Neanderthals were never in China. So the model we've proposed to explain this is that when modern humans came out of Africa sometime after 100,000 years ago, they met Neanderthals. Presumably, they did so first in the Middle East, where there were Neanderthals living. If they then mixed with each other there, then those modern humans that became the ancestors of everyone outside Africa carried with them this Neanderthal component in their genome to the rest of the world. So that today, the people living outside Africa have about two and a half percent of their DNA from Neanderthals. So having now a Neanderthal genome on hand as a reference point and having the technologies to look at ancient remains and extract the DNA, we can begin to apply them elsewhere in the world. And the first place we've done that is in Southern Siberia in the Altai Mountains at a place called Denisova, a cave site in this mountain here, where archeologists in 2008 found a tiny little piece of bone -- this is a copy of it -- that they realized came from the last phalanx of a little finger of a pinky of a human. And it was well enough preserved so we could determine the DNA from this individual, even to a greater extent than for the Neanderthals actually, and start relating it to the Neanderthal genome and to people today. And we found that this individual shared a common origin for his DNA sequences with Neanderthals around 640,000 years ago. And further back, 800,000 years ago is there a common origin with present day humans. So this individual comes from a population that shares an origin with Neanderthals, but far back and then have a long independent history. We call this group of humans, that we then described for the first time from this tiny, tiny little piece of bone, the Denisovans, after this place where they were first described. So we can then ask for Denisovans the same things as for the Neanderthals: Did they mix with ancestors of present day people? If we ask that question, and compare the Denisovan genome to people around the world, we surprisingly find no evidence of Denisovan DNA in any people living even close to Siberia today. But we do find it in Papua New Guinea and in other islands in Melanesia and the Pacific. So this presumably means that these Denisovans had been more widespread in the past, since we don't think that the ancestors of Melanesians were ever in Siberia. So from studying these genomes of extinct humans, we're beginning to arrive at a picture of what the world looked like when modern humans started coming out of Africa. In the West, there were Neanderthals; in the East, there were Denisovans -- maybe other forms of humans too that we've not yet described. We don't know quite where the borders between these people were, but we know that in Southern Siberia, there were both Neanderthals and Denisovans at least at some time in the past. Then modern humans emerged somewhere in Africa, came out of Africa, presumably in the Middle East. They meet Neanderthals, mix with them, continue to spread over the world, and somewhere in Southeast Asia, they meet Denisovans and mix with them and continue on out into the Pacific. And then these earlier forms of humans disappear, but they live on a little bit today in some of us -- in that people outside of Africa have two and a half percent of their DNA from Neanderthals, and people in Melanesia actually have an additional five percent approximately from the Denisovans. Does this then mean that there is after all some absolute difference between people outside Africa and inside Africa in that people outside Africa have this old component in their genome from these extinct forms of humans, whereas Africans do not? Well I don't think that is the case. Presumably, modern humans emerged somewhere in Africa. They spread across Africa also, of course, and there were older, earlier forms of humans there. And since we mixed elsewhere, I'm pretty sure that one day, when we will perhaps have a genome of also these earlier forms in Africa, we will find that they have also mixed with early modern humans in Africa. So to sum up, what have we learned from studying genomes of present day humans and extinct humans? We learn perhaps many things, but one thing that I find sort of important to mention is that I think the lesson is that we have always mixed. We mixed with these earlier forms of humans, wherever we met them, and we mixed with each other ever since. Thank you for your attention. (Applause)

In terms of invention, I'd like to tell you the tale of one of my favorite projects. I think it's one of the most exciting that I'm working on, but I think it's also the simplest. It's a project that has the potential to make a huge impact around the world. It addresses one of the biggest health issues on the planet, the number one cause of death in children under five. Which is ...? Water-borne diseases? Diarrhea? Malnutrition? No. It's breathing the smoke from indoor cooking fires -- acute respiratory infections caused by this. Can you believe that? I find this shocking and somewhat appalling. Can't we make cleaner burning cooking fuels? Can't we make better stoves? How is it that this can lead to over two million deaths every year? I know Bill Joy was talking to you about the wonders of carbon nanotubes, so I'm going to talk to you about the wonders of carbon macro-tubes, which is charcoal. (Laughter) So this is a picture of rural Haiti. Haiti is now 98 percent deforested. You'll see scenes like this all over the island. It leads to all sorts of environmental problems and problems that affect people throughout the nation. A couple years ago there was severe flooding that led to thousands of deaths -- that's directly attributable to the fact that there are no trees on the hills to stabilize the soil. So the rains come -- they go down the rivers and the flooding happens. Now one of the reasons why there are so few trees is this: people need to cook, and they harvest wood and they make charcoal in order to do it. It's not that people are ignorant to the environmental damage. They know perfectly well, but they have no other choice. Fossil fuels are not available, and solar energy doesn't cook the way that they like their food prepared. And so this is what they do. You'll find families like this who go out into the forest to find a tree, cut it down and make charcoal out of it. So not surprisingly, there's a lot of effort that's been done to look at alternative cooking fuels. About four years ago, I took a team of students down to Haiti and we worked with Peace Corps volunteers there. This is one such volunteer and this is a device that he had built in the village where he worked. And the idea was that you could take waste paper; you could compress it and make briquettes that could be used for fuel. But this device was very slow. So our engineering students went to work on it and with some very simple changes, they were able to triple the throughput of this device. So you could imagine they were very excited about it. And they took the briquettes back to MIT so that they could test them. And one of the things that they found was they didn't burn. So it was a little discouraging to the students. (Laughter) And in fact, if you look closely, right here you can see it says, "US Peace Corps." As it turns out, there actually wasn't any waste paper in this village. And while it was a good use of government paperwork for this volunteer to bring it back with him to his village, it was 800 kilometers away. And so we thought perhaps there might be a better way to come up with an alternative cooking fuel. What we wanted to do is we wanted to make a fuel that used something that was readily available on the local level. You see these all over Haiti as well. They're small-scale sugar mills. And the waste product from them after you extract the juice from the sugarcane is called "bagasse." It has no other use. It has no nutritional value, so they don't feed it to the animals. It just sits in a pile near the sugar mill until eventually they burn it. What we wanted to do was we wanted to find a way to harness this waste resource and turn it into a fuel that would be something that people could easily cook with, something like charcoal. So over the next couple of years, students and I worked to develop a process. So you start with the bagasse, and then you take a very simple kiln that you can make out of a waste fifty five-gallon oil drum. After some time, after setting it on fire, you seal it to restrict the oxygen that goes into the kiln, and then you end up with this carbonized material here. However, you can't burn this. It's too fine and it burns too quickly to be useful for cooking. So we had to try to find a way to form it into useful briquettes. And conveniently, one of my students was from Ghana, and he remembered a dish his mom used to make for him called "kokonte," which is a very sticky porridge made out of the cassava root. And so what we did was we looked, and we found that cassava is indeed grown in Haiti, under the name of "manioc." In fact, it's grown all over the world -- yucca, tapioca, manioc, cassava, it's all the same thing -- a very starchy root vegetable. And you can make a very thick, sticky porridge out of it, which you can use to bind together the charcoal briquettes. So we did this. We went down to Haiti. These are the graduates of the first Ecole de Charbon, or Charcoal Institute. And these -- (Laughter) That's right. So I'm actually an instructor at MIT as well as CIT. And these are the briquettes that we made. Now I'm going to take you to a different continent. This is India and this is the most commonly used cooking fuel in India. It's cow dung. And more than in Haiti, this produces really smoky fires, and this is where you see the health impacts of cooking with cow dung and biomass as a fuel. Kids and women are especially affected by it, because they're the ones who are around the cooking fires. So we wanted to see if we could introduce this charcoal-making technology there. Well, unfortunately, they didn't have sugarcane and they didn't have cassava, but that didn't stop us. What we did was we found what were the locally available sources of biomass. And there was wheat straw and there was rice straw in this area. And what we could use as a binder was actually small amounts of cow manure, which they used ordinarily for their fuel. And we did side-by-side tests, and here you can see the charcoal briquettes and here the cow dung. And you can see that it's a lot cleaner burning of a cooking fuel. And in fact, it heats the water a lot more quickly. And so we were very happy, thus far. But one of the things that we found was when we did side-by-side comparisons with wood charcoal, it didn't burn as long. And the briquettes crumbled a little bit and we lost energy as they fell apart as they were cooking. So we wanted to try to find a way to make a stronger briquette so that we could compete with wood charcoal in the markets in Haiti. So we went back to MIT, we took out the Instron machine and we figured out what sort of forces you needed in order to compress a briquette to the level that you actually are getting improved performance out of it? And at the same time that we had students in the lab looking at this, we also had community partners in Haiti working to develop the process, to improve it and make it more accessible to people in the villages there. And after some time, we developed a low-cost press that allows you to produce charcoal, which actually now burns not only -- actually, it burns longer, cleaner than wood charcoal. So now we're in a situation where we have a product, which is actually better than what you can buy in Haiti in the marketplace, which is a very wonderful place to be. In Haiti alone, about 30 million trees are cut down every year. There's a possibility of this being implemented and saving a good portion of those. In addition, the revenue generated from that charcoal is 260 million dollars. That's an awful lot for a country like Haiti -- with a population of eight million and an average income of less than 400 dollars. So this is where we're also moving ahead with our charcoal project. And one of the things that I think is also interesting, is I have a friend up at UC Berkeley who's been doing risk analysis. And he's looked at the problem of the health impacts of burning wood versus charcoal. And he's found that worldwide, you could prevent a million deaths switching from wood to charcoal as a cooking fuel. That's remarkable, but up until now, there weren't ways to do it without cutting down trees. But now we have a way that's using an agricultural waste material to create a cooking fuel. One of the really exciting things, though, is something that came out of the trip that I took to Ghana just last month. And I think it's the coolest thing, and it's even lower tech than what you just saw, if you can imagine such a thing. Here it is. So what is this? This is corncobs turned into charcoal. And the beauty of this is that you don't need to form briquettes -- it comes ready made. This is my $100 laptop, right here. And actually, like Nick, I brought samples. (Laughter) So we can pass these around. They're fully functional, field-tested, ready to roll out. (Laughter) And I think one of the things which is also remarkable about this technology, is that the technology transfer is so easy. Compared to the sugarcane charcoal, where we have to teach people how to form it into briquettes and you have the extra step of cooking the binder, this comes pre-briquetted. And this is about the most exciting thing in my life right now, which is perhaps a sad commentary on my life. (Laughter) But once you see it, like you guys in the front row -- All right, yeah, OK. So anyway -- (Laughter) Here it is. And this is, I think, a perfect example of what Robert Wright was talking about in those non-zero-sum things. So not only do you have health benefits, you have environmental benefits. But this is one of the incredibly rare situations where you also have economic benefits. People can make their own cooking fuel from waste products. They can generate income from this. They can save the money that they were going to spend on charcoal and they can produce excess and sell it in the market to people who aren't making their own. It's really rare that you don't have trade-offs between health and economics, or environment and economics. So this is a project that I just find extremely exciting and I'm really looking forward to see where it takes us. So when we talk about, now, the future we will create, one of the things that I think is necessary is to have a very clear vision of the world that we live in. And now, I don't actually mean the world that we live in. I mean the world where women spend two to three hours everyday grinding grain for their families to eat. I mean the world where advanced building materials means cement roofing tiles that are made by hand, and where, when you work 10 hours a day, you're still only earning 60 dollars in a month. I mean the world where women and children spend 40 billion hours a year fetching water. That's as if the entire workforce of the state of California worked full time for a year doing nothing but fetching water. It's a place where, for example, if this were India, in this room, only three of us would have a car. If this were Afghanistan, only one person in this room would know how the use the Internet. If this were Zambia -- 300 of you would be farmers, 100 of you would have AIDS or HIV. And more than half of you would be living on less than a dollar a day. These are the issues that we need to come up with solutions for. These are the issues that we need to be training our engineers, our designers, our business people, our entrepreneurs to be facing. These are the solutions that we need to find. I have a few areas that I believe are especially important that we address. One of them is creating technologies to promote micro-finance and micro-enterprise, so that people who are living below the poverty line can find a way to move out -- and that they're not doing it using the same traditional basket making, poultry rearing, etc. But there are new technologies and new products that they can make on a small scale. The next thing I believe is that we need to create technologies for poor farmers to add value to their own crops. And we need to rethink our development strategies, so that we're not promoting educational campaigns to get them to stop being farmers, but rather to stop being poor farmers. And we need to think about how we can do that effectively. We need to work with the people in these communities and give them the resources and the tools that they need to solve their own problems. That's the best way to do it. We shouldn't be doing it from outside. So we need to create this future, and we need to start doing it now. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you, incredible. Stay here. Tell us -- just while we see if someone has a question -- just tell us about one of the other things that you've worked on. Amy Smith: Some of the other things we're working on are ways to do low-cost water quality testing, so that communities can maintain their own water systems, know when they're working, know when they treat them, etc. We're also looking at low-cost water-treatment systems. One of the really exciting things is looking at solar water disinfection and improving the ability to be able to do that. CA: What's the bottleneck preventing this stuff getting from scale? Do you need to find entrepreneurs, or venture capitalists, or what do you need to take what you've got and get it to scale? AS: I think it's large numbers of people moving it forward. It's a difficult thing -- it's a marketplace which is very fragmented and a consumer population with no income. So you can't use the same models that you use in the United States for making things move forward. And we're a pretty small staff, which is me. (Laughter) So, you know, I do what I can with the students. We have 30 students a year go out into the field and try to implement this and move it forward. The other thing is you have to do things with a long time frame, as, you know, you can't expect to get something done in a year or two years; you have to be looking five or 10 years ahead. But I think with the vision to do that, we can move forward.

There are times when I feel really quite ashamed to be a European. In the last year, more than a million people arrived in Europe in need of our help, and our response, frankly, has been pathetic. There are just so many contradictions. We mourn the tragic death of two-year-old Alan Kurdi, and yet, since then, more than 200 children have subsequently drowned in the Mediterranean. We have international treaties that recognize that refugees are a shared responsibility, and yet we accept that tiny Lebanon hosts more Syrians than the whole of Europe combined. We lament the existence of human smugglers, and yet we make that the only viable route to seek asylum in Europe. We have labor shortages, and yet we exclude people who fit our economic and demographic needs from coming to Europe. We proclaim our liberal values in opposition to fundamentalist Islam, and yet -- we have repressive policies that detain child asylum seekers, that separate children from their families, and that seize property from refugees. What are we doing? How has the situation come to this, that we've adopted such an inhumane response to a humanitarian crisis? I don't believe it's because people don't care, or at least I don't want to believe it's because people don't care. I believe it's because our politicians lack a vision, a vision for how to adapt an international refugee system created over 50 years ago for a changing and globalized world. And so what I want to do is take a step back and ask two really fundamental questions, the two questions we all need to ask. First, why is the current system not working? And second, what can we do to fix it? So the modern refugee regime was created in the aftermath of the Second World War by these guys. Its basic aim is to ensure that when a state fails, or worse, turns against its own people, people have somewhere to go, to live in safety and dignity until they can go home. It was created precisely for situations like the situation we see in Syria today. Through an international convention signed by 147 governments, the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees, and an international organization, UNHCR, states committed to reciprocally admit people onto their territory who flee conflict and persecution. But today, that system is failing. In theory, refugees have a right to seek asylum. In practice, our immigration policies block the path to safety. In theory, refugees have a right to a pathway to integration, or return to the country they've come from. But in practice, they get stuck in almost indefinite limbo. In theory, refugees are a shared global responsibility. In practice, geography means that countries proximate the conflict take the overwhelming majority of the world's refugees. The system isn't broken because the rules are wrong. It's that we're not applying them adequately to a changing world, and that's what we need to reconsider. So I want to explain to you a little bit about how the current system works. How does the refugee regime actually work? But not from a top-down institutional perspective, rather from the perspective of a refugee. So imagine a Syrian woman. Let's call her Amira. And Amira to me represents many of the people I've met in the region. Amira, like around 25 percent of the world's refugees, is a woman with children, and she can't go home because she comes from this city that you see before you, Homs, a once beautiful and historic city now under rubble. And so Amira can't go back there. But Amira also has no hope of resettlement to a third country, because that's a lottery ticket only available to less than one percent of the world's refugees. So Amira and her family face an almost impossible choice. They have three basic options. The first option is that Amira can take her family to a camp. In the camp, she might get assistance, but there are very few prospects for Amira and her family. Camps are in bleak, arid locations, often in the desert. In the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, you can hear the shells across the border in Syria at nighttime. There's restricted economic activity. Education is often of poor quality. And around the world, some 80 percent of refugees who are in camps have to stay for at least five years. It's a miserable existence, and that's probably why, in reality, only nine percent of Syrians choose that option. Alternatively, Amira can head to an urban area in a neighboring country, like Amman or Beirut. That's an option that about 75 percent of Syrian refugees have taken. But there, there's great difficulty as well. Refugees in such urban areas don't usually have the right to work. They don't usually get significant access to assistance. And so when Amira and her family have used up their basic savings, they're left with very little and likely to face urban destitution. So there's a third alternative, and it's one that increasing numbers of Syrians are taking. Amira can seek some hope for her family by risking their lives on a dangerous and perilous journey to another country, and it's that which we're seeing in Europe today. Around the world, we present refugees with an almost impossible choice between three options: encampment, urban destitution and dangerous journeys. For refugees, that choice is the global refugee regime today. But I think it's a false choice. I think we can reconsider that choice. The reason why we limit those options is because we think that those are the only options that are available to refugees, and they're not. Politicians frame the issue as a zero-sum issue, that if we benefit refugees, we're imposing costs on citizens. We tend to have a collective assumption that refugees are an inevitable cost or burden to society. But they don't have to. They can contribute. So what I want to argue is there are ways in which we can expand that choice set and still benefit everyone else: the host states and communities, our societies and refugees themselves. And I want to suggest four ways we can transform the paradigm of how we think about refugees. All four ways have one thing in common: they're all ways in which we take the opportunities of globalization, mobility and markets, and update the way we think about the refugee issue. The first one I want to think about is the idea of enabling environments, and it starts from a very basic recognition that refugees are human beings like everyone else, but they're just in extraordinary circumstances. Together with my colleagues in Oxford, we've embarked on a research project in Uganda looking at the economic lives of refugees. We chose Uganda not because it's representative of all host countries. It's not. It's exceptional. Unlike most host countries around the world, what Uganda has done is give refugees economic opportunity. It gives them the right to work. It gives them freedom of movement. And the results of that are extraordinary both for refugees and the host community. In the capital city, Kampala, we found that 21 percent of refugees own a business that employs other people, and 40 percent of those employees are nationals of the host country. In other words, refugees are making jobs for citizens of the host country. Even in the camps, we found extraordinary examples of vibrant, flourishing and entrepreneurial businesses. For example, in a settlement called Nakivale, we found examples of Congolese refugees running digital music exchange businesses. We found a Rwandan who runs a business that's available to allow the youth to play computer games on recycled games consoles and recycled televisions. Against the odds of extreme constraint, refugees are innovating, and the gentleman you see before you is a Congolese guy called Demou-Kay. Demou-Kay arrived in the settlement with very little, but he wanted to be a filmmaker. So with friends and colleagues, he started a community radio station, he rented a video camera, and he's now making films. He made two documentary films with and for our team, and he's making a successful business out of very little. It's those kinds of examples that should guide our response to refugees. Rather than seeing refugees as inevitably dependent upon humanitarian assistance, we need to provide them with opportunities for human flourishing. Yes, clothes, blankets, shelter, food are all important in the emergency phase, but we need to also look beyond that. We need to provide opportunities to connectivity, electricity, education, the right to work, access to capital and banking. All the ways in which we take for granted that we are plugged in to the global economy can and should apply to refugees. The second idea I want to discuss is economic zones. Unfortunately, not every host country in the world takes the approach Uganda has taken. Most host countries don't open up their economies to refugees in the same way. But there are still pragmatic alternative options that we can use. Last April, I traveled to Jordan with my colleague, the development economist Paul Collier, and we brainstormed an idea while we were there with the international community and the government, an idea to bring jobs to Syrians while supporting Jordan's national development strategy. The idea is for an economic zone, one in which we could potentially integrate the employment of refugees alongside the employment of Jordanian host nationals. And just 15 minutes away from the Zaatari refugee camp, home to 83,000 refugees, is an existing economic zone called the King Hussein Bin Talal Development Area. The government has spent over a hundred million dollars connecting it to the electricity grid, connecting it to the road network, but it lacked two things: access to labor and inward investment. So what if refugees were able to work there rather than being stuck in camps, able to support their families and develop skills through vocational training before they go back to Syria? We recognized that that could benefit Jordan, whose development strategy requires it to make the leap as a middle income country to manufacturing. It could benefit refugees, but it could also contribute to the postconflict reconstruction of Syria by recognizing that we need to incubate refugees as the best source of eventually rebuilding Syria. We published the idea in the journal Foreign Affairs. King Abdullah has picked up on the idea. It was announced at the London Syria Conference two weeks ago, and a pilot will begin in the summer. (Applause) The third idea that I want to put to you is preference matching between states and refugees to lead to the kinds of happy outcomes you see here in the selfie featuring Angela Merkel and a Syrian refugee. What we rarely do is ask refugees what they want, where they want to go, but I'd argue we can do that and still make everyone better off. The economist Alvin Roth has developed the idea of matching markets, ways in which the preference ranking of the parties shapes an eventual match. My colleagues Will Jones and Alex Teytelboym have explored ways in which that idea could be applied to refugees, to ask refugees to rank their preferred destinations, but also allow states to rank the types of refugees they want on skills criteria or language criteria and allow those to match. Now, of course you'd need to build in quotas on things like diversity and vulnerability, but it's a way of increasing the possibilities of matching. The matching idea has been successfully used to match, for instance, students with university places, to match kidney donors with patients, and it underlies the kind of algorithms that exist on dating websites. So why not apply that to give refugees greater choice? It could also be used at the national level, where one of the great challenges we face is to persuade local communities to accept refugees. And at the moment, in my country, for instance, we often send engineers to rural areas and farmers to the cities, which makes no sense at all. So matching markets offer a potential way to bring those preferences together and listen to the needs and demands of the populations that host and the refugees themselves. The fourth idea I want to put to you is of humanitarian visas. Much of the tragedy and chaos we've seen in Europe was entirely avoidable. It stems from a fundamental contradiction in Europe's asylum policy, which is the following: that in order to seek asylum in Europe, you have to arrive spontaneously by embarking on those dangerous journeys that I described. But why should those journeys be necessary in an era of the budget airline and modern consular capabilities? They're completely unnecessary journeys, and last year, they led to the deaths of over 3,000 people on Europe's borders and within European territory. If refugees were simply allowed to travel directly and seek asylum in Europe, we would avoid that, and there's a way of doing that through something called a humanitarian visa, that allows people to collect a visa at an embassy or a consulate in a neighboring country and then simply pay their own way through a ferry or a flight to Europe. It costs around a thousand euros to take a smuggler from Turkey to the Greek islands. It costs 200 euros to take a budget airline from Bodrum to Frankfurt. If we allowed refugees to do that, it would have major advantages. It would save lives, it would undercut the entire market for smugglers, and it would remove the chaos we see from Europe's front line in areas like the Greek islands. It's politics that prevents us doing that rather than a rational solution. And this is an idea that has been applied. Brazil has adopted a pioneering approach where over 2,000 Syrians have been able to get humanitarian visas, enter Brazil, and claim refugee status on arrival in Brazil. And in that scheme, every Syrian who has gone through it has received refugee status and been recognized as a genuine refugee. There is a historical precedent for it as well. Between 1922 and 1942, these Nansen passports were used as travel documents to allow 450,000 Assyrians, Turks and Chechens to travel across Europe and claim refugee status elsewhere in Europe. And the Nansen International Refugee Office received the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of this being a viable strategy. So all four of these ideas that I've presented you are ways in which we can expand Amira's choice set. They're ways in which we can have greater choice for refugees beyond those basic, impossible three options I explained to you and still leave others better off. In conclusion, we really need a new vision, a vision that enlarges the choices of refugees but recognizes that they don't have to be a burden. There's nothing inevitable about refugees being a cost. Yes, they are a humanitarian responsibility, but they're human beings with skills, talents, aspirations, with the ability to make contributions -- if we let them. In the new world, migration is not going to go away. What we've seen in Europe will be with us for many years. People will continue to travel, they'll continue to be displaced, and we need to find rational, realistic ways of managing this -- not based on the old logics of humanitarian assistance, not based on logics of charity, but building on the opportunities offered by globalization, markets and mobility. I'd urge you all to wake up and urge our politicians to wake up to this challenge. Thank you very much. (Applause)

It was a Saturday afternoon in May, and I suddenly realized that the next day was Mother's Day, and I hadn't gotten anything for my mom, so I started thinking about what should I get my mom for Mother's Day? I thought, why don't I make her an interactive Mother's Day card using the Scratch software that I'd been developing with my research group at the MIT Media Lab? We developed it so that people could easily create their own interactive stories and games and animations, and then share their creations with one another. So I thought, this would be an opportunity to use Scratch to make an interactive card for my mom. Before making my own Mother's Day card, I thought I would take a look at the Scratch website. So over the last several years, kids around the world ages 8 and up, have shared their projects, and I thought, I wonder if, of those three million projects, whether anyone else has thought to put up Mother's Day cards. So in the search box I typed in "Mother's Day," and I was surprised and delighted to see a list of dozens and dozens of Mother's Day cards that showed up on the Scratch website, many of them just in the past 24 hours by procrastinators just like myself. So I started taking a look at them. (Music) I saw one of them that featured a kitten and her mom and wishing her mom a happy Mother's Day. And the creator very considerately offered a replay for her mom. Another one was an interactive project where, when you moved the mouse over the letters of "Happy Mom Day," it reveals a special happy Mother's Day slogan. (Music) In this one, the creator told a narrative about how she had Googled to find out when Mother's Day was happening. (Typing) And then once she found out when Mother's Day was happening, she delivered a special Mother's Day greeting of how much she loved her mom. So I really enjoyed looking at these projects and interacting with these projects. In fact, I liked it so much that, instead of making my own project, I sent my mom links to about a dozen of these projects. (Laughter) And actually, she reacted exactly the way that I hoped that she would. She wrote back to me and she said, "I'm so proud to have a son that created the software that allowed these kids to make Mother's Day cards for their mothers." So my mom was happy, and that made me happy, but actually I was even happier for another reason. I was happy because these kids were using Scratch just in the way that we had hoped that they would. As they created their interactive Mother's Day cards, you could see that they were really becoming fluent with new technologies. What do I mean by fluent? I mean that they were able to start expressing themselves and to start expressing their ideas. When you become fluent with language, it means you can write an entry in your journal or tell a joke to someone or write a letter to a friend. And it's similar with new technologies. By writing, be creating these interactive Mother's Day cards, these kids were showing that they were really fluent with new technologies. Now maybe you won't be so surprised by this, because a lot of times people feel that young people today can do all sorts of things with technology. I mean, all of us have heard young people referred to as "digital natives." But actually I'm sort of skeptical about this term. I'm not so sure we should be thinking of young people as digital natives. When you really look at it, how is it that young people spend most of their time using new technologies? You often see them in situations like this, or like this, and there's no doubt that young people are very comfortable and familiar browsing and chatting and texting and gaming. But that doesn't really make you fluent. So young people today have lots of experience and lots of familiarity with interacting with new technologies, but a lot less so of creating with new technologies and expressing themselves with new technologies. It's almost as if they can read but not write with new technologies. And I'm really interested in seeing, how can we help young people become fluent so they can write with new technologies? And that really means that they need to be able to write their own computer programs, or code. So, increasingly, people are starting to recognize the importance of learning to code. You know, in recent years, there have been hundreds of new organizations and websites that are helping young people learn to code. You look online, you'll see places like Codecademy and events like CoderDojo and sites like Girls Who Code, or Black Girls Code. It seems that everybody is getting into the act. You know, just at the beginning of this year, at the turn of the new year, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg made a New Year's resolution that he was going to learn to code in 2012. A few months later, the country of Estonia decided that all of its first graders should learn to code. And that triggered a debate in the U.K. about whether all the children there should learn to code. Now, for some of you, when you hear about this, it might seem sort of strange about everybody learning to code. When many people think of coding, they think of it as something that only a very narrow sub-community of people are going to be doing, and they think of coding looking like this. And in fact, if this is what coding is like, it will only be a narrow sub-community of people with special mathematical skills and technological background that can code. But coding doesn't have to be like this. Let me show you about what it's like to code in Scratch. So in Scratch, to code, you just snap blocks together. In this case, you take a move block, snap it into a stack, and the stacks of blocks control the behaviors of the different characters in your game or your story, in this case controlling the big fish. After you've created your program, you can click on "share," and then share your project with other people, so that they can use the project and start working on the project as well. So, of course, making a fish game isn't the only thing you can do with Scratch. Of the millions of projects on the Scratch website, there's everything from animated stories to school science projects to anime soap operas to virtual construction kits to recreations of classic video games to political opinion polls to trigonometry tutorials to interactive artwork, and, yes, interactive Mother's Day cards. So I think there's so many different ways that people can express themselves using this, to be able to take their ideas and share their ideas with the world. And it doesn't just stay on the screen. You can also code to interact with the physical world around you. Here's an example from Hong Kong, where some kids made a game and then built their own physical interface device and had a light sensor, so the light sensor detects the hole in the board, so as they move the physical saw, the light sensor detects the hole and controls the virtual saw on the screen and saws down the tree. We're going to continue to look at new ways of bringing together the physical world and the virtual world and connecting to the world around us. This is an example from a new version of Scratch that we'll be releasing in the next few months, and we're looking again to be able to push you in new directions. Here's an example. It uses the webcam. And as I move my hand, I can pop the balloons or I can move the bug. So it's a little bit like Microsoft Kinect, where you interact with gestures in the world. But instead of just playing someone else's game, you get to create the games, and if you see someone else's game, you can just say "see inside," and you can look at the stacks of blocks that control it. So there's a new block that says how much video motion there is, and then, if there's so much video motion, it will then tell the balloon to pop. The same way that this uses the camera to get information into Scratch, you can also use the microphone. Here's an example of a project using the microphone. So I'm going to let all of you control this game using your voices. (Crickets chirping) (Shouts) (Chomping) (Laughter) (Applause) As kids are creating projects like this, they're learning to code, but even more importantly, they're coding to learn. Because as they learn to code, it enables them to learn many other things, opens up many new opportunities for learning. Again, it's useful to make an analogy to reading and writing. When you learn to read and write, it opens up opportunities for you to learn so many other things. When you learn to read, you can then read to learn. And it's the same thing with coding. If you learn to code, you can code to learn. Now some of the things you can learn are sort of obvious. You learn more about how computers work. But that's just where it starts. When you learn to code, it opens up for you to learn many other things. Let me show you an example. Here's another project, and I saw this when I was visiting one of the computer clubhouses. These are after-school learning centers that we helped start that help young people from low-income communities learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies. And when I went to one of the clubhouses a couple years ago, I saw a 13-year-old boy who was using our Scratch software to create a game somewhat like this one, and he was very happy with his game and proud of his game, but also he wanted to do more. He wanted to keep score. So this was a game where the big fish eats the little fish, but he wanted to keep score, so that each time the big fish eats the little fish, the score would go up and it would keep track, and he didn't know how to do that. So I showed him. In Scratch, you can create something called a variable. I'll call it score. And that creates some new blocks for you, and also creates a little scoreboard that keeps track of the score, so each time I click on "change score," it increments the score. So I showed this to the clubhouse member -- let's call him Victor -- and Victor, when he saw that this block would let him increment the score, he knew exactly what to do. He took the block and he put it into the program exactly where the big fish eats the little fish. So then, each time the big fish eats the little fish, he will increment the score, and the score will go up by one. And it's in fact working. And he saw this, and he was so excited, he reached his hand out to me, and he said, "Thank you, thank you, thank you." And what went through my mind was, how often is it that teachers are thanked by their students for teaching them variables? (Laughter) It doesn't happen in most classrooms, but that's because in most classrooms, when kids learn about variables, they don't know why they're learning it. It's nothing that, really, they can make use of. When you learn ideas like this in Scratch, you can learn it in a way that's really meaningful and motivating for you, that you can understand the reason for learning variables, and we see that kids learn it more deeply and learn it better. Victor had, I'm sure, been taught about variables in schools, but he really didn't -- he wasn't paying attention. Now he had a reason for learning variables. So when you learn through coding, and coding to learn, you're learning it in a meaningful context, and that's the best way of learning things. So as kids like Victor are creating projects like this, they're learning important concepts like variables, but that's just the start. As Victor worked on this project and created the scripts, he was also learning about the process of design, how to start with the glimmer of an idea and turn it into a fully-fledged, functioning project like you see here. So he was learning many different core principles of design, about how to experiment with new ideas, how to take complex ideas and break them down into simpler parts, how to collaborate with other people on your projects, about how to find and fix bugs when things go wrong, how to keep persistent and to persevere in the face of frustrations when things aren't working well. Now those are important skills that aren't just relevant for coding. They're relevant for all sorts of different activities. Now, who knows if Victor is going to grow up and become a programmer or a professional computer scientist? It's probably not so likely, but regardless of what he does, he'll be able to make use of these design skills that he learned. Regardless of whether he grows up to be a marketing manager or a mechanic or a community organizer, that these ideas are useful for everybody. Again, it's useful to think about this analogy with language. When you become fluent with reading and writing, it's not something that you're doing just to become a professional writer. Very few people become professional writers. But it's useful for everybody to learn how to read and write. Again, the same thing with coding. Most people won't grow up to become professional computer scientists or programmers, but those skills of thinking creatively, reasoning systematically, working collaboratively -- skills you develop when you code in Scratch -- are things that people can use no matter what they're doing in their work lives. And it's not just about your work life. Coding can also enable you to express your ideas and feelings in your personal life. Let me end with just one more example. So this is an example that came from after I had sent the Mother's Day cards to my mom, she decided that she wanted to learn Scratch. So she made this project for my birthday and sent me a happy birthday Scratch card. Now this project is not going to win any prizes for design, and you can rest assured that my 83-year-old mom is not training to become a professional programmer or computer scientist. But working on this project enabled her to make a connection to someone that she cares about and enabled her to keep on learning new things and continuing to practice her creativity and developing new ways of expressing herself. So as we take a look and we see that Michael Bloomberg is learning to code, all of the children of Estonia learn to code, even my mom has learned to code, don't you think it's about time that you might be thinking about learning to code? If you're interested in giving it a try, I'd encourage you to go to the Scratch website. It's scratch.mit.edu, and give a try at coding. Thanks very much. (Applause)

I got my start in writing and research as a surgical trainee, as someone who was a long ways away from becoming any kind of an expert at anything. So the natural question you ask then at that point is, how do I get good at what I'm trying to do? And it became a question of, how do we all get good at what we're trying to do? It's hard enough to learn to get the skills, try to learn all the material you have to absorb at any task you're taking on. I had to think about how I sew and how I cut, but then also how I pick the right person to come to an operating room. And then in the midst of all this came this new context for thinking about what it meant to be good. In the last few years we realized we were in the deepest crisis of medicine's existence due to something you don't normally think about when you're a doctor concerned with how you do good for people, which is the cost of health care. There's not a country in the world that now is not asking whether we can afford what doctors do. The political fight that we've developed has become one around whether it's the government that's the problem or is it insurance companies that are the problem. And the answer is yes and no; it's deeper than all of that. The cause of our troubles is actually the complexity that science has given us. And in order to understand this, I'm going to take you back a couple of generations. I want to take you back to a time when Lewis Thomas was writing in his book, "The Youngest Science." Lewis Thomas was a physician-writer, one of my favorite writers. And he wrote this book to explain, among other things, what it was like to be a medical intern at the Boston City Hospital in the pre-penicillin year of 1937. It was a time when medicine was cheap and very ineffective. If you were in a hospital, he said, it was going to do you good only because it offered you some warmth, some food, shelter, and maybe the caring attention of a nurse. Doctors and medicine made no difference at all. That didn't seem to prevent the doctors from being frantically busy in their days, as he explained. What they were trying to do was figure out whether you might have one of the diagnoses for which they could do something. And there were a few. You might have a lobar pneumonia, for example, and they could give you an antiserum, an injection of rabid antibodies to the bacterium streptococcus, if the intern sub-typed it correctly. If you had an acute congestive heart failure, they could bleed a pint of blood from you by opening up an arm vein, giving you a crude leaf preparation of digitalis and then giving you oxygen by tent. If you had early signs of paralysis and you were really good at asking personal questions, you might figure out that this paralysis someone has is from syphilis, in which case you could give this nice concoction of mercury and arsenic -- as long as you didn't overdose them and kill them. Beyond these sorts of things, a medical doctor didn't have a lot that they could do. This was when the core structure of medicine was created -- what it meant to be good at what we did and how we wanted to build medicine to be. It was at a time when what was known you could know, you could hold it all in your head, and you could do it all. If you had a prescription pad, if you had a nurse, if you had a hospital that would give you a place to convalesce, maybe some basic tools, you really could do it all. You set the fracture, you drew the blood, you spun the blood, looked at it under the microscope, you plated the culture, you injected the antiserum. This was a life as a craftsman. As a result, we built it around a culture and set of values that said what you were good at was being daring, at being courageous, at being independent and self-sufficient. Autonomy was our highest value. Go a couple generations forward to where we are, though, and it looks like a completely different world. We have now found treatments for nearly all of the tens of thousands of conditions that a human being can have. We can't cure it all. We can't guarantee that everybody will live a long and healthy life. But we can make it possible for most. But what does it take? Well, we've now discovered 4,000 medical and surgical procedures. We've discovered 6,000 drugs that I'm now licensed to prescribe. And we're trying to deploy this capability, town by town, to every person alive -- in our own country, let alone around the world. And we've reached the point where we've realized, as doctors, we can't know it all. We can't do it all by ourselves. There was a study where they looked at how many clinicians it took to take care of you if you came into a hospital, as it changed over time. And in the year 1970, it took just over two full-time equivalents of clinicians. That is to say, it took basically the nursing time and then just a little bit of time for a doctor who more or less checked in on you once a day. By the end of the 20th century, it had become more than 15 clinicians for the same typical hospital patient -- specialists, physical therapists, the nurses. We're all specialists now, even the primary care physicians. Everyone just has a piece of the care. But holding onto that structure we built around the daring, independence, self-sufficiency of each of those people has become a disaster. We have trained, hired and rewarded people to be cowboys. But it's pit crews that we need, pit crews for patients. There's evidence all around us: 40 percent of our coronary artery disease patients in our communities receive incomplete or inappropriate care. 60 percent of our asthma, stroke patients receive incomplete or inappropriate care. Two million people come into hospitals and pick up an infection they didn't have because someone failed to follow the basic practices of hygiene. Our experience as people who get sick, need help from other people, is that we have amazing clinicians that we can turn to -- hardworking, incredibly well-trained and very smart -- that we have access to incredible technologies that give us great hope, but little sense that it consistently all comes together for you from start to finish in a successful way. There's another sign that we need pit crews, and that's the unmanageable cost of our care. Now we in medicine, I think, are baffled by this question of cost. We want to say, "This is just the way it is. This is just what medicine requires." When you go from a world where you treated arthritis with aspirin, that mostly didn't do the job, to one where, if it gets bad enough, we can do a hip replacement, a knee replacement that gives you years, maybe decades, without disability, a dramatic change, well is it any surprise that that $40,000 hip replacement replacing the 10-cent aspirin is more expensive? It's just the way it is. But I think we're ignoring certain facts that tell us something about what we can do. As we've looked at the data about the results that have come as the complexity has increased, we found that the most expensive care is not necessarily the best care. And vice versa, the best care often turns out to be the least expensive -- has fewer complications, the people get more efficient at what they do. And what that means is there's hope. Because [if] to have the best results, you really needed the most expensive care in the country, or in the world, well then we really would be talking about rationing who we're going to cut off from Medicare. That would be really our only choice. But when we look at the positive deviants -- the ones who are getting the best results at the lowest costs -- we find the ones that look the most like systems are the most successful. That is to say, they found ways to get all of the different pieces, all of the different components, to come together into a whole. Having great components is not enough, and yet we've been obsessed in medicine with components. We want the best drugs, the best technologies, the best specialists, but we don't think too much about how it all comes together. It's a terrible design strategy actually. There's a famous thought experiment that touches exactly on this that said, what if you built a car from the very best car parts? Well it would lead you to put in Porsche brakes, a Ferrari engine, a Volvo body, a BMW chassis. And you put it all together and what do you get? A very expensive pile of junk that does not go anywhere. And that is what medicine can feel like sometimes. It's not a system. Now a system, however, when things start to come together, you realize it has certain skills for acting and looking that way. Skill number one is the ability to recognize success and the ability to recognize failure. When you are a specialist, you can't see the end result very well. You have to become really interested in data, unsexy as that sounds. One of my colleagues is a surgeon in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and he got interested in the question of, well how many CT scans did they do for their community in Cedar Rapids? He got interested in this because there had been government reports, newspaper reports, journal articles saying that there had been too many CT scans done. He didn't see it in his own patients. And so he asked the question, "How many did we do?" and he wanted to get the data. It took him three months. No one had asked this question in his community before. And what he found was that, for the 300,000 people in their community, in the previous year they had done 52,000 CT scans. They had found a problem. Which brings us to skill number two a system has. Skill one, find where your failures are. Skill two is devise solutions. I got interested in this when the World Health Organization came to my team asking if we could help with a project to reduce deaths in surgery. The volume of surgery had spread around the world, but the safety of surgery had not. Now our usual tactics for tackling problems like these are to do more training, give people more specialization or bring in more technology. Well in surgery, you couldn't have people who are more specialized and you couldn't have people who are better trained. And yet we see unconscionable levels of death, disability that could be avoided. And so we looked at what other high-risk industries do. We looked at skyscraper construction, we looked at the aviation world, and we found that they have technology, they have training, and then they have one other thing: They have checklists. I did not expect to be spending a significant part of my time as a Harvard surgeon worrying about checklists. And yet, what we found were that these were tools to help make experts better. We got the lead safety engineer for Boeing to help us. Could we design a checklist for surgery? Not for the lowest people on the totem pole, but for the folks who were all the way around the chain, the entire team including the surgeons. And what they taught us was that designing a checklist to help people handle complexity actually involves more difficulty than I had understood. You have to think about things like pause points. You need to identify the moments in a process when you can actually catch a problem before it's a danger and do something about it. You have to identify that this is a before-takeoff checklist. And then you need to focus on the killer items. An aviation checklist, like this one for a single-engine plane, isn't a recipe for how to fly a plane, it's a reminder of the key things that get forgotten or missed if they're not checked. So we did this. We created a 19-item two-minute checklist for surgical teams. We had the pause points immediately before anesthesia is given, immediately before the knife hits the skin, immediately before the patient leaves the room. And we had a mix of dumb stuff on there -- making sure an antibiotic is given in the right time frame because that cuts the infection rate by half -- and then interesting stuff, because you can't make a recipe for something as complicated as surgery. Instead, you can make a recipe for how to have a team that's prepared for the unexpected. And we had items like making sure everyone in the room had introduced themselves by name at the start of the day, because you get half a dozen people or more who are sometimes coming together as a team for the very first time that day that you're coming in. We implemented this checklist in eight hospitals around the world, deliberately in places from rural Tanzania to the University of Washington in Seattle. We found that after they adopted it the complication rates fell 35 percent. It fell in every hospital it went into. The death rates fell 47 percent. This was bigger than a drug. (Applause) And that brings us to skill number three, the ability to implement this, to get colleagues across the entire chain to actually do these things. And it's been slow to spread. This is not yet our norm in surgery -- let alone making checklists to go onto childbirth and other areas. There's a deep resistance because using these tools forces us to confront that we're not a system, forces us to behave with a different set of values. Just using a checklist requires you to embrace different values from the ones we've had, like humility, discipline, teamwork. This is the opposite of what we were built on: independence, self-sufficiency, autonomy. I met an actual cowboy, by the way. I asked him, what was it like to actually herd a thousand cattle across hundreds of miles? How did you do that? And he said, "We have the cowboys stationed at distinct places all around." They communicate electronically constantly, and they have protocols and checklists for how they handle everything -- (Laughter) -- from bad weather to emergencies or inoculations for the cattle. Even the cowboys are pit crews now. And it seemed like time that we become that way ourselves. Making systems work is the great task of my generation of physicians and scientists. But I would go further and say that making systems work, whether in health care, education, climate change, making a pathway out of poverty, is the great task of our generation as a whole. In every field, knowledge has exploded, but it has brought complexity, it has brought specialization. And we've come to a place where we have no choice but to recognize, as individualistic as we want to be, complexity requires group success. We all need to be pit crews now. Thank you. (Applause)

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

This is the Large Hadron Collider. It's 27 kilometers in circumference. It's the biggest scientific experiment ever attempted. Over 10,000 physicists and engineers from 85 countries around the world have come together over several decades to build this machine. What we do is we accelerate protons -- so, hydrogen nuclei -- around 99.999999 percent the speed of light. Right? At that speed, they go around that 27 kilometers 11,000 times a second. And we collide them with another beam of protons going in the opposite direction. We collide them inside giant detectors. They're essentially digital cameras. And this is the one that I work on, ATLAS. You get some sense of the size -- you can just see these EU standard-size people underneath. (Laughter) You get some sense of the size: 44 meters wide, 22 meters in diameter, 7,000 tons. And we re-create the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the universe began up to 600 million times a second inside that detector -- immense numbers. And if you see those metal bits there -- those are huge magnets that bend electrically charged particles, so it can measure how fast they're traveling. This is a picture about a year ago. Those magnets are in there. And, again, a EU standard-size, real person, so you get some sense of the scale. And it's in there that those mini-Big Bangs will be created, sometime in the summer this year. And actually, this morning, I got an email saying that we've just finished, today, building the last piece of ATLAS. So as of today, it's finished. I'd like to say that I planned that for TED, but I didn't. So it's been completed as of today. (Applause) Yeah, it's a wonderful achievement. So, you might be asking, "Why? Why create the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the universe began?" Well, particle physicists are nothing if not ambitious. And the aim of particle physics is to understand what everything's made of, and how everything sticks together. And by everything I mean, of course, me and you, the Earth, the Sun, the 100 billion suns in our galaxy and the 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Absolutely everything. Now you might say, "Well, OK, but why not just look at it? You know? If you want to know what I'm made of, let's look at me." Well, we found that as you look back in time, the universe gets hotter and hotter, denser and denser, and simpler and simpler. Now, there's no real reason I'm aware of for that, but that seems to be the case. So, way back in the early times of the universe, we believe it was very simple and understandable. All this complexity, all the way to these wonderful things -- human brains -- are a property of an old and cold and complicated universe. Back at the start, in the first billionth of a second, we believe, or we've observed, it was very simple. It's almost like ... imagine a snowflake in your hand, and you look at it, and it's an incredibly complicated, beautiful object. But as you heat it up, it'll melt into a pool of water, and you would be able to see that, actually, it was just made of H20, water. So it's in that same sense that we look back in time to understand what the universe is made of. And, as of today, it's made of these things. Just 12 particles of matter, stuck together by four forces of nature. The quarks, these pink things, are the things that make up protons and neutrons that make up the atomic nuclei in your body. The electron -- the thing that goes around the atomic nucleus -- held around in orbit, by the way, by the electromagnetic force that's carried by this thing, the photon. The quarks are stuck together by other things called gluons. And these guys, here, they're the weak nuclear force, probably the least familiar. But, without it, the sun wouldn't shine. And when the sun shines, you get copious quantities of these things, called neutrinos, pouring out. Actually, if you just look at your thumbnail -- about a square centimeter -- there are something like 60 billion neutrinos per second from the sun, passing through every square centimeter of your body. But you don't feel them, because the weak force is correctly named -- very short range and very weak, so they just fly through you. And these particles have been discovered over the last century, pretty much. The first one, the electron, was discovered in 1897, and the last one, this thing called the tau neutrino, in the year 2000. Actually just -- I was going to say, just up the road in Chicago. I know it's a big country, America, isn't it? Just up the road. Relative to the universe, it's just up the road. (Laughter) So, this thing was discovered in the year 2000, so it's a relatively recent picture. One of the wonderful things, actually, I find, is that we've discovered any of them, when you realize how tiny they are. You know, they're a step in size from the entire observable universe. So, 100 billion galaxies, 13.7 billion light years away -- a step in size from that to Monterey, actually, is about the same as from Monterey to these things. Absolutely, exquisitely minute, and yet we've discovered pretty much the full set. So, one of my most illustrious forebears at Manchester University, Ernest Rutherford, discoverer of the atomic nucleus, once said, "All science is either physics or stamp collecting." Now, I don't think he meant to insult the rest of science, although he was from New Zealand, so it's possible. (Laughter) But what he meant was that what we've done, really, is stamp collect there. OK, we've discovered the particles, but unless you understand the underlying reason for that pattern -- you know, why it's built the way it is -- really you've done stamp collecting. You haven't done science. Fortunately, we have probably one of the greatest scientific achievements of the twentieth century that underpins that pattern. It's the Newton's laws, if you want, of particle physics. It's called the standard model -- beautifully simple mathematical equation. You could stick it on the front of a T-shirt, which is always the sign of elegance. This is it. (Laughter) I've been a little disingenuous, because I've expanded it out in all its gory detail. This equation, though, allows you to calculate everything -- other than gravity -- that happens in the universe. So, you want to know why the sky is blue, why atomic nuclei stick together -- in principle, you've got a big enough computer -- why DNA is the shape it is. In principle, you should be able to calculate it from that equation. But there's a problem. Can anyone see what it is? A bottle of champagne for anyone that tells me. I'll make it easier, actually, by blowing one of the lines up. Basically, each of these terms refers to some of the particles. So those Ws there refer to the Ws, and how they stick together. These carriers of the weak force, the Zs, the same. But there's an extra symbol in this equation: H. Right, H. H stands for Higgs particle. Higgs particles have not been discovered. But they're necessary: they're necessary to make that mathematics work. So all the exquisitely detailed calculations we can do with that wonderful equation wouldn't be possible without an extra bit. So it's a prediction: a prediction of a new particle. What does it do? Well, we had a long time to come up with good analogies. And back in the 1980s, when we wanted the money for the LHC from the U.K. government, Margaret Thatcher, at the time, said, "If you guys can explain, in language a politician can understand, what the hell it is that you're doing, you can have the money. I want to know what this Higgs particle does." And we came up with this analogy, and it seemed to work. Well, what the Higgs does is, it gives mass to the fundamental particles. And the picture is that the whole universe -- and that doesn't mean just space, it means me as well, and inside you -- the whole universe is full of something called a Higgs field. Higgs particles, if you will. The analogy is that these people in a room are the Higgs particles. Now when a particle moves through the universe, it can interact with these Higgs particles. But imagine someone who's not very popular moves through the room. Then everyone ignores them. They can just pass through the room very quickly, essentially at the speed of light. They're massless. And imagine someone incredibly important and popular and intelligent walks into the room. They're surrounded by people, and their passage through the room is impeded. It's almost like they get heavy. They get massive. And that's exactly the way the Higgs mechanism works. The picture is that the electrons and the quarks in your body and in the universe that we see around us are heavy, in a sense, and massive, because they're surrounded by Higgs particles. They're interacting with the Higgs field. If that picture's true, then we have to discover those Higgs particles at the LHC. If it's not true -- because it's quite a convoluted mechanism, although it's the simplest we've been able to think of -- then whatever does the job of the Higgs particles we know have to turn up at the LHC. So, that's one of the prime reasons we built this giant machine. I'm glad you recognize Margaret Thatcher. Actually, I thought about making it more culturally relevant, but -- (Laughter) anyway. So that's one thing. That's essentially a guarantee of what the LHC will find. There are many other things. You've heard many of the big problems in particle physics. One of them you heard about: dark matter, dark energy. There's another issue, which is that the forces in nature -- it's quite beautiful, actually -- seem, as you go back in time, they seem to change in strength. Well, they do change in strength. So, the electromagnetic force, the force that holds us together, gets stronger as you go to higher temperatures. The strong force, the strong nuclear force, which sticks nuclei together, gets weaker. And what you see is the standard model -- you can calculate how these change -- is the forces, the three forces, other than gravity, almost seem to come together at one point. It's almost as if there was one beautiful kind of super-force, back at the beginning of time. But they just miss. Now there's a theory called super-symmetry, which doubles the number of particles in the standard model, which, at first sight, doesn't sound like a simplification. But actually, with this theory, we find that the forces of nature do seem to unify together, back at the Big Bang -- absolutely beautiful prophecy. The model wasn't built to do that, but it seems to do it. Also, those super-symmetric particles are very strong candidates for the dark matter. So a very compelling theory that's really mainstream physics. And if I was to put money on it, I would put money on -- in a very unscientific way -- that that these things would also crop up at the LHC. Many other things that the LHC could discover. But in the last few minutes, I just want to give you a different perspective of what I think -- what particle physics really means to me -- particle physics and cosmology. And that's that I think it's given us a wonderful narrative -- almost a creation story, if you'd like -- about the universe, from modern science over the last few decades. And I'd say that it deserves, in the spirit of Wade Davis' talk, to be at least put up there with these wonderful creation stories of the peoples of the high Andes and the frozen north. This is a creation story, I think, equally as wonderful. The story goes like this: we know that the universe began 13.7 billion years ago, in an immensely hot, dense state, much smaller than a single atom. It began to expand about a million, billion, billion, billion billionth of a second -- I think I got that right -- after the Big Bang. Gravity separated away from the other forces. The universe then underwent an exponential expansion called inflation. In about the first billionth of a second or so, the Higgs field kicked in, and the quarks and the gluons and the electrons that make us up got mass. The universe continued to expand and cool. After about a few minutes, there was hydrogen and helium in the universe. That's all. The universe was about 75 percent hydrogen, 25 percent helium. It still is today. It continued to expand about 300 million years. Then light began to travel through the universe. It was big enough to be transparent to light, and that's what we see in the cosmic microwave background that George Smoot described as looking at the face of God. After about 400 million years, the first stars formed, and that hydrogen, that helium, then began to cook into the heavier elements. So the elements of life -- carbon, and oxygen and iron, all the elements that we need to make us up -- were cooked in those first generations of stars, which then ran out of fuel, exploded, threw those elements back into the universe. They then re-collapsed into another generation of stars and planets. And on some of those planets, the oxygen, which had been created in that first generation of stars, could fuse with hydrogen to form water, liquid water on the surface. On at least one, and maybe only one of those planets, primitive life evolved, which evolved over millions of years into things that walked upright and left footprints about three and a half million years ago in the mud flats of Tanzania, and eventually left a footprint on another world. And built this civilization, this wonderful picture, that turned the darkness into light, and you can see the civilization from space. As one of my great heroes, Carl Sagan, said, these are the things -- and actually, not only these, but I was looking around -- these are the things, like Saturn V rockets, and Sputnik, and DNA, and literature and science -- these are the things that hydrogen atoms do when given 13.7 billion years. Absolutely remarkable. And, the laws of physics. Right? So, the right laws of physics -- they're beautifully balanced. If the weak force had been a little bit different, then carbon and oxygen wouldn't be stable inside the hearts of stars, and there would be none of that in the universe. And I think that's a wonderful and significant story. 50 years ago, I couldn't have told that story, because we didn't know it. It makes me really feel that that civilization -- which, as I say, if you believe the scientific creation story, has emerged purely as a result of the laws of physics, and a few hydrogen atoms -- then I think, to me anyway, it makes me feel incredibly valuable. So that's the LHC. The LHC is certainly, when it turns on in summer, going to write the next chapter of that book. And I'm certainly looking forward with immense excitement to it being turned on. Thanks. (Applause)

I and my colleagues Art Aron and Lucy Brown and others, have put 37 people who are madly in love into a functional MRI brain scanner. 17 who were happily in love, 15 who had just been dumped, and we're just starting our third experiment: studying people who report that they're still in love after 10 to 25 years of marriage. So, this is the short story of that research. In the jungles of Guatemala, in Tikal, stands a temple. It was built by the grandest Sun King, of the grandest city-state, of the grandest civilization of the Americas, the Mayas. His name was Jasaw Chan K'awiil. He stood over six feet tall. He lived into his 80s, and he was buried beneath this monument in 720 AD. And Mayan inscriptions proclaim that he was deeply in love with his wife. So, he built a temple in her honor, facing his. And every spring and autumn, exactly at the equinox, the sun rises behind his temple, and perfectly bathes her temple with his shadow. And as the sun sets behind her temple in the afternoon, it perfectly bathes his temple with her shadow. After 1,300 years, these two lovers still touch and kiss from their tomb. Around the world, people love. They sing for love, they dance for love, they compose poems and stories about love. They tell myths and legends about love. They pine for love, they live for love, they kill for love, and they die for love. As Walt Whitman once said, he said, "Oh, I would stake all for you." Anthropologists have found evidence of romantic love in 170 societies. They've never found a society that did not have it. But love isn't always a happy experience. In one study of college students, they asked a lot of questions about love, but the two that stood out to me the most were, "Have you ever been rejected by somebody who you really loved?" And the second question was, "Have you ever dumped somebody who really loved you?" And almost 95 percent of both men and women said yes to both. Almost nobody gets out of love alive. So, before I start telling you about the brain, I want to read for you what I think is the most powerful love poem on Earth. There's other love poems that are, of course, just as good, but I don't think this one can be surpassed. It was told by an anonymous Kwakiutl Indian of southern Alaska to a missionary in 1896, and here it is. I've never had the opportunity to say it before. "Fire runs through my body with the pain of loving you. Pain runs through my body with the fires of my love for you. Pain like a boil about to burst with my love for you, consumed by fire with my love for you. I remember what you said to me. I am thinking of your love for me. I am torn by your love for me. Pain and more pain -- where are you going with my love? I am told you will go from here. I am told you will leave me here. My body is numb with grief. Remember what I said, my love. Goodbye, my love, goodbye." Emily Dickinson once wrote, "Parting is all we need to know of hell." How many people have suffered in all the millions of years of human evolution? How many people around the world are dancing with elation at this very minute? Romantic love is one of the most powerful sensations on Earth. So, several years ago, I decided to look into the brain and study this madness. Our first study of people who were happily in love has been widely publicized, so I'm only going to say a very little about it. We found activity in a tiny, little factory near the base of the brain called the ventral tegmental area. We found activity in some cells called the A10 cells, cells that actually make dopamine, a natural stimulant, and spray it to many brain regions. Indeed, this part, the VTA, is part of the brain's reward system. It's way below your cognitive thinking process. It's below your emotions. It's part of what we call the reptilian core of the brain, associated with wanting, with motivation, with focus and with craving. In fact, the same brain region where we found activity becomes active also when you feel the rush of cocaine. But romantic love is much more than a cocaine high -- at least you come down from cocaine. Romantic love is an obsession. It possesses you. You lose your sense of self. You can't stop thinking about another human being. Somebody is camping in your head. As an eighth-century Japanese poet said, "My longing had no time when it ceases." Wild is love. And the obsession can get worse when you've been rejected. So, right now, Lucy Brown and I, the neuroscientist on our project, are looking at the data of the people who were put into the machine after they had just been dumped. It was very difficult actually, putting these people in the machine, because they were in such bad shape. (Laughter) So anyway, we found activity in three brain regions. We found activity in the brain region, in exactly the same brain region associated with intense romantic love. What a bad deal. You know, when you've been dumped, the one thing you love to do is just forget about this human being, and then go on with your life -- but no, you just love them harder. As the poet Terence, the Roman poet once said, he said, "The less my hope, the hotter my love." And indeed, we now know why. Two thousand years later, we can explain this in the brain. That brain system -- the reward system for wanting, for motivation, for craving, for focus -- becomes more active when you can't get what you want. In this case, life's greatest prize: an appropriate mating partner. We found activity in other brain regions also -- in a brain region associated with calculating gains and losses. You know, you're lying there, you're looking at the picture, and you're in this machine, and you're calculating, you know, what went wrong. How, you know, what have I lost? As a matter of fact, Lucy and I have a little joke about this. It comes from a David Mamet play, and there's two con artists in the play, and the woman is conning the man, and the man looks at the woman and says, "Oh, you're a bad pony, I'm not going to bet on you." And indeed, it's this part of the brain, the core of the nucleus accumbens, actually, that is becoming active as you're measuring your gains and losses. It's also the brain region that becomes active when you're willing to take enormous risks for huge gains and huge losses. Last but not least, we found activity in a brain region associated with deep attachment to another individual. No wonder people suffer around the world, and we have so many crimes of passion. When you've been rejected in love, not only are you engulfed with feelings of romantic love, but you're feeling deep attachment to this individual. Moreover, this brain circuit for reward is working, and you're feeling intense energy, intense focus, intense motivation and the willingness to risk it all to win life's greatest prize. So, what have I learned from this experiment that I would like to tell the world? Foremost, I have come to think that romantic love is a drive, a basic mating drive. Not the sex drive -- the sex drive gets you out there, looking for a whole range of partners. Romantic love enables you to focus your mating energy on just one at a time, conserve your mating energy, and start the mating process with this single individual. I think of all the poetry that I've read about romantic love, what sums it up best is something that is said by Plato, over 2,000 years ago. He said, "The god of love lives in a state of need. It is a need. It is an urge. It is a homeostatic imbalance. Like hunger and thirst, it's almost impossible to stamp out." I've also come to believe that romantic love is an addiction: a perfectly wonderful addiction when it's going well, and a perfectly horrible addiction when it's going poorly. And indeed, it has all of the characteristics of addiction. You focus on the person, you obsessively think about them, you crave them, you distort reality, your willingness to take enormous risks to win this person. And it's got the three main characteristics of addiction: tolerance, you need to see them more, and more, and more; withdrawals; and last, relapse. I've got a girlfriend who's just getting over a terrible love affair. It's been about eight months, she's beginning to feel better. And she was driving along in her car the other day, and suddenly she heard a song on the car radio that reminded her of this man. And she -- not only did the instant craving come back, but she had to pull over from the side of the road and cry. So, one thing I would like the medical community, and the legal community, and even the college community, to see if they can understand, that indeed, romantic love is one of the most addictive substances on Earth. I would also like to tell the world that animals love. There's not an animal on this planet that will copulate with anything that comes along. Too old, too young, too scruffy, too stupid, and they won't do it. Unless you're stuck in a laboratory cage -- and you know, if you spend your entire life in a little box, you're not going to be as picky about who you have sex with -- but I've looked in a hundred species, and everywhere in the wild, animals have favorites. As a matter of fact ethologists know this. There are over eight words for what they call "animal favoritism:" selective proceptivity, mate choice, female choice, sexual choice. And indeed, there are now three academic articles in which they've looked at this attraction, which may only last for a second, but it's a definite attraction, and either this same brain region, this reward system, or the chemicals of that reward system are involved. In fact, I think animal attraction can be instant -- you can see an elephant instantly go for another elephant. And I think that this is really the origin of what you and I call "love at first sight." People have often asked me whether what I know about love has spoiled it for me. And I just simply say, "Hardly." You can know every single ingredient in a piece of chocolate cake, and then when you sit down and eat that cake, you can still feel that joy. And certainly, I make all the same mistakes that everybody else does too, but it's really deepened my understanding and compassion, really, for all human life. As a matter of fact, in New York, I often catch myself looking in baby carriages and feeling a little sorry for the tot. And in fact, sometimes I feel a little sorry for the chicken on my dinner plate, when I think of how intense this brain system is. Our newest experiment has been hatched by my colleague, Art Aron -- putting people who are reporting that they are still in love, in a long-term relationship, into the functional MRI. We've put five people in so far, and indeed, we found exactly the same thing. They're not lying. The brain areas associated with intense romantic love still become active, 25 years later. There are still many questions to be answered and asked about romantic love. The question that I'm working on right this minute -- and I'm only going to say it for a second, and then end -- is, why do you fall in love with one person, rather than another? I never would have even thought to think of this, but Match.com, the Internet-dating site, came to me three years ago and asked me that question. And I said, I don't know. I know what happens in the brain, when you do become in love, but I don't know why you fall in love with one person rather than another. And so, I've spent the last three years on this. And there are many reasons that you fall in love with one person rather than another, that psychologists can tell you. And we tend to fall in love with somebody from the same socioeconomic background, the same general level of intelligence, the same general level of good looks, the same religious values. Your childhood certainly plays a role, but nobody knows how. And that's about it, that's all they know. No, they've never found the way two personalities fit together to make a good relationship. So, it began to occur to me that maybe your biology pulls you towards some people rather than another. And I have concocted a questionnaire to see to what degree you express dopamine, serotonin, estrogen and testosterone. I think we've evolved four very broad personality types associated with the ratios of these four chemicals in the brain. And on this dating site that I have created, called Chemistry.com, I ask you first a series of questions to see to what degree you express these chemicals, and I'm watching who chooses who to love. And 3.7 million people have taken the questionnaire in America. About 600,000 people have taken it in 33 other countries. I'm putting the data together now, and at some point -- there will always be magic to love, but I think I will come closer to understanding why it is you can walk into a room and everybody is from your background, your same general level of intelligence, your same general level of good looks, and you don't feel pulled towards all of them. I think there's biology to that. I think we're going to end up, in the next few years, to understand all kinds of brain mechanisms that pull us to one person rather than another. So, I will close with this. These are my older people. Faulkner once said, "The past is not dead, it's not even the past." Indeed, we carry a lot of luggage from our yesteryear in the human brain. And so, there's one thing that makes me pursue my understanding of human nature, and this reminds me of it. These are two women. Women tend to get intimacy differently than men do. Women get intimacy from face-to-face talking. We swivel towards each other, we do what we call the "anchoring gaze" and we talk. This is intimacy to women. I think it comes from millions of years of holding that baby in front of your face, cajoling it, reprimanding it, educating it with words. Men tend to get intimacy from side-by-side doing. (Laughter) As soon as one guy looks up, the other guy will look away. (Laughter) I think it comes from millions of years of standing behind that -- sitting behind the bush, looking straight ahead, trying to hit that buffalo on the head with a rock. (Laughter) I think, for millions of years, men faced their enemies, they sat side by side with friends. So my final statement is: love is in us. It's deeply embedded in the brain. Our challenge is to understand each other. Thank you. (Applause)

I'm really scared. I don't think we're going to make it. Probably by now most of you have seen Al Gore's amazing talk. Shortly after I saw that, we had some friends over for dinner with the family. The conversation turned to global warming, and everybody agreed, there's a real problem. We've got a climate crisis. So, we went around the table to talk about what we should do. The conversation came to my 15-year-old daughter, Mary. She said, "I agree with everything that's been said. I'm scared and I'm angry." And then she turned to me and said, "Dad, your generation created this problem; you'd better fix it." Wow. All the conversation stopped. All the eyes turned to me. (Laughter) I didn't know what to say. Kleiner's second law is, "There is a time when panic is the appropriate response." (Laughter) And we've reached that time. We cannot afford to underestimate this problem. If we face irreversible and catastrophic consequences, we must act, and we must act decisively. I've got to tell you, for me, everything changed that evening. And so, my partners and I, we set off on this mission to learn more, to try to do much more. So, we mobilized. We got on airplanes. We went to Brazil. We went to China and to India, to Bentonville, Arkansas, to Washington, D.C. and to Sacramento. And so, what I'd like to do now is to tell you about what we've learned in those journeys. Because the more we learned, the more concerned we grew. You know, my partners at Kleiner and I were compulsive networkers, and so when we see a big problem or an opportunity like avian flu or personalized medicine, we just get together the smartest people we know. For this climate crisis, we assembled a network, really, of superstars, from policy activists to scientists and entrepreneurs and business leaders. Fifty or so of them. And so, I want to tell you about what we've learned in doing that and four lessons I've learned in the last year. The first lesson is that companies are really powerful, and that matters a lot. This is a story about how Wal-Mart went green, and what that means. Two years ago, the CEO, Lee Scott, believed that green is the next big thing, and so Wal-Mart made going green a top priority. They committed that they're going to take their existing stores and reduce their energy consumption by 20 percent, and their new stores by 30 percent, and do all that in seven years. The three biggest uses of energy in a store are heating and air conditioning, then lighting, and then refrigeration. So, look what they did. They painted the roofs of all their stores white. They put smart skylights through their stores so they could harvest the daylight and reduce the lighting demands. And, third, they put the refrigerated goods behind closed doors with LED lighting. I mean, why would you try to refrigerate a whole store? These are really simple, smart solutions based on existing technology. Why does Wal-Mart matter? Well, it's massive. They're the largest private employer in America. They're the largest private user of electricity. They have the second-largest vehicle fleet on the road. And they have one of the world's most amazing supply chains, 60,000 suppliers. If Wal-Mart were a country, it would be the sixth-largest trading partner with China. And maybe most important, they have a big effect on other companies. When Wal-Mart declares it's going to go green and be profitable, it has a powerful impact on other great institutions. So, let me tell you this: when Wal-Mart achieves 20 percent energy reductions, that's going to be a very big deal. But I'm afraid it's not enough. We need Wal-Mart and every other company to do the same. The second thing that we learned is that individuals matter, and they matter enormously. I've got another Wal-Mart story for you, OK? Wal-Mart has over 125 million U.S. customers. That's a third of the U.S. population. 65 million compact fluorescent light bulbs were sold last year. And Wal-Mart has committed they're going to sell another 100 million light bulbs in the coming year. But it's not easy. Consumers don't really like these light bulbs. The light's kind of funny, they won't dim, takes a while for them to start up. But the pay-off is really enormous. 100 million compact fluorescent light bulbs means that we'll save 600 million dollars in energy bills, and 20 million tons of CO2 every year, year in and year out. It does seem really hard to get consumers to do the right thing. It is stupid that we use two tons of steel, glass and plastic to haul our sorry selves to the shopping mall. It's stupid that we put water in plastic bottles in Fiji and ship it here. (Laughter) It's hard to change consumer behavior because consumers don't know how much this stuff costs. Do you know? Do you know how much CO2 you generated to drive here or fly here? I don't know, and I should. Those of us who care about all this would act better if we knew what the real costs were. But as long as we pretend that CO2 is free, as long as these uses are nearly invisible, how can we expect change? I'm really afraid, because I think the kinds of changes we can reasonably expect from individuals are going to be clearly not enough. The third lesson we learned is that policy matters. It really matters. In fact, policy is paramount. I've got a behind-the-scenes story for you about that green tech network I described. At the end of our first meeting, we got together to talk about what the action items would be, how we'd follow up. And Bob Epstein raised a hand. He stood up. You know, Bob's that Berkeley techie type who started Sybase. Well, Bob said the most important thing we could do right now is to make it clear in Sacramento, California that we need a market-based system of mandates that's going to cap and reduce greenhouse gases in California. It's necessary and, just as important, it's good for the California economy. So, eight of us went to Sacramento in August and we met with the seven undecided legislators and we lobbied for AB32. You know what? Six of those seven voted yes in favor of the bill, so it passed, and it passed by a vote of 47 to 32. (Applause) Please. Thank you. I think it's the most important legislation of 2006. Why? Because California was the first state in this country to mandate 25 percent reduction of greenhouse gases by 2020. And the result of that is, we're going to generate 83,000 new jobs, four billion dollars a year in annual income, and reduce the CO2 emissions by 174 million tons a year. California emits only seven percent of U.S. CO2 emissions. It's only a percent and a half of the country's CO2 emissions. It's a great start, but I've got to tell you -- where I started -- I'm really afraid. In fact, I'm certain California's not enough. Here's a story about national policy that we could all learn from. You know Tom Friedman says, "If you don't go, you don't know"? Well, we went to Brazil to meet Dr. Jose Goldemberg. He's the father of the ethanol revolution. He told us that Brazil's government mandated that every gasoline station in the country would carry ethanol. And they mandated that their new vehicles would be flex-fuel compatible, right? They'd run ethanol or ordinary gasoline. And so, here's what's happened in Brazil. They now have 29,000 ethanol pumps -- this versus 700 in the U.S., and a paltry two in California -- and in three years their new car fleet has gone from four percent to 85 percent flex-fuel. Compare that to the U.S.: five percent are flex-fuel. And you know what? Most consumers who have them don't even know it. So, what's happened in Brazil is, they've replaced 40 percent of the gasoline consumed by their automotive fleet with ethanol. That's 59 billion dollars since 1975 that they didn't ship to the Middle East. It's created a million jobs inside that country, and it's saved 32 million tons of CO2. It's really substantial. That's 10 percent of the CO2 emissions across their entire country. But Brazil's only 1.3 percent of the world's CO2 emission. So, Brazil's ethanol miracle, I'm really afraid, is not enough. In fact, I'm afraid all of the best policies we have are not going to be enough. The fourth and final lesson we've learned is about the potential of radical innovation. So, I want to tell you about a tragic problem and a breakthrough technology. Every year a million and a half people die of a completely preventable disease. That's malaria. 6,000 people a day. All for want of two dollars' worth of medications that we can buy at the corner drugstore. Well, two dollars, two dollars is too much for Africa. So, a team of Berkeley researchers with 15 million dollars from the Gates Foundation is engineering, designing a radical new way to make the key ingredient, called artemisinin, and they're going to make that drug 10 times cheaper. And in doing so, they'll save a million lives -- at least a million lives a year. A million lives. Their breakthrough technology is synthetic biology. This leverages millions of years of evolution by redesigning bugs to make really useful products. Now, what you do is, you get inside the microbe, you change its metabolic pathways, and you end up with a living chemical factory. Now, you may ask, John, what has this got to go with green and with climate crisis? Well, I'll tell you -- a lot. We've now formed a company called Amyris, and this technology that they're using can be used to make better biofuels. Don't let me skip over that. Better biofuels are a really big deal. That means we can precisely engineer the molecules in the fuel chain and optimize them along the way. So, if all goes well, they're going to have designer bugs in warm vats that are eating and digesting sugars to excrete better biofuels. I guess that's better living through bugs. Alan Kay is famous for saying the best way to predict the future is to invent it. And, of course, at Kleiner we, kind of, apologize and say the second best way is to finance it. And that's why we're investing 200 million dollars in a wide range of really disruptive new technologies for innovation in green technologies. And we're encouraging others to do it as well. We're talking a lot about this. In 2005, there were 600 million dollars invested in new technologies of the sort you see here. It doubled in 2006 to 1.2 billion dollars. But I'm really afraid we need much, much more. For reference, fact one: Exxon's revenues in 2005 were a billion dollars a day. Do you know, they only invested 0.2 percent of revenues in R&D? Second fact: the President's new budget for renewable energy is barely a billion dollars in total. Less than one day of Exxon's revenues. Third fact: I bet you didn't know that there's enough energy in hot rocks under the country to supply America's energy needs for the next thousand years. And the federal budget calls for a measly 20 million dollars of R&D in geothermal energy. It is almost criminal that we are not investing more in energy research in this country. And I am really afraid that it's absolutely not enough. So, in a year's worth of learning we found a bunch of surprises. Who would have thought that a mass retailer could make money by going green? Who would have thought that a database entrepreneur could transform California with legislation? Who would have thought that the ethanol biofuel miracle would come from a developing country in South America? And who would have thought that scientists trying to cure malaria could come up with breakthroughs in biofuels? And who would have thought that all that is not enough? Not enough to stabilize the climate. Not enough to keep the ice in Greenland from crashing into the ocean. The scientists tell us -- and they're only guessing -- that we've got to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by one half, and do it as fast as possible. Now, we may have the political will to do this in the U.S., but I've got to tell you, we've got only one atmosphere, and so somehow we're going to have to find the political will to do this all around the world. The wild card in this deck is China. To size the problem, China's CO2 emissions today are 3.3 gigatons; the U.S. is 5.8. Business as usual means we'll have 23 gigatons from China by 2050. That's about as much CO2 as there is in the whole world. And if it's business as usual, we're going out of business. When I was in Davos, China's Mayor of Dalian was pressed about their CO2 strategy, and he said the following, "You know, Americans use seven times the CO2 per capita as Chinese." Then he asked, "Why should China sacrifice our growth so that the West can continue to be profligate and stupid?" Does anybody here have an answer for him? I don't. We've got to make this economic so that all people and all nations make the right outcome, the profitable outcome, and therefore the likely outcome. Energy's a six-trillion-dollar business worldwide. It is the mother of all markets. You remember that Internet? Well, I'll tell you what. Green technologies -- going green -- is bigger than the Internet. It could be the biggest economic opportunity of the 21st century. Moreover, if we succeed, it's going to be the most important transformation for life on the planet since, as Bill Joy says, we went from methane to oxygen in the atmosphere. Now, here's the hard question, if the trajectory of all the world's companies and individuals and policies and innovation is not going to be enough, what are we going to do? I don't know. Everyone here cares about changing the world and has made a difference in that one way or another. So, our call to action -- my call to you -- is for you to make going green your next big thing, your gig. What can you do? You can personally get carbon neutral. Go to ClimateCrisis.org or CarbonCalculator.com and buy carbon credits. You could join other leaders in mandating, lobbying for mandated cap and trade in U.S. greenhouse gas reductions. There's six bills right now in Congress. Let's get one of them passed. And the most important thing you can do, I think, is to use your personal power and your Rolodex to lead your business, your institution, in going green. Do it like Wal-Mart, get it to go green for its customers and its suppliers and for itself. Really think outside the box. Can you imagine what it would be like if Amazon or eBay or Google or Microsoft or Apple really went green and you caused that to happen? It could be bigger than Wal-Mart. I can't wait to see what we TEDsters do about this crisis. And I really, really hope that we multiply all of our energy, all of our talent and all of our influence to solve this problem. Because if we do, I can look forward to the conversation I'm going to have with my daughter in 20 years. (Applause)

I've actually been waiting by the phone for a call from TED for years. And in fact, in 2000, I was ready to talk about eBay, but no call. In 2003, I was ready to do a talk about the Skoll Foundation and social entrepreneurship. No call. In 2004, I started Participant Productions and we had a really good first year, and no call. And finally, I get a call last year, and then I have to go up after J.J. Abrams. (Laughter) You've got a cruel sense of humor, TED. (Laughter) When I first moved to Hollywood from Silicon Valley, I had some misgivings. But I found that there were some advantages to being in Hollywood. (Laughter) And, in fact, some advantages to owning your own media company. And I also found that Hollywood and Silicon Valley have a lot more in common than I would have dreamed. Hollywood has its sex symbols, and the Valley has its sex symbols. (Laughter) Hollywood has its rivalries, and the Valley has its rivalries. Hollywood gathers around power tables, and the Valley gathers around power tables. So it turned out there was a lot more in common than I would have dreamed. But I'm actually here today to tell a story. And part of it is a personal story. When Chris invited me to speak, he said, people think of you as a bit of an enigma, and they want to know what drives you a bit. And what really drives me is a vision of the future that I think we all share. It's a world of peace and prosperity and sustainability. And when we heard a lot of the presentations over the last couple of days, Ed Wilson and the pictures of James Nachtwey, I think we all realized how far we have to go to get to this new version of humanity that I like to call "Humanity 2.0." And it's also something that resides in each of us, to close what I think are the two big calamities in the world today. One is the gap in opportunity -- this gap that President Clinton last night called uneven, unfair and unsustainable -- and, out of that, comes poverty and illiteracy and disease and all these evils that we see around us. But perhaps the other, bigger gap is what we call the hope gap. And someone, at some point, came up with this very bad idea that an ordinary individual couldn't make a difference in the world. And I think that's just a horrible thing. And so chapter one really begins today, with all of us, because within each of us is the power to equal those opportunity gaps and to close the hope gaps. And if the men and women of TED can't make a difference in the world, I don't know who can. And for me, a lot of this started when I was younger and my family used to go camping in upstate New York. And there really wasn't much to do there for the summer, except get beaten up by my sister or read books. And so I used to read authors like James Michener and James Clavell and Ayn Rand. And their stories made the world seem a very small and interconnected place. And it struck me that if I could write stories that were about this world as being small and interconnected, that maybe I could get people interested in the issues that affected us all, and maybe engage them to make a difference. I didn't think that was necessarily the best way to make a living, so I decided to go on a path to become financially independent, so I could write these stories as quickly as I could. I then had a bit of a wake-up call when I was 14. And my dad came home one day and announced that he had cancer, and it looked pretty bad. And what he said was, he wasn't so much afraid that he might die, but that he hadn't done the things that he wanted to with his life. And knock on wood, he's still alive today, many years later. But for a young man that made a real impression on me, that one never knows how much time one really has. So I set out in a hurry. I studied engineering. I started a couple of businesses that I thought would be the ticket to financial freedom. One of those businesses was a computer rental business called Micros on the Move, which is very well named, because people kept stealing the computers. (Laughter) So I figured I needed to learn a little bit more about business, so I went to Stanford Business School and studied there. And while I was there, I made friends with a fellow named Pierre Omidyar, who is here today. And Pierre, I apologize for this. This is a photo from the old days. And just after I'd graduated, Pierre came to me with this idea to help people buy and sell things online with each other. And with the wisdom of my Stanford degree, I said, "Pierre, what a stupid idea." (Laughter) And needless to say, I was right. (Laughter) But right after that, Pierre -- in '96, Pierre and I left our full-time jobs to build eBay as a company. And the rest of that story, you know. The company went public two years later and is today one of the best known companies in the world. Hundreds of millions of people use it in hundreds of countries, and so on. But for me, personally, it was a real change. I went from living in a house with five guys in Palo Alto and living off their leftovers, to all of a sudden having all kinds of resources. And I wanted to figure out how I could take the blessing of these resources and share it with the world. And around that time, I met John Gardner, who is a remarkable man. He was the architect of the Great Society programs under Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. And I asked him what he felt was the best thing I could do, or anyone could do, to make a difference in the long-term issues facing humanity. And John said, "Bet on good people doing good things. Bet on good people doing good things." And that really resonated with me. I started a foundation to bet on these good people doing good things. These leading, innovative, nonprofit folks, who are using business skills in a very leveraged way to solve social problems. People today we call social entrepreneurs. And to put a face on it, people like Muhammad Yunus, who started the Grameen Bank, has lifted 100 million people plus out of poverty around the world, won the Nobel Peace Prize. But there's also a lot of people that you don't know. Folks like Ann Cotton, who started a group called CAMFED in Africa, because she felt girls' education was lagging. And she started it about 10 years ago, and today, she educates over a quarter million African girls. And somebody like Dr. Victoria Hale, who started the world's first nonprofit pharmaceutical company, and whose first drug will be fighting visceral leishmaniasis, also known as black fever. And by 2010, she hopes to eliminate this disease, which is really a scourge in the developing world. And so this is one way to bet on good people doing good things. And a lot of this comes together in a philosophy of change that I find really is powerful. It's what we call, "Invest, connect and celebrate." And invest: if you see good people doing good things, invest in them. Invest in their organizations, or in business. Invest in these folks. Connecting them together through conferences -- like a TED -- brings so many powerful connections, or through the World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship that my foundation does at Oxford every year. And celebrate them: tell their stories, because not only are there good people doing good work, but their stories can help close these gaps of hope. And it was this last part of the mission, the celebrate part, that really got me back to thinking when I was a kid and wanted to tell stories to get people involved in the issues that affect us all. And a light bulb went off, which was, first, that I didn't actually have to do the writing myself, I could find writers. And then the next light bulb was, better than just writing, what about film and TV, to get out to people in a big way? And I thought about the films that inspired me, films like "Gandhi" and "Schindler's List." And I wondered who was doing these kinds of films today. And there really wasn't a specific company that was focused on the public interest. So, in 2003, I started to make my way around Los Angeles to talk about the idea of a pro-social media company and I was met with a lot of encouragement. One of the lines of encouragement that I heard over and over was, "The streets of Hollywood are littered with the carcasses of people like you, who think you're going to come to this town and make movies." And then of course, there was the other adage. "The surest way to become a millionaire is to start by being a billionaire and go into the movie business." (Laughter) Undeterred, in January of 2004, I started Participant Productions with the vision to be a global media company focused on the public interest. And our mission is to produce entertainment that creates and inspires social change. And we don't just want people to see our movies and say, that was fun, and forget about it. We want them to actually get involved in the issues. In 2005, we launched our first slate of films, "Murder Ball," "North Country," "Syriana" and "Good Night and Good Luck." And much to my surprise, they were noticed. We ended up with 11 Oscar nominations for these films. And it turned out to be a pretty good year for this guy. Perhaps more importantly, tens of thousands of people joined the advocacy programs and the activism programs that we created to go around the movies. And we had an online component of that, our community sect called Participate.net. But with our social sector partners, like the ACLU and PBS and the Sierra Club and the NRDC, once people saw the film, there was actually something they could do to make a difference. One of these films in particular, called "North Country," was actually kind of a box office disaster. But it was a film that starred Charlize Theron and it was about women's rights, women's empowerment, domestic violence and so on. And we released the film at the same time that the Congress was debating the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act. And with screenings on the Hill, and discussions, and with our social sector partners, like the National Organization of Women, the film was widely credited with influencing the successful renewal of the act. And that to me, spoke volumes, because it's -- the film started about a true-life story about a woman who was harassed, sued her employer, led to a landmark case that led to the Equal Opportunity Act, and the Violence Against Women Act and others. And then the movie about this person doing these things, then led to this greater renewal. And so again, it goes back to betting on good people doing good things. Speaking of which, our fellow TEDster, Al -- I first saw Al do his slide show presentation on global warming in May of 2005. At that point, I thought I knew something about global warming. I thought it was a 30 to 50 year problem. And after we saw his slide show, it became clear that it was much more urgent. And so right afterwards, I met backstage with Al, and with Lawrence Bender, who was there, and Laurie David, and Davis Guggenheim, who was running documentaries for Participant at the time. And with Al's blessing, we decided on the spot to turn it into a film, because we felt that we could get the message out there far more quickly than having Al go around the world, speaking to audiences of 100 or 200 at a time. And you know, there's another adage in Hollywood, that nobody knows nothing about anything. And I really thought this was going to be a straight-to-PBS charitable initiative. And so it was a great shock to all of us when the film really captured the public interest, and today is mandatory viewing in schools in England and Scotland, and most of Scandinavia. We've sent 50,000 DVDs to high school teachers in the U.S. and it's really changed the debate on global warming. It was also a pretty good year for this guy. We now call Al the George Clooney of global warming. (Laughter) And for Participant, this is just the start. Everything we do looks at the major issues in the world. And we have 10 films in production right now, and dozens others in development. I'll quickly talk about a few coming up. One is "Charlie Wilson's War," with Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts. And it's the true story of Congressman Charlie Wilson, and how he funded the Taliban to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. And we're also doing a movie called "The Kite Runner," based on the book "The Kite Runner," also about Afghanistan. And we think once people see these films, they'll have a much better understanding of that part of the world and the Middle East in general. We premiered a film called "The Chicago 10" at Sundance this year. It's based on the protesters at the Democratic Convention in 1968, Abby Hoffman and crew, and, again, a story about a small group of individuals who did make change in the world. And a documentary that we're doing on Jimmy Carter and his Mid-East peace efforts over the years. And in particular, we've been following him on his recent book tour, which, as many of you know, has been very non-controversial -- (Laughter) -- which is really bad for getting people to come see a movie. In closing, I'd like to say that everybody has the opportunity to make change in their own way. And all the people in this room have done so through their business lives, or their philanthropic work, or their other interests. And one thing that I've learned is that there's never one right way to make change. One can do it as a tech person, or as a finance person, or a nonprofit person, or as an entertainment person, but every one of us is all of those things and more. And I believe if we do these things, we can close the opportunity gaps, we can close the hope gaps. And I can imagine, if we do this, the headlines in 10 years might read something like these: "New AIDS Cases in Africa Fall to Zero," "U.S. Imports its Last Barrel of Oil" -- (Applause) -- "Israelis and Palestinians Celebrate 10 Years of Peaceful Coexistence." (Applause) And I like this one, "Snow Has Returned to Kilimanjaro." (Laughter) And finally, an eBay listing for one well-traveled slide show, now obsolete, museum piece. Please contact Al Gore. And I believe that, working together, we can make all of these things happen. And I want to thank you all for having me here today. It's been a real honor. Thank you. (Applause) Oh, thank you.

Today I'm going to take you on a voyage to some place so deep, so dark, so unexplored that we know less about it than we know about the dark side of the moon. It's a place of myth and legend. It's a place marked on ancient maps as "here be monsters." It is a place where each new voyage of exploration brings back new discoveries of creatures so wondrous and strange that our forefathers would have considered them monstrous indeed. Instead, they just make me green with envy that my colleague from IUCN was able to go on this journey to the south of Madagascar seamounts to actually take photographs and to see these wondrous creatures of the deep. We are talking about the high seas. The "high seas" is a legal term, but in fact, it covers 50 percent of the planet. With an average depth of the oceans of 4,000 meters, in fact, the high seas covers and provides nearly 90 percent of the habitat for life on this Earth. It is, in theory, the global commons, belonging to us all. But in reality, it is managed by and for those who have the resources to go out and exploit it. So today I'm going to take you on a voyage to cast light on some of the outdated myths and legends and assumptions that have kept us as the true stakeholders in the high seas in the dark. We're going to voyage to some of these special places that we've been discovering in the past few years to show why we really need to care. And then finally, we're going to try to develop and pioneer a new perspective on high seas governance that's rooted in ocean-basin-wide conservation, but framed in an arena of global norms of precaution and respect. So here is a picture of the high seas as seen from above -- that area in the darker blue. To me, as an international lawyer, this scared me far more than any of the creatures or the monsters we may have seen, for it belies the notion that you can actually protect the ocean, the global ocean, that provides us all with carbon storage, with heat storage, with oxygen, if you can only protect 36 percent. This is indeed the true heart of the planet. Some of the problems that we have to confront are that the current international laws -- for example, shipping -- provide more protection to the areas closest to shore. For example, garbage discharge, something you would think just simply goes away, but the laws regulating ship discharge of garbage actually get weaker the further you are from shore. As a result, we have garbage patches the size of twice-Texas. It's unbelievable. We used to think the solution to pollution was dilution, but that has proved to be no longer the case. So what we have learned from social scientists and economists like Elinor Ostrom, who are studying the phenomenon of management of the commons on a local scale, is that there are certain prerequisites that you can put into place that enable you to manage and access open space for the good of one and all. And these include a sense of shared responsibility, common norms that bind people together as a community. Conditional access: You can invite people in, but they have to be able to play by the rules. And of course, if you want people to play by the rules, you still need an effective system of monitoring and enforcement, for as we've discovered, you can trust, but you also need to verify. What I'd also like to convey is that it is not all doom and gloom that we are seeing in the high seas. For a group of very dedicated individuals -- scientists, conservationists, photographers and states -- were able to actually change a tragic trajectory that was destroying fragile seascapes such as this coral garden that you see in front of you. That is, we're able to save it from a fate of deep-sea bottom trawling. And how did we do that? Well, as I said, we had a group of photographers that went out on board ships and actually photographed the activities in process. But we also spent many hours in the basements of the United Nations, trying to work with governments to make them understand what was going on so far away from land that few of us had ever even imagined that these creatures existed. So within three years, from 2003 to 2006, we were able to get norm in place that actually changed the paradigm of how fishers went about deep-sea bottom trawling. Instead of "go anywhere, do anything you want," we actually created a regime that required prior assessment of where you're going and a duty to prevent significant harm. In 2009, when the U.N. reviewed progress, they discovered that almost 100 million square-kilometers of seabed had been protected. This does not mean that it's the final solution, or that this even provides permanent protection. But what it does mean is that a group of individuals can form a community to actually shape the way high seas are governed, to create a new regime. So I'm looking optimistically at our opportunities for creating a true, blue perspective for this beautiful planet. Sylvia's wish provides us with that leverage, that access to the heart of human beings, you might say, who have rarely seen places beyond their own toes, but are now hopefully going to become interested in the full life-cycle of creatures like these sea turtles, who indeed spend most of their time in the high seas. Today, we're just going to voyage to a small sampling of some of these special areas, just to give you an idea of the flavor of the riches and wonders they do contain. The Sargasso Sea, for example, is not a sea bounded by coastlines, but it is bounded by oceanic currents that contain and envelope this wealth of sargassum that grows and aggregates there. It's also known as the spawning ground for eels from Northern European and Northern American rivers that are now so dwindling in numbers that they've actually stopped showing up in Stockholm, and five showed up in the U.K. just recently. But the Sargasso Sea, the same way it aggregates sargassum weed, actually is pulling in the plastic from throughout the region. This picture doesn't exactly show the plastics that I would like it to show, because I haven't been out there myself. But there has just been a study that was released in February that showed there are 200,000 pieces of plastic per square-kilometer now floating in the surface of the Sargasso Sea, and that is affecting the habitat for the many species in their juvenile stages who come to the Sargasso Sea for its protection and its food. The Sargasso Sea is also a wondrous place for the aggregation of these unique species that have developed to mimic the sargassum habitat. It also provides a special habitat for these flying fish to lay their eggs. But what I'd like to get from this picture is that we truly do have an opportunity to launch a global initiative for protection. Thus, the government of Bermuda has recognized the need and its responsibility as having some of the Sargasso Sea within its national jurisdiction -- but the vast majority is beyond -- to help spearhead a movement to achieve protection for this vital area. Spinning down to someplace a little bit cooler than here right now: the Ross Sea in the Southern Ocean. It's actually a bay. It's considered high seas, because the continent has been put off limits to territorial claims. So anything in the water is treated as if it's the high seas. But what makes the Ross Sea important is the vast sea of pack ice that in the spring and summer provides a wealth of phytoplankton and krill that supports what, till recently, has been a virtually intact near-shore ecosystem. But unfortunately, CCAMLR, the regional commission in charge of conserving and managing fish stocks and other living marine resources, is unfortunately starting to give in to fishing interests and has authorized the expansion of toothfish fisheries in the region. The captain of a New Zealand vessel who was just down there is reporting a significant decline in the number of the Ross Sea killer whales, who are directly dependent on the Antarctic toothfish as their main source of food. So what we need to do is to stand up boldly, singly and together, to push governments, to push regional fisheries management organizations, to declare our right to declare certain areas off-limits to high seas fishing, so that the freedom to fish no longer means the freedom to fish anywhere and anytime. Coming closer to here, the Costa Rica Dome is a recently discovered area -- potentially year-round habitat for blue whales. There's enough food there to last them the summer and the winter long. But what's unusual about the Costa Rica Dome is, in fact, it's not a permanent place. It's an oceanographic phenomenon that shifts in time and space on a seasonal basis. So, in fact, it's not permanently in the high seas. It's not permanently in the exclusive economic zones of these five Central American countries, but it moves with the season. As such, it does create a challenge to protect, but we also have a challenge protecting the species that move along with it. We can use the same technologies that fishers use to identify where the species are, in order to close the area when it's most vulnerable, which may, in some cases, be year-round. Getting closer to shore, where we are, this was in fact taken in the Galapagos. Many species are headed through this region, which is why there's been so much attention put into conservation of the Eastern Tropical Pacific Seascape. This is the initiative that's been coordinated by Conservation International with a variety of partners and governments to actually try to bring integrated management regime throughout the area. That is, it provides a wonderful example of where you can go with a real regional initiative. It's protecting five World Heritage sites. Unfortunately, the World Heritage Convention does not recognize the need to protect areas beyond national jurisdiction, at present. So a place like the Costa Rica Dome could not technically qualify the time it's in the high seas. So what we've been suggesting is that we either need to amend the World Heritage Convention, so that it can adopt and urge universal protection of these World Heritage sites, or we need to change the name and call it Half-the-World Heritage Convention. But what we also know is that species like these sea turtles do not stay put in the Eastern Tropical Pacific Seascape. These happen to go down to a vast South Pacific Gyre, where they spend most of their time and often end up getting hooked like this, or as bycatch. So what I'd really like to suggest is that we need to scale-up. We need to work locally, but we also need to work ocean-basin-wide. We have the tools and technologies now to enable us to take a broader ocean-basin-wide initiative. We've heard about the Tagging of Pacific Predators project, one of the 17 Census of Marine Life projects. It's provided us data like this, of tiny, little sooty shearwaters that make the entire ocean basin their home. They fly 65,000 kilometers in less than a year. So we have the tools and treasures coming from the Census of Marine Life. And its culminating year that's going to be launched in October. So stay tuned for further information. What I find so exciting is that the Census of Marine Life has looked at more than the tagging of pacific predators; it's also looked in the really unexplored mid-water column, where creatures like this flying sea cucumber have been found. And fortunately, we've been able, as IUCN, to team up with the Census of Marine Life and many of the scientists working there to actually try to translate much of this information to policymakers. We have the support of governments now behind us. We've been revealing this information through technical workshops. And the exciting thing is that we do have sufficient information to move ahead to protect some of these significant hope spots, hotspots. At the same time we're saying, "Yes, we need more. We need to move forward." But many of you have said, if you get these marine protected areas, or a reasonable regime for high seas fisheries management in place, how are you going to enforce it? Which leads me to my second passion besides ocean science, which is outer space technology. I wanted to be an astronaut, so I've constantly followed what are the tools available to monitor Earth from outer space -- and that we have incredible tools like we've been learning about, in terms of being able to follow tagged species throughout their life-cycles in the open ocean. We can also tag and track fishing vessels. Many already have transponders on board that allow us to find out where they are and even what they're doing. But not all the vessels have those to date. It does not take too much rocket science to actually try to create new laws to mandate, if you're going to have the privilege of accessing our high seas resources, we need to know -- someone needs to know -- where you are and what you're doing. So it brings me to my main take-home message, which is we can avert a tragedy of the commons. We can stop the collision course of 50 percent of the planet with the high seas. But we need to think broad-scale. We need to think globally. We need to change how we actually go about managing these resources. We need to get the new paradigm of precaution and respect. At the same time, we need to think locally, which is the joy and marvel of Sylvia's hope spot wish, is that we can shine a spotlight on many of these previously unknown areas, and to bring people to the table, if you will, to actually make them feel part of this community that truly has a stake in their future management. And third is that we need to look at ocean-basin-wide management. Our species are ocean-basin-wide. Many of the deep-sea communities have genetic distribution that goes ocean-basin-wide. We need to better understand, but we also need to start to manage and protect. And in order to do that, you also need ocean-basin management regimes. That is, we have regional management regimes within the exclusive economic zone, but we need to scale these up, we need to build their capacity, so they're like the Southern Ocean, where they do have the two-pronged fisheries and conservation organization. So with that, I would just like to sincerely thank and honor Sylvia Earle for her wish, for it is helping us to put a face on the high seas and the deep seas beyond national jurisdiction. It's helping to bring an incredible group of talented people together to really try to solve and penetrate these problems that have created our obstacles to management and rational use of this area that was once so far away and remote. So on this tour, I hope I provided you with a new perspective of the high seas: one, that it is our home too, and that we need to work together if we are to make this a sustainable ocean future for us all. Thank you. (Applause)

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

On my desk in my office, I keep a small clay pot that I made in college. It's raku, which is a kind of pottery that began in Japan centuries ago as a way of making bowls for the Japanese tea ceremony. This one is more than 400 years old. Each one was pinched or carved out of a ball of clay, and it was the imperfections that people cherished. Everyday pots like this cup take eight to 10 hours to fire. I just took this out of the kiln last week, and the kiln itself takes another day or two to cool down, but raku is really fast. You do it outside, and you take the kiln up to temperature. In 15 minutes, it goes to 1,500 degrees, and as soon as you see that the glaze has melted inside, you can see that faint sheen, you turn the kiln off, and you reach in with these long metal tongs, you grab the pot, and in Japan, this red-hot pot would be immediately immersed in a solution of green tea, and you can imagine what that steam would smell like. But here in the United States, we ramp up the drama a little bit, and we drop our pots into sawdust, which catches on fire, and you take a garbage pail, and you put it on top, and smoke starts pouring out. I would come home with my clothes reeking of woodsmoke. I love raku because it allows me to play with the elements. I can shape a pot out of clay and choose a glaze, but then I have to let it go to the fire and the smoke, and what's wonderful is the surprises that happen, like this crackle pattern, because it's really stressful on these pots. They go from 1,500 degrees to room temperature in the space of just a minute. Raku is a wonderful metaphor for the process of creativity. I find in so many things that tension between what I can control and what I have to let go happens all the time, whether I'm creating a new radio show or just at home negotiating with my teenage sons. When I sat down to write a book about creativity, I realized that the steps were reversed. I had to let go at the very beginning, and I had to immerse myself in the stories of hundreds of artists and writers and musicians and filmmakers, and as I listened to these stories, I realized that creativity grows out of everyday experiences more often than you might think, including letting go. It was supposed to break, but that's okay. (Laughter) (Laughs) That's part of the letting go, is sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't, because creativity also grows from the broken places. The best way to learn about anything is through stories, and so I want to tell you a story about work and play and about four aspects of life that we need to embrace in order for our own creativity to flourish. The first embrace is something that we think, "Oh, this is very easy," but it's actually getting harder, and that's paying attention to the world around us. So many artists speak about needing to be open, to embrace experience, and that's hard to do when you have a lighted rectangle in your pocket that takes all of your focus. The filmmaker Mira Nair speaks about growing up in a small town in India. Its name is Bhubaneswar, and here's a picture of one of the temples in her town. Mira Nair: In this little town, there were like 2,000 temples. We played cricket all the time. We kind of grew up in the rubble. The major thing that inspired me, that led me on this path, that made me a filmmaker eventually, was traveling folk theater that would come through the town and I would go off and see these great battles of good and evil by two people in a school field with no props but with a lot of, you know, passion, and hashish as well, and it was amazing. You know, the folk tales of Mahabharata and Ramayana, the two holy books, the epics that everything comes out of in India, they say. After seeing that Jatra, the folk theater, I knew I wanted to get on, you know, and perform. Julie Burstein: Isn't that a wonderful story? You can see the sort of break in the everyday. There they are in the school fields, but it's good and evil, and passion and hashish. And Mira Nair was a young girl with thousands of other people watching this performance, but she was ready. She was ready to open up to what it sparked in her, and it led her, as she said, down this path to become an award-winning filmmaker. So being open for that experience that might change you is the first thing we need to embrace. Artists also speak about how some of their most powerful work comes out of the parts of life that are most difficult. The novelist Richard Ford speaks about a childhood challenge that continues to be something he wrestles with today. He's severely dyslexic. Richard Ford: I was slow to learn to read, went all the way through school not really reading more than the minimum, and still to this day can't read silently much faster than I can read aloud, but there were a lot of benefits to being dyslexic for me because when I finally did reconcile myself to how slow I was going to have to do it, then I think I came very slowly into an appreciation of all of those qualities of language and of sentences that are not just the cognitive aspects of language: the syncopations, the sounds of words, what words look like, where paragraphs break, where lines break. I mean, I wasn't so badly dyslexic that I was disabled from reading. I just had to do it really slowly, and as I did, lingering on those sentences as I had to linger, I fell heir to language's other qualities, which I think has helped me write sentences. JB: It's so powerful. Richard Ford, who's won the Pulitzer Prize, says that dyslexia helped him write sentences. He had to embrace this challenge, and I use that word intentionally. He didn't have to overcome dyslexia. He had to learn from it. He had to learn to hear the music in language. Artists also speak about how pushing up against the limits of what they can do, sometimes pushing into what they can't do, helps them focus on finding their own voice. The sculptor Richard Serra talks about how, as a young artist, he thought he was a painter, and he lived in Florence after graduate school. While he was there, he traveled to Madrid, where he went to the Prado to see this picture by the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez. It's from 1656, and it's called "Las Meninas," and it's the picture of a little princess and her ladies-in-waiting, and if you look over that little blonde princess's shoulder, you'll see a mirror, and reflected in it are her parents, the King and Queen of Spain, who would be standing where you might stand to look at the picture. As he often did, Velázquez put himself in this painting too. He's standing on the left with his paintbrush in one hand and his palette in the other. Richard Serra: I was standing there looking at it, and I realized that Velázquez was looking at me, and I thought, "Oh. I'm the subject of the painting." And I thought, "I'm not going to be able to do that painting." I was to the point where I was using a stopwatch and painting squares out of randomness, and I wasn't getting anywhere. So I went back and dumped all my paintings in the Arno, and I thought, I'm going to just start playing around. JB: Richard Serra says that so nonchalantly, you might have missed it. He went and saw this painting by a guy who'd been dead for 300 years, and realized, "I can't do that," and so Richard Serra went back to his studio in Florence, picked up all of his work up to that point, and threw it in a river. Richard Serra let go of painting at that moment, but he didn't let go of art. He moved to New York City, and he put together a list of verbs — to roll, to crease, to fold — more than a hundred of them, and as he said, he just started playing around. He did these things to all kinds of material. He would take a huge sheet of lead and roll it up and unroll it. He would do the same thing to rubber, and when he got to the direction "to lift," he created this, which is in the Museum of Modern Art. Richard Serra had to let go of painting in order to embark on this playful exploration that led him to the work that he's known for today: huge curves of steel that require our time and motion to experience. In sculpture, Richard Serra is able to do what he couldn't do in painting. He makes us the subject of his art. So experience and challenge and limitations are all things we need to embrace for creativity to flourish. There's a fourth embrace, and it's the hardest. It's the embrace of loss, the oldest and most constant of human experiences. In order to create, we have to stand in that space between what we see in the world and what we hope for, looking squarely at rejection, at heartbreak, at war, at death. That's a tough space to stand in. The educator Parker Palmer calls it "the tragic gap," tragic not because it's sad but because it's inevitable, and my friend Dick Nodel likes to say, "You can hold that tension like a violin string and make something beautiful." That tension resonates in the work of the photographer Joel Meyerowitz, who at the beginning of his career was known for his street photography, for capturing a moment on the street, and also for his beautiful photographs of landscapes -- of Tuscany, of Cape Cod, of light. Joel is a New Yorker, and his studio for many years was in Chelsea, with a straight view downtown to the World Trade Center, and he photographed those buildings in every sort of light. You know where this story goes. On 9/11, Joel wasn't in New York. He was out of town, but he raced back to the city, and raced down to the site of the destruction. Joel Meyerowitz: And like all the other passersby, I stood outside the chain link fence on Chambers and Greenwich, and all I could see was the smoke and a little bit of rubble, and I raised my camera to take a peek, just to see if there was something to see, and some cop, a lady cop, hit me on my shoulder, and said, "Hey, no pictures!" And it was such a blow that it woke me up, in the way that it was meant to be, I guess. And when I asked her why no pictures, she said, "It's a crime scene. No photographs allowed." And I asked her, "What would happen if I was a member of the press?" And she told me, "Oh, look back there," and back a block was the press corps tied up in a little penned-in area, and I said, "Well, when do they go in?" and she said, "Probably never." And as I walked away from that, I had this crystallization, probably from the blow, because it was an insult in a way. I thought, "Oh, if there's no pictures, then there'll be no record. We need a record." And I thought, "I'm gonna make that record. I'll find a way to get in, because I don't want to see this history disappear." JB: He did. He pulled in every favor he could, and got a pass into the World Trade Center site, where he photographed for nine months almost every day. Looking at these photographs today brings back the smell of smoke that lingered on my clothes when I went home to my family at night. My office was just a few blocks away. But some of these photographs are beautiful, and we wondered, was it difficult for Joel Meyerowitz to make such beauty out of such devastation? JM: Well, you know, ugly, I mean, powerful and tragic and horrific and everything, but it was also as, in nature, an enormous event that was transformed after the fact into this residue, and like many other ruins — you go to the ruins of the Colosseum or the ruins of a cathedral someplace — and they take on a new meaning when you watch the weather. I mean, there were afternoons I was down there, and the light goes pink and there's a mist in the air and you're standing in the rubble, and I found myself recognizing both the inherent beauty of nature and the fact that nature, as time, is erasing this wound. Time is unstoppable, and it transforms the event. It gets further and further away from the day, and light and seasons temper it in some way, and it's not that I'm a romantic. I'm really a realist. The reality is, there's the Woolworth Building in a veil of smoke from the site, but it's now like a scrim across a theater, and it's turning pink, you know, and down below there are hoses spraying, and the lights have come on for the evening, and the water is turning acid green because the sodium lamps are on, and I'm thinking, "My God, who could dream this up?" But the fact is, I'm there, it looks like that, you have to take a picture. JB: You have to take a picture. That sense of urgency, of the need to get to work, is so powerful in Joel's story. When I saw Joel Meyerowitz recently, I told him how much I admired his passionate obstinacy, his determination to push through all the bureaucratic red tape to get to work, and he laughed, and he said, "I'm stubborn, but I think what's more important is my passionate optimism." The first time I told these stories, a man in the audience raised his hand and said, "All these artists talk about their work, not their art, which has got me thinking about my work and where the creativity is there, and I'm not an artist." He's right. We all wrestle with experience and challenge, limits and loss. Creativity is essential to all of us, whether we're scientists or teachers, parents or entrepreneurs. I want to leave you with another image of a Japanese tea bowl. This one is at the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C. It's more than a hundred years old and you can still see the fingermarks where the potter pinched it. But as you can also see, this one did break at some point in its hundred years. But the person who put it back together, instead of hiding the cracks, decided to emphasize them, using gold lacquer to repair it. This bowl is more beautiful now, having been broken, than it was when it was first made, and we can look at those cracks, because they tell the story that we all live, of the cycle of creation and destruction, of control and letting go, of picking up the pieces and making something new. Thank you. (Applause)

Many of you could ask the question, you know, why is a flying car, or maybe more accurately, a roadable aircraft, possible at this time? A number of years ago, Mr. Ford predicted that flying cars of some form would be available. Now, 60 years later, I'm here to tell you why it's possible. When I was about five years old, not very much -- about a year after Mr. Ford made his predictions, I was living in a rural part of Canada, on the side of a mountain in a very isolated area. Getting to school, for a kid that was actually pretty short for his age, through the Canadian winter, was not a pleasant experience. It was a trying and scary thing for a young kid to be going through. At the end of my first year in school, in the summer of that year, I discovered a couple hummingbirds that were caught in a shed near my home. They'd worn themselves out, beating themselves against the window, and, well, they were easy to capture. I took them outside and as I let them go, that split second, even though they were very tired, that second I let them go they hovered for a second, then zipped off into the distance. I thought, what a great way to get to school. (Laughter) For a kid at that age, this was like infinite speed, disappearing, and I was very inspired by that. And so the next -- over the next six decades, believe it or not, I've built a number of aircraft, with the goal of creating something that could do for you, or me, what the hummingbird does, and give you that flexibility. I've called this vehicle, generically, a volantor, after the Latin word "volant," meaning, to fly in a light, nimble manner. Volantor-like helicopter, perhaps. The FAA, the controlling body above all, calls it a "powered lift aircraft." And they've actually issued a pilot's license -- a powerlift pilot's license -- for this type of aircraft. It's closer than you think. It's kind of remarkable when you consider that there are no operational powered lift aircraft. So for once, perhaps, the government is ahead of itself. The press calls my particular volantor a "Skycar." This is a little bit earlier version of it, that's why it's given the X designation, but it's a four-passenger aircraft that could take off vertically, like a helicopter -- therefore it doesn't need an airfield. On the ground, it's powered electrically. It's actually classified as a motorcycle because of the three wheels, which is a great asset because it allows you, theoretically, to use this on the highways in most states, and actually in all cities. So that's an asset because if you've got to deal with the crash protection issues of the automobile, forget it -- you're never going to fly it. (Laughter) One could say that a helicopter does pretty much what the hummingbird does, and gets around in much the same way, and it's true, but a helicopter is a very complex device. It's expensive -- so expensive that very few people could own or use it. It's often been described because of its fragile nature and its complexity, as a series of parts -- a large number of parts -- flying in formation. (Laughter) Another difference, and I have to describe this, because it's very personal, another great difference between the helicopter and the volantor -- in my case the Skycar volantor -- is the experience that I've had in flying both of those. In a helicopter you feel -- and it's still a remarkable sensation -- you feel like you're being hauled up from above by a vibrating crane. When you get in the Skycar -- and I can tell you, there's only one other person that's flown it, but he had the same sensation -- you really feel like you're being lifted up by a magic carpet, without any vibration whatsoever. The sensation is unbelievable. And it's been a great motivator. I only get to fly this vehicle occasionally, and only when I can persuade my stockholders to let me do so, but it's still one of those wonderful experiences that reward you for all that time. What we really need is something to replace the automobile for those 50-plus mile trips. Very few people realize that 50 mile-plus trips make up 85 percent of the miles traveled in America. If we can get rid of that, then the highways will now be useful to you, as contrasted by what's happening in many parts of the world today. On this next slide, is an interesting history of what we really have seen in infrastructure, because whether I give you a perfect Skycar, the perfect vehicle for use, it's going to have very little value to you unless you've got a system to use it in. I'm sure any of you have asked the question, yeah, are there great things up there -- what am I going to do, get up there? It's bad enough on a highway, what's it going to be like to be in the air? This world that you're going to be talking about tomorrow is going to be completely integrated. You're not going to be a pilot, you're going to be a passenger. And it's the infrastructure that really determines whether this process goes forward. I can tell you, technically we can build Skycars -- my God, we went to the moon! The technology there was much more difficult than what I'm dealing with here. But we have to have these priority changes, we have to have infrastructure to go with this. Historically you see that we got around 200 years ago by canals, and as that system disappeared, were replaced by railroads. As that disappeared we came in with highways. But if you look at that top corner -- the highway system -- you see where we are today. Highways are no longer being built, and that's a fact. You won't see any additional highways in the next 10 years. However, the next 10 years, if like the last 10 years, we're going to see 30 percent more traffic. And where is that going to lead you to? So the issue then, I've often asked, is when is it going to happen? When are we going to be able to have these vehicles? And of course, if you ask me, I'm going to give you a really optimistic view. After all, I've been spending 60 years here believing it's going to happen tomorrow. So, I'm not going to quote myself on this. I'd prefer to quote someone else, who testified with me before Congress, and in his position as head of NASA put forward this particular vision of the future of this type of aircraft. Now I would argue, actually, if you look at the fact that on the highways today, you're only averaging about 30 miles per hour -- on average, according to the DOT -- the Skycar travels at over 300 miles an hour, up to 25,000 feet. And so, in effect, you could see perhaps a tenfold increase in the ability to get around as far as speed is concerned. Unbeknownst to many of you, the highway in the sky that I'm talking about here has been under construction for 10 years. It makes use of the GPS -- you're familiar with GPS in your automobile, but you may not be familiar with the fact that there's a GPS U.S., there's a Russian GPS, and there's a new GPS system going to Europe, called Galileo. With those three systems, you have what is always necessary -- a level of redundancy that says, if one system fails, you'll still have a way to make sure that you're being controlled. Because if you're in this world, where computers are controlling what you're doing, it's going to be very critical that something can't fail on you. How would a trip in a Skycar work? Well, you can't right now take off from your home because it's too noisy. I mean to be able to take off from your home, you'd have to be extremely quiet. But it's still fairly quiet. You'd motor, electrically, to a vertiport, which may be a few blocks, maybe even a few miles away. This is clearly, as I said earlier, a roadable aircraft, and you're not going to spend that much time on the road. After all, if you can fly like that, why are you going to drive around on a highway? Go to a local vertiport, plug in your destination, delivered almost like a passenger. You can play computer games, you can sleep, you can read on the way. This is the world -- there won't be you as a pilot. And I know the pilots in the audience aren't going to like that -- and I've had a lot of bad feedback from people who want to be up there, flying around and experiencing that. And of course, I suppose like recreational parks you can still do that. But the vehicle itself is going to be a very, very controlled environment. Or it's going to have no use to you as a person who might use such a system. We flew the first vehicle for the international press in 1965, when I really got it started. I was a professor at the U.C. Davis System, and I got a lot of excitement around this, and I was able to fund the initiation of the program back in that time. And then through the various years we invented various vehicles. Actually the critical point was in 1989, when we demonstrated the stability of this vehicle -- how completely stable it was in all circumstances, which is of course very critical. Still not a practical vehicle during all of this, but moving in the right direction, we believe. Finally, in the early part of -- or actually the middle of 2002, we flew the 400 -- M400, which was the four-passenger vehicle. In this case here, we're flying it remotely, as we always did at the beginning. And we had very small power plants in it at this time. We are now installing larger powerplants, which will make it possible for me to get back on board. A vertical-takeoff aircraft is not the safest vehicle during the test flight program. There's an old adage that applied for the years between 1950s and 1970s, when every aeronautical company was working on vertical-takeoff aircraft. A vertical-takeoff aircraft needs an artificial stabilization system -- that's essential. At least for the hover, and the low-speed flight. If that single-stability system, that brain that flies that aircraft, fails, or if the engine fails, that vehicle crashes. There is no option to that. And the adage that I'm referring to, that applied at that time, was that nothing comes down faster than a VTOL aircraft upside down. (Laughter) That's a macabre comment because we lost a lot of pilots. In fact, the aircraft companies gave up on vertical-takeoff aircraft more or less for a number of years. And there's really only one operational aircraft in the world today that's a vertical-takeoff aircraft -- as distinct from a helicopter -- and that's the Hawker Harrier jump jet. A vertical-takeoff aircraft, like the hummingbird, has a very high metabolism, which means it requires a lot of energy. Getting that energy is very, very difficult. It all comes down to that power plant -- how to get a large amount of power in a small package. Fortunately, Dr. Felix Wankel invented the rotary engine. A very unique engine -- it's round, it's small, it's vibration-free. It fits exactly where we need to fit it, right in the center of the hubs of the ducts in the system -- very critical. In fact that engine -- for those who are into the automobile -- know that it recently is applied to the RX8 -- the Mazda. And that sportscar won Sports Car of the Year. Wonderful engine. In that application, it generates one horsepower per pound, which is twice as good as your car engine today, but only half of what we need. My company has spent 35 years and many millions of dollars taking that rotary engine, which was invented in the late '50s, and getting it to the point that we get over two horsepower per pound, reliably, and critical. We actually get 175 horsepower into one cubic foot. We have eight engines in this vehicle. We have four computers. We have two parachutes. Redundancy is the critical issue here. If you want to stay alive you've got to have backups. And we have actually flown this vehicle and lost an engine, and continued to hover. The computers back up each other. There's a voting system -- if one computer is not agreeing with the other three, it's kicked out of the system. And then you have three -- you still have the triple redundancy. If one of those fails, you still have a second chance. If you stick around, then good luck. There won't be a third chance. The parachutes are there -- hopefully, more for psychological than real reasons, but they will be an ultimate backup if it comes to that. (Laughter) I'd like to show you an animation in this next one, which is one element of the Skycar's use, but it's one that demonstrates how it could be used. You could think of it personally in your own terms, of how you might use it. Video: Skycar dispatched, launch rescue vehicle for San Francisco. Paul Moller: I believe that personal transportation in something like the Skycar, probably in another volantor form as well, will be a significant part of our lives, as Dr. Goldin says, within the next 10 years. And it's going to change the demographics in a very significant way. If you can live 75 miles from San Francisco and get there in 15 minutes, you're going to sell your 700,000-dollar apartment, buy an upscale home on the side of a mountain, buy a Skycar, which I think would be priced at that time perhaps in the area of 100,000 dollars, put money in the bank ... that's a very significant incentive for getting out of San Francisco. But you better be the first one out of town as the real estate values go to hell. (Laughter) Developing the Skycar has been a real challenge. Obviously I'm dependent on a lot of other people believing in what I'm doing -- both financially and in technical help. And that has -- you run into situations where you have this great acceptance of what you're doing, and a lot of rejection of the same kind of thing. I characterized this emerging technology in an aphorism, as it's described, which really talks about what I've experienced, and I'm sure what other people may have experienced in emerging technologies. There's an interesting poll that came out recently under NAS -- I think it's MSNBC -- in which they asked the question, "Are you in the market for a volantor?" Twenty-three percent said, "Yes, as soon as possible." Forty-seven percent -- yes, as soon as they could -- price could come down. Twenty-three percent said, "As soon as it's proven safe." Only seven percent said that they wouldn't consider buying a Skycar. I'm encouraged by that. At least it makes me feel like, to some extent, it is becoming self-evident. That we need an alternative to the automobile, at least for those 50-mile trips and more, so that the highways become usable in today's world. Thank you.

I've been fascinated with crop diversity for about 35 years from now, ever since I stumbled across a fairly obscure academic article by a guy named Jack Harlan. And he described the diversity within crops -- all the different kinds of wheat and rice and such -- as a genetic resource. And he said, "This genetic resource," -- and I'll never forget the words -- "stands between us and catastrophic starvation on a scale we cannot imagine." I figured he was either really on to something, or he was one of these academic nutcases. So, I looked a little further, and what I figured out was that he wasn't a nutcase. He was the most respected scientist in the field. What he understood was that biological diversity -- crop diversity -- is the biological foundation of agriculture. It's the raw material, the stuff, of evolution in our agricultural crops. Not a trivial matter. And he also understood that that foundation was crumbling, literally crumbling. That indeed, a mass extinction was underway in our fields, in our agricultural system. And that this mass extinction was taking place with very few people noticing and even fewer caring. Now, I know that many of you don't stop to think about diversity in agricultural systems and, let's face it, that's logical. You don't see it in the newspaper every day. And when you go into the supermarket, you certainly don't see a lot of choices there. You see apples that are red, yellow, and green and that's about it. So, let me show you a picture of one form of diversity. Here's some beans, and there are about 35 or 40 different varieties of beans on this picture. Now, imagine each one of these varieties as being distinct from another about the same way as a poodle from a Great Dane. If I wanted to show you a picture of all the dog breeds in the world, and I put 30 or 40 of them on a slide, it would take about 10 slides because there about 400 breeds of dogs in the world. But there are 35 to 40,000 different varieties of beans. So if I were to going to show you all the beans in the world, and I had a slide like this, and I switched it every second, it would take up my entire TED talk, and I wouldn't have to say anything. But the interesting thing is that this diversity -- and the tragic thing is -- that this diversity is being lost. We have about 200,000 different varieties of wheat, and we have about 2 to 400,000 different varieties of rice, but it's being lost. And I want to give you an example of that. It's a bit of a personal example, in fact. In the United States, in the 1800s -- that's where we have the best data -- farmers and gardeners were growing 7,100 named varieties of apples. Imagine that. 7,100 apples with names. Today, 6,800 of those are extinct, no longer to be seen again. I used to have a list of these extinct apples, and when I would go out and give a presentation, I would pass the list out in the audience. I wouldn't tell them what it was, but it was in alphabetical order, and I would tell them to look for their names, their family names, their mother's maiden name. And at the end of the speech, I would ask, "How many people have found a name?" And I never had fewer than two-thirds of an audience hold up their hand. And I said, "You know what? These apples come from your ancestors, and your ancestors gave them the greatest honor they could give them. They gave them their name. The bad news is they're extinct. The good news is a third of you didn't hold up your hand. Your apple's still out there. Find it. Make sure it doesn't join the list." So, I want to tell you that the piece of the good news is that the Fowler apple is still out there. And there's an old book back here, and I want to read a piece from it. This book was published in 1904. It's called "The Apples of New York" and this is the second volume. See, we used to have a lot of apples. And the Fowler apple is described in here -- I hope this doesn't surprise you -- as, "a beautiful fruit." (Laughter) I don't know if we named the apple or if the apple named us, but ... but, to be honest, the description goes on and it says that it "doesn't rank high in quality, however." And then he has to go even further. It sounds like it was written by an old school teacher of mine. "As grown in New York, the fruit usually fails to develop properly in size and quality and is, on the whole, unsatisfactory." (Laughter) And I guess there's a lesson to be learned here, and the lesson is: so why save it? I get this question all the time. Why don't we just save the best one? And there are a couple of answers to that question. One thing is that there is no such thing as a best one. Today's best variety is tomorrow's lunch for insects or pests or disease. The other thing is that maybe that Fowler apple or maybe a variety of wheat that's not economical right now has disease or pest resistance or some quality that we're going to need for climate change that the others don't. So it's not necessary, thank God, that the Fowler apple is the best apple in the world. It's just necessary or interesting that it might have one good, unique trait. And for that reason, we ought to be saving it. Why? As a raw material, as a trait we can use in the future. Think of diversity as giving us options. And options, of course, are exactly what we need in an era of climate change. I want to show you two slides, but first, I want to tell you that we've been working at the Global Crop Diversity Trust with a number of scientists -- particularly at Stanford and University of Washington -- to ask the question: What's going to happen to agriculture in an era of climate change and what kind of traits and characteristics do we need in our agricultural crops to be able to adapt to this? In short, the answer is that in the future, in many countries, the coldest growing seasons are going to be hotter than anything those crops have seen in the past. The coldest growing seasons of the future, hotter than the hottest of the past. Is agriculture adapted to that? I don't know. Can fish play the piano? If agriculture hasn't experienced that, how could it be adapted? Now, the highest concentration of poor and hungry people in the world, and the place where climate change, ironically, is going to be the worst is in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. So I've picked two examples here, and I want to show you. In the histogram before you now, the blue bars represent the historical range of temperatures, going back about far as we have temperature data. And you can see that there's some difference between one growing season and another. Some are colder, some are hotter and it's a bell shaped curve. The tallest bar is the average temperature for the most number of growing seasons. In the future, later this century, it's going to look like the red, totally out of bounds. The agricultural system and, more importantly, the crops in the field in India have never experienced this before. Here's South Africa. The same story. But the most interesting thing about South Africa is we don't have to wait for 2070 for there to be trouble. By 2030, if the maize, or corn, varieties, which is the dominant crop -- 50 percent of the nutrition in Southern Africa are still in the field -- in 2030, we'll have a 30 percent decrease in production of maize because of the climate change already in 2030. 30 percent decrease of production in the context of increasing population, that's a food crisis. It's global in nature. We will watch children starve to death on TV. Now, you may say that 20 years is a long way off. It's two breeding cycles for maize. We have two rolls of the dice to get this right. We have to get climate-ready crops in the field, and we have to do that rather quickly. Now, the good news is that we have conserved. We have collected and conserved a great deal of biological diversity, agricultural diversity, mostly in the form of seed, and we put it in seed banks, which is a fancy way of saying a freezer. If you want to conserve seed for a long term and you want to make it available to plant breeders and researchers, you dry it and then you freeze it. Unfortunately, these seed banks are located around the world in buildings and they're vulnerable. Disasters have happened. In recent years we lost the gene bank, the seed bank in Iraq and Afghanistan. You can guess why. In Rwanda, in the Solomon Islands. And then there are just daily disasters that take place in these buildings, financial problems and mismanagement and equipment failures, and all kinds of things, and every time something like this happens, it means extinction. We lose diversity. And I'm not talking about losing diversity in the same way that you lose your car keys. I'm talking about losing it in the same way that we lost the dinosaurs: actually losing it, never to be seen again. So, a number of us got together and decided that, you know, enough is enough and we need to do something about that and we need to have a facility that can really offer protection for our biological diversity of -- maybe not the most charismatic diversity. You don't look in the eyes of a carrot seed quite in the way you do a panda bear, but it's very important diversity. So we needed a really safe place, and we went quite far north to find it. To Svalbard, in fact. This is above mainland Norway. You can see Greenland there. That's at 78 degrees north. It's as far as you can fly on a regularly scheduled airplane. It's a remarkably beautiful landscape. I can't even begin to describe it to you. It's otherworldly, beautiful. We worked with the Norwegian government and with the NorGen, the Norwegian Genetic Resources Program, to design this facility. What you see is an artist's conception of this facility, which is built in a mountain in Svalbard. The idea of Svalbard was that it's cold, so we get natural freezing temperatures. But it's remote. It's remote and accessible so it's safe and we don't depend on mechanical refrigeration. This is more than just an artist's dream, it's now a reality. And this next picture shows it in context, in Svalbard. And here's the front door of this facility. When you open up the front door, this is what you're looking at. It's pretty simple. It's a hole in the ground. It's a tunnel, and you go into the tunnel, chiseled in solid rock, about 130 meters. There are now a couple of security doors, so you won't see it quite like this. Again, when you get to the back, you get into an area that's really my favorite place. I think of it as sort of a cathedral. And I know that this tags me as a bit of a nerd, but ... (Laughter) Some of the happiest days of my life have been spent ... (Laughter) in this place there. (Applause) If you were to walk into one of these rooms, you would see this. It's not very exciting, but if you know what's there, it's pretty emotional. We have now about 425,000 samples of unique crop varieties. There's 70,000 samples of different varieties of rice in this facility right now. About a year from now, we'll have over half a million samples. We're going up to over a million, and someday we'll basically have samples -- about 500 seeds -- of every variety of agricultural crop that can be stored in a frozen state in this facility. This is a backup system for world agriculture. It's a backup system for all the seed banks. Storage is free. It operates like a safety deposit box. Norway owns the mountain and the facility, but the depositors own the seed. And if anything happens, then they can come back and get it. This particular picture that you see shows the national collection of the United States, of Canada, and an international institution from Syria. I think it's interesting in that this facility, I think, is almost the only thing I can think of these days where countries, literally, every country in the world -- because we have seeds from every country in the world -- all the countries of the world have gotten together to do something that's both long term, sustainable and positive. I can't think of anything else that's happened in my lifetime that way. I can't look you in the eyes and tell you that I have a solution for climate change, for the water crisis. Agriculture takes 70 percent of fresh water supplies on earth. I can't look you in the eyes and tell you that there is such a solution for those things, or the energy crisis, or world hunger, or peace in conflict. I can't look you in the eyes and tell you that I have a simple solution for that, but I can look you in the eyes and tell you that we can't solve any of those problems if we don't have crop diversity. Because I challenge you to think of an effective, efficient, sustainable solution to climate change if we don't have crop diversity. Because, quite literally, if agriculture doesn't adapt to climate change, neither will we. And if crops don't adapt to climate change, neither will agriculture, neither will we. So, this is not something pretty and nice to do. There are a lot of people who would love to have this diversity exist just for the existence value of it. It is, I agree, a nice thing to do. But it's a necessary thing to do. So, in a very real sense, I believe that we, as an international community, should get organized to complete the task. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a wonderful gift that Norway and others have given us, but it's not the complete answer. We need to collect the remaining diversity that's out there. We need to put it into good seed banks that can offer those seeds to researchers in the future. We need to catalog it. It's a library of life, but right now I would say we don't have a card catalog for it. And we need to support it financially. My big idea would be that while we think of it as commonplace to endow an art museum or endow a chair at a university, we really ought to be thinking about endowing wheat. 30 million dollars in an endowment would take care of preserving all the diversity in wheat forever. So we need to be thinking a little bit in those terms. And my final thought is that we, of course, by conserving wheat, rice, potatoes, and the other crops, we may, quite simply, end up saving ourselves. Thank you. (Applause)

This is Pleurobot. Pleurobot is a robot that we designed to closely mimic a salamander species called Pleurodeles waltl. Pleurobot can walk, as you can see here, and as you'll see later, it can also swim. So you might ask, why did we design this robot? And in fact, this robot has been designed as a scientific tool for neuroscience. Indeed, we designed it together with neurobiologists to understand how animals move, and especially how the spinal cord controls locomotion. But the more I work in biorobotics, the more I'm really impressed by animal locomotion. If you think of a dolphin swimming or a cat running or jumping around, or even us as humans, when you go jogging or play tennis, we do amazing things. And in fact, our nervous system solves a very, very complex control problem. It has to coordinate more or less 200 muscles perfectly, because if the coordination is bad, we fall over or we do bad locomotion. And my goal is to understand how this works. There are four main components behind animal locomotion. The first component is just the body, and in fact we should never underestimate to what extent the biomechanics already simplify locomotion in animals. Then you have the spinal cord, and in the spinal cord you find reflexes, multiple reflexes that create a sensorimotor coordination loop between neural activity in the spinal cord and mechanical activity. A third component are central pattern generators. These are very interesting circuits in the spinal cord of vertebrate animals that can generate, by themselves, very coordinated rhythmic patterns of activity while receiving only very simple input signals. And these input signals coming from descending modulation from higher parts of the brain, like the motor cortex, the cerebellum, the basal ganglia, will all modulate activity of the spinal cord while we do locomotion. But what's interesting is to what extent just a low-level component, the spinal cord, together with the body, already solve a big part of the locomotion problem. You probably know it by the fact that you can cut the head off a chicken, it can still run for a while, showing that just the lower part, spinal cord and body, already solve a big part of locomotion. Now, understanding how this works is very complex, because first of all, recording activity in the spinal cord is very difficult. It's much easier to implant electrodes in the motor cortex than in the spinal cord, because it's protected by the vertebrae. Especially in humans, very hard to do. A second difficulty is that locomotion is really due to a very complex and very dynamic interaction between these four components. So it's very hard to find out what's the role of each over time. This is where biorobots like Pleurobot and mathematical models can really help. So what's biorobotics? Biorobotics is a very active field of research in robotics where people want to take inspiration from animals to make robots to go outdoors, like service robots or search and rescue robots or field robots. And the big goal here is to take inspiration from animals to make robots that can handle complex terrain -- stairs, mountains, forests, places where robots still have difficulties and where animals can do a much better job. The robot can be a wonderful scientific tool as well. There are some very nice projects where robots are used, like a scientific tool for neuroscience, for biomechanics or for hydrodynamics. And this is exactly the purpose of Pleurobot. So what we do in my lab is to collaborate with neurobiologists like Jean-Marie Cabelguen, a neurobiologist in Bordeaux in France, and we want to make spinal cord models and validate them on robots. And here we want to start simple. So it's good to start with simple animals like lampreys, which are very primitive fish, and then gradually go toward more complex locomotion, like in salamanders, but also in cats and in humans, in mammals. And here, a robot becomes an interesting tool to validate our models. And in fact, for me, Pleurobot is a kind of dream becoming true. Like, more or less 20 years ago I was already working on a computer making simulations of lamprey and salamander locomotion during my PhD. But I always knew that my simulations were just approximations. Like, simulating the physics in water or with mud or with complex ground, it's very hard to simulate that properly on a computer. Why not have a real robot and real physics? So among all these animals, one of my favorites is the salamander. You might ask why, and it's because as an amphibian, it's a really key animal from an evolutionary point of view. It makes a wonderful link between swimming, as you find it in eels or fish, and quadruped locomotion, as you see in mammals, in cats and humans. And in fact, the modern salamander is very close to the first terrestrial vertebrate, so it's almost a living fossil, which gives us access to our ancestor, the ancestor to all terrestrial tetrapods. So the salamander swims by doing what's called an anguilliform swimming gait, so they propagate a nice traveling wave of muscle activity from head to tail. And if you place the salamander on the ground, it switches to what's called a walking trot gait. In this case, you have nice periodic activation of the limbs which are very nicely coordinated with this standing wave undulation of the body, and that's exactly the gait that you are seeing here on Pleurobot. Now, one thing which is very surprising and fascinating in fact is the fact that all this can be generated just by the spinal cord and the body. So if you take a decerebrated salamander -- it's not so nice but you remove the head -- and if you electrically stimulate the spinal cord, at low level of stimulation this will induce a walking-like gait. If you stimulate a bit more, the gait accelerates. And at some point, there's a threshold, and automatically, the animal switches to swimming. This is amazing. Just changing the global drive, as if you are pressing the gas pedal of descending modulation to your spinal cord, makes a complete switch between two very different gaits. And in fact, the same has been observed in cats. If you stimulate the spinal cord of a cat, you can switch between walk, trot and gallop. Or in birds, you can make a bird switch between walking, at a low level of stimulation, and flapping its wings at high-level stimulation. And this really shows that the spinal cord is a very sophisticated locomotion controller. So we studied salamander locomotion in more detail, and we had in fact access to a very nice X-ray video machine from Professor Martin Fischer in Jena University in Germany. And thanks to that, you really have an amazing machine to record all the bone motion in great detail. That's what we did. So we basically figured out which bones are important for us and collected their motion in 3D. And what we did is collect a whole database of motions, both on ground and in water, to really collect a whole database of motor behaviors that a real animal can do. And then our job as roboticists was to replicate that in our robot. So we did a whole optimization process to find out the right structure, where to place the motors, how to connect them together, to be able to replay these motions as well as possible. And this is how Pleurobot came to life. So let's look at how close it is to the real animal. So what you see here is almost a direct comparison between the walking of the real animal and the Pleurobot. You can see that we have almost a one-to-one exact replay of the walking gait. If you go backwards and slowly, you see it even better. But even better, we can do swimming. So for that we have a dry suit that we put all over the robot -- (Laughter) and then we can go in water and start replaying the swimming gaits. And here, we were very happy, because this is difficult to do. The physics of interaction are complex. Our robot is much bigger than a small animal, so we had to do what's called dynamic scaling of the frequencies to make sure we had the same interaction physics. But you see at the end, we have a very close match, and we were very, very happy with this. So let's go to the spinal cord. So here what we did with Jean-Marie Cabelguen is model the spinal cord circuits. And what's interesting is that the salamander has kept a very primitive circuit, which is very similar to the one we find in the lamprey, this primitive eel-like fish, and it looks like during evolution, new neural oscillators have been added to control the limbs, to do the leg locomotion. And we know where these neural oscillators are but what we did was to make a mathematical model to see how they should be coupled to allow this transition between the two very different gaits. And we tested that on board of a robot. And this is how it looks. So what you see here is a previous version of Pleurobot that's completely controlled by our spinal cord model programmed on board of the robot. And the only thing we do is send to the robot through a remote control the two descending signals it normally should receive from the upper part of the brain. And what's interesting is, by playing with these signals, we can completely control speed, heading and type of gait. For instance, when we stimulate at a low level, we have the walking gait, and at some point, if we stimulate a lot, very rapidly it switches to the swimming gait. And finally, we can also do turning very nicely by just stimulating more one side of the spinal cord than the other. And I think it's really beautiful how nature has distributed control to really give a lot of responsibility to the spinal cord so that the upper part of the brain doesn't need to worry about every muscle. It just has to worry about this high-level modulation, and it's really the job of the spinal cord to coordinate all the muscles. So now let's go to cat locomotion and the importance of biomechanics. So this is another project where we studied cat biomechanics, and we wanted to see how much the morphology helps locomotion. And we found three important criteria in the properties, basically, of the limbs. The first one is that a cat limb more or less looks like a pantograph-like structure. So a pantograph is a mechanical structure which keeps the upper segment and the lower segments always parallel. So a simple geometrical system that kind of coordinates a bit the internal movement of the segments. A second property of cat limbs is that they are very lightweight. Most of the muscles are in the trunk, which is a good idea, because then the limbs have low inertia and can be moved very rapidly. The last final important property is this very elastic behavior of the cat limb, so to handle impacts and forces. And this is how we designed Cheetah-Cub. So let's invite Cheetah-Cub onstage. So this is Peter Eckert, who does his PhD on this robot, and as you see, it's a cute little robot. It looks a bit like a toy, but it was really used as a scientific tool to investigate these properties of the legs of the cat. So you see, it's very compliant, very lightweight, and also very elastic, so you can easily press it down and it will not break. It will just jump, in fact. And this very elastic property is also very important. And you also see a bit these properties of these three segments of the leg as pantograph. Now, what's interesting is that this quite dynamic gait is obtained purely in open loop, meaning no sensors, no complex feedback loops. And that's interesting, because it means that just the mechanics already stabilized this quite rapid gait, and that really good mechanics already basically simplify locomotion. To the extent that we can even disturb a bit locomotion, as you will see in the next video, where we can for instance do some exercise where we have the robot go down a step, and the robot will not fall over, which was a surprise for us. This is a small perturbation. I was expecting the robot to immediately fall over, because there are no sensors, no fast feedback loop. But no, just the mechanics stabilized the gait, and the robot doesn't fall over. Obviously, if you make the step bigger, and if you have obstacles, you need the full control loops and reflexes and everything. But what's important here is that just for small perturbation, the mechanics are right. And I think this is a very important message from biomechanics and robotics to neuroscience, saying don't underestimate to what extent the body already helps locomotion. Now, how does this relate to human locomotion? Clearly, human locomotion is more complex than cat and salamander locomotion, but at the same time, the nervous system of humans is very similar to that of other vertebrates. And especially the spinal cord is also the key controller for locomotion in humans. That's why, if there's a lesion of the spinal cord, this has dramatic effects. The person can become paraplegic or tetraplegic. This is because the brain loses this communication with the spinal cord. Especially, it loses this descending modulation to initiate and modulate locomotion. So a big goal of neuroprosthetics is to be able to reactivate that communication using electrical or chemical stimulations. And there are several teams in the world that do exactly that, especially at EPFL. My colleagues Grégoire Courtine and Silvestro Micera, with whom I collaborate. But to do this properly, it's very important to understand how the spinal cord works, how it interacts with the body, and how the brain communicates with the spinal cord. This is where the robots and models that I've presented today will hopefully play a key role towards these very important goals. Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Auke, I've seen in your lab other robots that do things like swim in pollution and measure the pollution while they swim. But for this one, you mentioned in your talk, like a side project, search and rescue, and it does have a camera on its nose. Auke Ijspeert: Absolutely. So the robot -- We have some spin-off projects where we would like to use the robots to do search and rescue inspection, so this robot is now seeing you. And the big dream is to, if you have a difficult situation like a collapsed building or a building that is flooded, and this is very dangerous for a rescue team or even rescue dogs, why not send in a robot that can crawl around, swim, walk, with a camera onboard to do inspection and identify survivors and possibly create a communication link with the survivor. BG: Of course, assuming the survivors don't get scared by the shape of this. AI: Yeah, we should probably change the appearance quite a bit, because here I guess a survivor might die of a heart attack just of being worried that this would feed on you. But by changing the appearance and it making it more robust, I'm sure we can make a good tool out of it. BG: Thank you very much. Thank you and your team.

Do you know how many choices you make in a typical day? Do you know how many choices you make in typical week? I recently did a survey with over 2,000 Americans, and the average number of choices that the typical American reports making is about 70 in a typical day. There was also recently a study done with CEOs in which they followed CEOs around for a whole week. And these scientists simply documented all the various tasks that these CEOs engaged in and how much time they spent engaging in making decisions related to these tasks. And they found that the average CEO engaged in about 139 tasks in a week. Each task was made up of many, many, many sub-choices of course. 50 percent of their decisions were made in nine minutes or less. Only about 12 percent of the decisions did they make an hour or more of their time. Think about your own choices. Do you know how many choices make it into your nine minute category versus your one hour category? How well do you think you're doing at managing those choices? Today I want to talk about one of the biggest modern day choosing problems that we have, which is the choice overload problem. I want to talk about the problem and some potential solutions. Now as I talk about this problem, I'm going to have some questions for you and I'm going to want to know your answers. So when I ask you a question, since I'm blind, only raise your hand if you want to burn off some calories. (Laughter) Otherwise, when I ask you a question, and if your answer is yes, I'd like you to clap your hands. So for my first question for you today: Are you guys ready to hear about the choice overload problem? (Applause) Thank you. So when I was a graduate student at Stanford University, I used to go to this very, very upscale grocery store; at least at that time it was truly upscale. It was a store called Draeger's. Now this store, it was almost like going to an amusement park. They had 250 different kinds of mustards and vinegars and over 500 different kinds of fruits and vegetables and more than two dozen different kinds of bottled water -- and this was during a time when we actually used to drink tap water. I used to love going to this store, but on one occasion I asked myself, well how come you never buy anything? Here's their olive oil aisle. They had over 75 different kinds of olive oil, including those that were in a locked case that came from thousand-year-old olive trees. So I one day decided to pay a visit to the manager, and I asked the manager, "Is this model of offering people all this choice really working?" And he pointed to the busloads of tourists that would show up everyday, with cameras ready usually. We decided to do a little experiment, and we picked jam for our experiment. Here's their jam aisle. They had 348 different kinds of jam. We set up a little tasting booth right near the entrance of the store. We there put out six different flavors of jam or 24 different flavors of jam, and we looked at two things: First, in which case were people more likely to stop, sample some jam? More people stopped when there were 24, about 60 percent, than when there were six, about 40 percent. The next thing we looked at is in which case were people more likely to buy a jar of jam. Now we see the opposite effect. Of the people who stopped when there were 24, only three percent of them actually bought a jar of jam. Of the people who stopped when there were six, well now we saw that 30 percent of them actually bought a jar of jam. Now if you do the math, people were at least six times more likely to buy a jar of jam if they encountered six than if they encountered 24. Now choosing not to buy a jar of jam is probably good for us -- at least it's good for our waistlines -- but it turns out that this choice overload problem affects us even in very consequential decisions. We choose not to choose, even when it goes against our best self-interests. So now for the topic of today: financial savings. Now I'm going to describe to you a study I did with Gur Huberman, Emir Kamenica, Wei Jang where we looked at the retirement savings decisions of nearly a million Americans from about 650 plans all in the U.S. And what we looked at was whether the number of fund offerings available in a retirement savings plan, the 401(k) plan, does that affect people's likelihood to save more for tomorrow. And what we found was that indeed there was a correlation. So in these plans, we had about 657 plans that ranged from offering people anywhere from two to 59 different fund offerings. And what we found was that, the more funds offered, indeed, there was less participation rate. So if you look at the extremes, those plans that offered you two funds, participation rates were around in the mid-70s -- still not as high as we want it to be. In those plans that offered nearly 60 funds, participation rates have now dropped to about the 60th percentile. Now it turns out that even if you do choose to participate when there are more choices present, even then, it has negative consequences. So for those people who did choose to participate, the more choices available, the more likely people were to completely avoid stocks or equity funds. The more choices available, the more likely they were to put all their money in pure money market accounts. Now neither of these extreme decisions are the kinds of decisions that any of us would recommend for people when you're considering their future financial well-being. Well, over the past decade, we have observed three main negative consequences to offering people more and more choices. They're more likely to delay choosing -- procrastinate even when it goes against their best self-interest. They're more likely to make worse choices -- worse financial choices, medical choices. They're more likely to choose things that make them less satisfied, even when they do objectively better. The main reason for this is because, we might enjoy gazing at those giant walls of mayonnaises, mustards, vinegars, jams, but we can't actually do the math of comparing and contrasting and actually picking from that stunning display. So what I want to propose to you today are four simple techniques -- techniques that we have tested in one way or another in different research venues -- that you can easily apply in your businesses. The first: Cut. You've heard it said before, but it's never been more true than today, that less is more. People are always upset when I say, "Cut." They're always worried they're going to lose shelf space. But in fact, what we're seeing more and more is that if you are willing to cut, get rid of those extraneous redundant options, well there's an increase in sales, there's a lowering of costs, there is an improvement of the choosing experience. When Proctor & Gamble went from 26 different kinds of Head & Shoulders to 15, they saw an increase in sales by 10 percent. When the Golden Cat Corporation got rid of their 10 worst-selling cat litter products, they saw an increase in profits by 87 percent -- a function of both increase in sales and lowering of costs. You know, the average grocery store today offers you 45,000 products. The typical Walmart today offers you 100,000 products. But the ninth largest retailer, the ninth biggest retailer in the world today is Aldi, and it offers you only 1,400 products -- one kind of canned tomato sauce. Now in the financial savings world, I think one of the best examples that has recently come out on how to best manage the choice offerings has actually been something that David Laibson was heavily involved in designing, which was the program that they have at Harvard. Every single Harvard employee is now automatically enrolled in a lifecycle fund. For those people who actually want to choose, they're given 20 funds, not 300 or more funds. You know, often, people say, "I don't know how to cut. They're all important choices." And the first thing I do is I ask the employees, "Tell me how these choices are different from one another. And if your employees can't tell them apart, neither can your consumers." Now before we started our session this afternoon, I had a chat with Gary. And Gary said that he would be willing to offer people in this audience an all-expenses-paid free vacation to the most beautiful road in the world. Here's a description of the road. And I'd like you to read it. And now I'll give you a few seconds to read it and then I want you to clap your hands if you're ready to take Gary up on his offer. (Light clapping) Okay. Anybody who's ready to take him up on his offer. Is that all? All right, let me show you some more about this. (Laughter) You guys knew there was a trick, didn't you. (Honk) Now who's ready to go on this trip. (Applause) (Laughter) I think I might have actually heard more hands. All right. Now in fact, you had objectively more information the first time around than the second time around, but I would venture to guess that you felt that it was more real the second time around. Because the pictures made it feel more real to you. Which brings me to the second technique for handling the choice overload problem, which is concretization. That in order for people to understand the differences between the choices, they have to be able to understand the consequences associated with each choice, and that the consequences need to be felt in a vivid sort of way, in a very concrete way. Why do people spend an average of 15 to 30 percent more when they use an ATM card or a credit card as opposed to cash? Because it doesn't feel like real money. And it turns out that making it feel more concrete can actually be a very positive tool to use in getting people to save more. So a study that I did with Shlomo Benartzi and Alessandro Previtero, we did a study with people at ING -- employees that are all working at ING -- and now these people were all in a session where they're doing enrollment for their 401(k) plan. And during that session, we kept the session exactly the way it used to be, but we added one little thing. The one little thing we added was we asked people to just think about all the positive things that would happen in your life if you saved more. By doing that simple thing, there was an increase in enrollment by 20 percent and there was an increase in the amount of people willing to save or the amount that they were willing to put down into their savings account by four percent. The third technique: Categorization. We can handle more categories than we can handle choices. So for example, here's a study we did in a magazine aisle. It turns out that in Wegmans grocery stores up and down the northeast corridor, the magazine aisles range anywhere from 331 different kinds of magazines all the way up to 664. But you know what? If I show you 600 magazines and I divide them up into 10 categories, versus I show you 400 magazines and divide them up into 20 categories, you believe that I have given you more choice and a better choosing experience if I gave you the 400 than if I gave you the 600. Because the categories tell me how to tell them apart. Here are two different jewelry displays. One is called "Jazz" and the other one is called "Swing." If you think the display on the left is Swing and the display on the right is Jazz, clap your hands. (Light Clapping) Okay, there's some. If you think the one on the left is Jazz and the one on the right is Swing, clap your hands. Okay, a bit more. Now it turns out you're right. The one on the left is Jazz and the one on the right is Swing, but you know what? This is a highly useless categorization scheme. (Laughter) The categories need to say something to the chooser, not the choice-maker. And you often see that problem when it comes down to those long lists of all these funds. Who are they actually supposed to be informing? My fourth technique: Condition for complexity. It turns out we can actually handle a lot more information than we think we can, we've just got to take it a little easier. We have to gradually increase the complexity. I'm going to show you one example of what I'm talking about. Let's take a very, very complicated decision: buying a car. Here's a German car manufacturer that gives you the opportunity to completely custom make your car. You've got to make 60 different decisions, completely make up your car. Now these decisions vary in the number of choices that they offer per decision. Car colors, exterior car colors -- I've got 56 choices. Engines, gearshift -- four choices. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to vary the order in which these decisions appear. So half of the customers are going to go from high choice, 56 car colors, to low choice, four gearshifts. The other half of the customers are going to go from low choice, four gearshifts, to 56 car colors, high choice. What am I going to look at? How engaged you are. If you keep hitting the default button per decision, that means you're getting overwhelmed, that means I'm losing you. What you find is the people who go from high choice to low choice, they're hitting that default button over and over and over again. We're losing them. They go from low choice to high choice, they're hanging in there. It's the same information. It's the same number of choices. The only thing that I have done is I have varied the order in which that information is presented. If I start you off easy, I learn how to choose. Even though choosing gearshift doesn't tell me anything about my preferences for interior decor, it still prepares me for how to choose. It also gets me excited about this big product that I'm putting together, so I'm more willing to be motivated to be engaged. So let me recap. I have talked about four techniques for mitigating the problem of choice overload -- cut -- get rid of the extraneous alternatives; concretize -- make it real; categorize -- we can handle more categories, less choices; condition for complexity. All of these techniques that I'm describing to you today are designed to help you manage your choices -- better for you, you can use them on yourself, better for the people that you are serving. Because I believe that the key to getting the most from choice is to be choosy about choosing. And the more we're able to be choosy about choosing the better we will be able to practice the art of choosing. Thank you very much. (Applause)

I want to talk about what we learn from conservatives. And I'm at a stage in life where I'm yearning for my old days, so I want to confess to you that when I was a kid, indeed, I was a conservative. I was a Young Republican, a Teenage Republican, a leader in the Teenage Republicans. Indeed, I was the youngest member of any delegation in the 1980 convention that elected Ronald Reagan to be the Republican nominee for president. Now, I know what you're thinking. (Laughter) You're thinking, "That's not what the Internets say." You're thinking, "Wikipedia doesn't say this fact." And indeed, this is just one of the examples of the junk that flows across the tubes in these Internets here. Wikipedia reports that this guy, this former congressman from Erie, Pennsylvania was, at the age of 20, one of the youngest people at the Republican National Convention, but it's just not true. (Laughter) Indeed, it drives me so nuts, let me just change this little fact here. (Laughter) (Applause) All right. Okay, so ... perfect. Perfect. (Laughter) Okay, speaker Lawrence Lessig, right. Okay. Finally, truth will be brought here. Okay, see? It's done. It's almost done. Here we go. "... Youngest Republican," okay, we're finished. That's it. Please save this. Great, here we go. And ... Wikipedia is fixed, finally. Okay, but no, this is really besides the point. (Applause) But the thing I want you to think about when we think about conservatives -- not so much this issue of the 1980 convention -- the thing to think about is this: They go to church. Now, you know, I mean, a lot of people go to church. I'm not talking about that only conservatives go to church. And I'm not talking about the God thing. I don't want to get into that, you know; that's not my point. They go to church, by which I mean, they do lots of things for free for each other. They hold potluck dinners. Indeed, they sell books about potluck dinners. They serve food to poor people. They share, they give, they give away for free. And it's the very same people leading Wall Street firms who, on Sundays, show up and share. And not only food, right. These very same people are strong believers, in lots of contexts, in the limits on the markets. They are in many important places against markets. Indeed, they, like all of us, celebrate this kind of relationship. But they're very keen that we don't let money drop into that relationship, else it turns into something like this. They want to regulate us, those conservatives, to stop us from allowing the market to spread in those places. Because they understand: There are places for the market and places where the market should not exist, where we should be free to enjoy the fellowship of others. They recognize: Both of these things have to live together. And the second great thing about conservatives: they get ecology. Right, it was the first great Republican president of the 20th century who taught us about environmental thinking -- Teddy Roosevelt. They first taught us about ecology in the context of natural resources. And then they began to teach us in the context of innovation, economics. They understand, in that context, "free." They understand "free" is an important essential part of the cultural ecology as well. That's the thing I want you to think about them. Now, I know you don't believe me, really, here. So here's exhibit number one. I want to share with you my latest hero, Julian Sanchez, a libertarian who works at the, for many people, "evil" Cato Institute. Okay, so Julian made this video. He's a terrible producer of videos, but it's great content, so I'm going to give you a little bit of it. So here he is beginning. Julian Sanchez: I'm going to make an observation about the way remix culture seems to be evolving ... Larry Lessig: So what he does is he begins to tell us about these three videos. This is this fantastic Brat Pack remix set to Lisztomania. Which, of course, spread virally. Hugely successful. (Music) And then some people from Brooklyn saw it. They decided they wanted to do the same. (Music) And then, of course, people from San Fransisco saw it. And San Franciscans thought they had to do the same as well. (Music) And so they're beautiful, but this libertarian has some important lessons he wants us to learn from this. Here's lesson number one. JS: There's obviously also something really deeply great about this. They are acting in the sense that they're emulating the original mashup. And the guy who shot it obviously has a strong eye and some experience with video editing. But this is also basically just a group of friends having an authentic social moment and screwing around together. It should feel familiar and kind of resonate for anyone who's had a sing-a-long or a dance party with a group of good friends. LL: Or ... JS: So that's importantly different from the earlier videos we looked at because here, remix isn't just about an individual doing something alone in his basement; it becomes an act of social creativity. And it's not just that it yields a different kind of product at the end, it's that potentially it changes the way that we relate to each other. All of our normal social interactions become a kind of invitation to this sort of collective expression. It's our real social lives themselves that are transmuted into art. LL: And so then, what this libertarian draws from these two points ... JS: One remix is about individuals using our shared culture as a kind of language to communicate something to an audience. Stage two, social remix, is really about using it to mediate people's relationships to each other. First, within each video, the Brat Pack characters are used as a kind of template for performing the social reality of each group. But there's also a dialogue between the videos, where, once the basic structure is established, it becomes a kind of platform for articulating the similarities and differences between the groups' social and physical worlds. LL: And then, here's for me, the critical key to what Julian has to say ... JS: Copyright policy isn't just about how to incentivize the production of a certain kind of artistic commodity; it's about what level of control we're going to permit to be exercised over our social realities -- social realities that are now inevitably permeated by pop culture. I think it's important that we keep these two different kinds of public goods in mind. If we're only focused on how to maximize the supply of one, I think we risk suppressing this different and richer and, in some ways, maybe even more important one. LL: Right. Bingo. Point. Freedom needs this opportunity to both have the commercial success of the great commercial works and the opportunity to build this different kind of culture. And for that to happen, you need ideas like fair use to be central and protected, to enable this kind of innovation, as this libertarian tells us, between these two creative cultures, a commercial and a sharing culture. The point is they, he, here, gets that culture. Now, my concern is, we Dems, too often, not so much. All right, take for example this great company. In the good old days when this Republican ran that company, their greatest work was work that built on the past, right. All of the great Disney works were works that took works that were in the public domain and remixed them, or waited until they entered the public domain to remix them, to celebrate this add-on remix creativity. Indeed, Mickey Mouse himself, of course, as "Steamboat Willie," is a remix of the then, very dominant, very popular "Steamboat Bill" by Buster Keaton. This man was a remixer extraordinaire. He is the celebration and ideal of exactly this kind of creativity. But then the company passes through this dark stage to this Democrat. Wildly different. This is the mastermind behind the eventual passage of what we call the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, extending the term of existing copyrights by 20 years, so that no one could do to Disney what Disney did to the Brothers Grimm. Now, when we tried to challenge this, going to the Supreme Court, getting the Supreme Court, the bunch of conservatives there -- if we could get them to wake up to this -- to strike it down, we had the assistance of Nobel Prize winners including this right-wing Nobel Prize winner, Milton Friedman, who said he would join our brief only if the word "no brainer" was in the brief somewhere. (Laughter) But apparently, no brains existed in this place when Democrats passed and signed this bill into law. Now, tiny little quibble of a footnote: Sonny Bono, you might say, was a Republican, but I don't buy it. This guy is no Republican. Okay, for a second example, think about this cultural hero, icon on the Left, creator of this character. Look at the site that he built: "Star Wars" MashUps, inviting people to come and use their creative energy to produce a new generation of attention towards this extraordinarily important cultural icon. Read the license. The license for these remixers assigns all of the rights to the remix back to Lucas. The mashup is owned by Lucas. Indeed, anything you add to the mashup, music you might add, Lucas has a worldwide perpetual right to exploit that for free. There is no creator here to be recognized. The creator doesn't have any rights. The creator is a sharecropper in this story. And we should remember who employed the sharecroppers: the Democrats, right? So the point is the Republicans here recognize that there's a certain need of ownership, a respect for ownership, the respect we should give the creator, the remixer, the owner, the property owner, the copyright owner of this extraordinarily powerful stuff, and not a generation of sharecroppers. Now, I think there are lessons we should learn here, lessons about openness. Our lives are sharing activities, at least in part. Even for the head of Goldman Sachs, at least in part. And for that sharing activity to happen, we have to have well-protected spaces of fair use. That's number one. Number two: This ecology of sharing needs freedom within which to create. Freedom, which means without permission from anyone, the ability to create. And number three: We need to respect the creator, the creator of these remixes through rights that are directly tied to them. Now, this explains the right-wing nonprofit Creative Commons. Actually, it's not a right-wing nonprofit, but of course -- let me just tie it here -- the Creative Commons, which is offering authors this simple way to mark their content with the freedoms they intended to carry. So that we go from a "all rights reserved" world to a "some rights reserved" world so that people can know the freedoms they have attached to the content, building and creating on the basis of this creative copyrighted work. These tools that we built enable this sharing in parts through licenses that make it clear and a freedom to create without requiring permission first because the permission has already been granted and a respect for the creator because it builds upon a copyright the creator has licensed freely. And it explains the vast right-wing conspiracy that's obviously developed around these licenses, as now more than 350 million digital objects are out there, licensed freely in this way. Now that picture of an ecology of creativity, the picture of an ecology of balanced creativity, is that the ecology of creativity we have right now? Well, as you all know, not many of us believe we do. I tripped on the reality of this ecology of creativity just last week. I created a video which was based on a Wireside Chat that I'd given, and I uploaded it to YouTube. I then got this email from YouTube weirdly notifying me that there was content in that owned by the mysterious WMG that matched their content ID. So I didn't think much about it. And then on Twitter, somebody said to me, "Your talk on YouTube was DMCA'd. Was that your purpose?" imagining that I had this deep conspiracy to reveal the obvious flaws in the DMCA. I answered, "No." I didn't even think about it. But then I went to the site and all of the audio in my site had been silenced. My whole 45-minute video had been silenced because there were snippets in that video, a video about fair use, that included Warner Music Group music. Now, interestingly, they still sold ads for that music, if you played the silent video. You could still buy the music, but you couldn't hear anything because it had been silenced. So I did what the current regime says I must do to be free to use YouTube to talk about fair use. I went to this site, and I had to answer these questions. And then in an extraordinarily Bart Simpson-like, juvenile way you've actually got to type out these words and get them right to reassert your freedom to speak. And I felt like I was in third grade again. "I will not put tacks on the teacher's chair. I will not put tacks on the teacher's chair." This is absurd. It is outrageous. It is an extraordinary perversion of the system of freedom we should be encouraging. And the question I ask you is: Who's fighting it? Well, interestingly, in the last presidential election, who was the number one, active opponent of this system of regulation in online speech? John McCain. Letter after letter attacking YouTube's refusal to be more respectful of fair use with their extraordinary notice and take down system, that led his campaign so many times to be thrown off the Internet. Now, that was the story of me then, my good old days of right-wing lunacy. Let me come back to now, now when I'm a little leftist -- I'm certainly left-handed, so at least a lefty -- And I wonder, can we on the Left expect to build this ecology of freedom, now, in a world where we know the extraordinarily powerful influences against it, where even icons of the Left like this entertain and push bills that would effectively ban the requirement of open access for government-funded research? The president, who has supported a process that secretly negotiates agreements, which effectively lock us into the insane system of DMCA that we have adopted and likely lock us down a path of three strikes, you're out that, of course, the rest of the world are increasingly adopting. Not a single example of reform has been produced yet. And we're not going to see this change in this system anytime soon. So here's the lessons of openness that I think we need to learn. Openness is a commitment to a certain set of values. We need to speak of those values. The value of freedom. It's a value of community. It's a value of the limits in regulation. It's a value respecting the creator. Now, if we can learn those values from at least some influences on the Right, if we can take them and incorporate them, maybe we could do a little trade. We learn those values on the Left, and maybe they'll do health care or global warming legislation or something in the Right. Anyway, please join me in teaching these values. Thank you very much. (Applause)

There's an old saying, "Just because you can't see something, doesn't mean it's not there." My work is -- it's a reflection of myself. What I wanted to do is to show the world that the little things can be the biggest things. We all seem to think that, you know, if we look down on the ground, there's nothing there. And we use the word "nothing." Nothing doesn't exist, because there is always something. My mother told me that, when I was a child, that I should always respect the little things. What made me do this work? I shall go into my story. This all started when I was age five. What made me do it? At school, I will admit this: academically, I couldn't express myself. So I was, more or less, classed as "nothing." My world was seen as less. So I decided I didn't really want to be a part of that world. I thought, I need to retreat into something else. So when my mother used to take me to school, she thought I was at school, and I used to do a U-turn, when her back was turned, and run off and hide in the shed at the back of the garden. Now, the one time I was in the shed, and my mother suspected something, thinking I was at school. My mother was like the woman in Tom and Jerry. So you'd just see her feet. (Laughter) So I was hiding in the shed, like that. And all of a sudden ... And then I saw her legs. And then she said -- grabbed me like that, because my mother was quite big -- and she lifted me up and she says, "How come you're not at school?" I told her I couldn't face it because the way the teacher was treating me, ridiculing me, and using me as an example of failure. So I told her. At that age, obviously, I couldn't express it that way, but I told her I didn't feel right. And then she just said, "You're going back to school tomorrow." And walked off. And I didn't expect that, because I expected one of these ... But I didn't get it. So I'm sitting there thinking. And as I looked down on the ground, I noticed there was some ants running around. And I went into this little fantasy world. And I thought, "These ants, are they looking for the queen ant? Or do they need somewhere to live?" So I thought "Perhaps, if I made these ants some apartments, they'll move in." (Laughter) So I did. And how I set about that, I got some splinters of wood. And I sliced the little splinters of wood with a broken shard of glass, constructed this little apartment. Well it looked like a little shanty shed when I'd finished. But I thought, perhaps the ant won't know, it'll probably move in. And so they did. That was a bit crude, at the time. And I made all these little apartments and little merry-go-rounds, seesaws and swings, little ladders. And then I encouraged the ants to come 'round by putting sugar and things like that. And then I sat down and all the ants came along. And all I could hear was "Is this for us?" (Laughter) And I say, "Yes, they're all for you." And they moved in, and decided not to pay me any rent. (Laughter) And from there I was watching this little world. It became part of me. When I discovered that I had this gift, I wanted to experiment with this world that we can't see. So I realized that there was more to life than just everything that we see around us that's huge. So I started to educate myself on this molecular level. And as I got older, I continued. I showed my mother. My mother told me to take it smaller. Now I shall show you something here. And I'll explain. As you can see, that's a pinhead. (Laughter) (Applause) Now that is called the Huf Haus. The gentleman who commissioned me to do this was a gentleman called Peter Huf. And he says to me "Willard, can you put my house on a pinhead?" (Laughter) So I say, "How are you going to fit in there?" (Laughter) And then he said to me, "I don't believe you can do it. Can you really do it?" And I says, "Well, try me." And then he said, "But I don't believe that you can do this." So I said, "OK." So, to cut a long story short, I went home, went underneath the microscope, and I crushed up a piece of glass, crushed it up. And underneath the microscope there were splinters of glass. Some of them were quite jagged. So I was crushing up these pieces of glass, which, as you can see, that's the actual frame of the house. And the actual roof is made up of a fiber, which I found in my sister's old teddy bear. (Laughter) So I got the teddy bear and I said, "Do you mind if I pull out one of your fibers?" So I did. And I looked at it beneath the microscope. And some of it was flat. So I decided to slice these up with the tool that I make by -- I sharpen the end of a needle into a blade. And then I actually slow down my whole nervous system. And then I work between my heartbeat, I have one-and-a-half seconds to actually move. And at the same time I have to watch I don't inhale my own work, at the same time. (Laughter) (Applause) Because that has happened to me. (Laughter) So what I did, like I said, come back to the glass. I found these little bits of glass. And I had to make them square. So I'm thinking "How can I do this?" So what I did, I got an oilstone. Broke the edge of an oilstone off. And what I did, I took pieces of glass. And I started to rub them. I used a little tweezer which I made from a hair clip. And I built rubber around the end of the tweezer so it wouldn't crush the glass. And then I started rubbing, very very gently, till some of the edges were quite square. And then I constructed it. And how I constructed it, is by making grooves in the top of the pinhead. And then pushing the glass in with its own friction. And as I was doing it, what happened? The instrument that I used turned into a catapult. And it went like this ... And then that was it. (Laughter) Gone. So I'm thinking, "Mr. Huf isn't going to be very happy when I told him his house has gone to another, into the atmosphere somewhere." So to cut the story short, I decided that I had to go back and do it. So I found some more. And I decided to, sort of, construct it very, very slowly, holding my breath, working between my heartbeat, and making sure everything is leveled. Because it's such a small sculpture, nothing can go wrong. And I decided to build it up. Then I used fibers out of my jumper, which I held and stretched. And made the beams going around the house. And the actual windows and the balcony had to be sort of constructed. I used a money spider's web to actually attach certain things, which sent me insane. But I managed to do it. And when I finished it, I came back the next day. I noticed that the house was occupied. Have we ever heard of a dust mite? Darren dust mite and his family moved in. (Laughter) So basically I'd completed the house. And there you are. (Applause) (Laughter) Right. As you can see, Bart Simpson is having a little argument. I think they're arguing about the space on the pin. There's not enough room for the two of them. So I didn't think he was going to throw Bart off. I think he was just warning him actually. But this one was made out of a nylon tag out of my shirt. What I did, I plucked the tag out and put it underneath the microscope. I used the needle which has got a slight blade on the end. Can anybody see the blade on the end of that needle? Audience: No. WW: So what I did is the same process where I just kind of hold my breath and just work away very, very slowly, manipulating the plastic, cutting it, because it behaves different. Whenever you work on that level, things behave different. Because it's on this molecular level things change and they act different. And sometimes they turn into little catapults and things go up in the air. And, you know, all different things happen. But I had to make a little barrier, going around it, out of cellophane, to stop it moving. Then static electricity set in. And it went ... And I'm trying to remove it. And the static is interfering with everything. So there is sweat dripping off my head, because I have to carve Homer Simpson like that, in that position. And after I've cut out the shape, then I have to make sure that there is room for Bart's neck. So after I've done the same thing, then I have to paint it. And after I've actually sculpted them, I have to paint them. I experimented with a -- I found a dead fly. And I plucked the hair off the fly's head. Decided to make a paintbrush. (Laughter) But I would never do it to a living fly. (Laughter) Because I've heard a fly in pain. And they go "Meow! Ow!" Even though they get on our nerves, I would never kill an insect because, "All creatures great and small" -- there is a hymn that says that. So what I decided to do is to pluck fine hair out of my face. And I looked at it underneath the microscope. That was the paintbrush. And whilst I'm painting I have to be very careful, because the paint starts to turn into little blobs. And it starts to dry very quickly. So I have to be very quick. If I'm not, it will end up looking not like what it's supposed to look like. It could end up looking like Humpty Dumpty or somebody else. So I have to be very very careful. This one took me approximately, I would say, six to seven weeks. My work, rough estimate, sometimes five, six to seven weeks; you can't always anticipate. (Applause) As you can see, that's Charlton Heston brought down to size. (Laughter) He says to me, "Willard" -- You can see him saying, "Why me?" I says, "I enjoyed your film. That's why." As you can see, there's an aphid fly there. That's just to show the scale and the actual size of the sculpture. I would say it probably measures ... a quarter of a millimeter. In America they say a period stop. So say if you cut a period stop in half, a full stop, that's about the size of the whole thing. It's made -- the chariot is made of gold. And Charlton Heston is made of a floating fiber, which I took out of the air. When the sunlight comes through the window you see these little fibers. And what I normally do is walk 'round a room -- (Laughter) -- trying to find one. And then I put it underneath the microscope. I remember one time I was doing it, and the window was open. And there was a lady standing by the bus stop. And she saw me walking around like this. (Laughter) And then she looked at me. And then I went ... And then she went, "Hmm, OK, he's not mad." Yeah, to actually do this thing -- the actual chariot is made of gold. I had a 24-karat gold ring. And I cut off a little flake of gold. And I bent it 'round, and made it into the chariot. And the horse is made from nylon. And the spider's web is for the reins on the horse. To get the symmetrical shape of the horse was very difficult, because I had to get the horse to rear up and look as though it was in some kind of action. When I did this one, a gentleman seen it and said to me, "There's no way you can do this, you must have used some kind of machine. There's no way a man can do that. It must be a machine." So I says, "OK then, if you say it's a machine ..." (Laughter) (Applause) That one took me approximately six weeks. (Applause) The most famous statue in the world. This one, I would say, was a serious challenge. (Laughter) Because I had to put the torch on the top. That one is, more or less, the same type of process. The bottom of it is carved from a grain of sand, because I wanted to get a bit of the stone effect. I used a microscopic shard of diamond to actually carve the actual base. Well, I can look at this one and I can be very proud of this, because that statue has always sort of kept an image in my head of, you know, the beginning of people coming to America. So it's sort of Ellis Island, and seeing America for the first time. And that's the first thing they saw. So I wanted to have that little image. And this is it. (Laughter) And we all know that is the Hulk. I wanted to create movement in the eye of a needle. Because we know we see needles, but people aren't familiar with the eye of a needle apart from putting a thread through it. So I broke the needle. And made a needle look like the Hulk's broken it. It's -- I had to make little holes in the base of the needle, to shove his feet in. So most of my work, I don't use glue. They go in with their own friction. And that's how I managed to do it. As you can see, he's looking at the moment. He's got a little grimace on his face. And his mouth must be probably about three microns. So the eyes are probably about one micron or something. That ship there, that's made from 24-karat gold. And I normally rig it with the web of a money spider. But I had to rig it with strands of glue. Because the web of the spider, it was sending me insane, because I couldn't get the web to move off. And that's 24-karat gold. And it's constructed. I built it. Constructed each plank of gold. And the whole thing is sort of symmetrical. The flag had to be made out of little strands of gold. It's almost like doing a surgical operation to get this thing right. (Applause) As you can see, dressage. (Laughter) It's something I wanted to do just to show how I could get the symmetrical shape. The actual rigging on the reins on the horse are made from the same sort of thing. And that was done with a particle from my shirt. And the pinhead I've made green around there by scraping the particles off a green shirt and then pressed onto the needle. It's very painstaking work, but the best things come in small packages. (Laughter) Bruno Giussani: Willard Wigan! (Applause)

If you take 10,000 people at random, 9,999 have something in common: their interests in business lie on or near the Earth's surface. The odd one out is an astronomer, and I am one of that strange breed. (Laughter) My talk will be in two parts. I'll talk first as an astronomer, and then as a worried member of the human race. But let's start off by remembering that Darwin showed how we're the outcome of four billion years of evolution. And what we try to do in astronomy and cosmology is to go back before Darwin's simple beginning, to set our Earth in a cosmic context. And let me just run through a few slides. This was the impact that happened last week on a comet. If they'd sent a nuke, it would have been rather more spectacular than what actually happened last Monday. So that's another project for NASA. That's Mars from the European Mars Express, and at New Year. This artist's impression turned into reality when a parachute landed on Titan, Saturn's giant moon. It landed on the surface. This is pictures taken on the way down. That looks like a coastline. It is indeed, but the ocean is liquid methane -- the temperature minus 170 degrees centigrade. If we go beyond our solar system, we've learned that the stars aren't twinkly points of light. Each one is like a sun with a retinue of planets orbiting around it. And we can see places where stars are forming, like the Eagle Nebula. We see stars dying. In six billion years, the sun will look like that. And some stars die spectacularly in a supernova explosion, leaving remnants like that. On a still bigger scale, we see entire galaxies of stars. We see entire ecosystems where gas is being recycled. And to the cosmologist, these galaxies are just the atoms, as it were, of the large-scale universe. This picture shows a patch of sky so small that it would take about 100 patches like it to cover the full moon in the sky. Through a small telescope, this would look quite blank, but you see here hundreds of little, faint smudges. Each is a galaxy, fully like ours or Andromeda, which looks so small and faint because its light has taken 10 billion light-years to get to us. The stars in those galaxies probably don't have planets around them. There's scant chance of life there -- that's because there's been no time for the nuclear fusion in stars to make silicon and carbon and iron, the building blocks of planets and of life. We believe that all of this emerged from a Big Bang -- a hot, dense state. So how did that amorphous Big Bang turn into our complex cosmos? I'm going to show you a movie simulation 16 powers of 10 faster than real time, which shows a patch of the universe where the expansions have subtracted out. But you see, as time goes on in gigayears at the bottom, you will see structures evolve as gravity feeds on small, dense irregularities, and structures develop. And we'll end up after 13 billion years with something looking rather like our own universe. And we compare simulated universes like that -- I'll show you a better simulation at the end of my talk -- with what we actually see in the sky. Well, we can trace things back to the earlier stages of the Big Bang, but we still don't know what banged and why it banged. That's a challenge for 21st-century science. If my research group had a logo, it would be this picture here: an ouroboros, where you see the micro-world on the left -- the world of the quantum -- and on the right the large-scale universe of planets, stars and galaxies. We know our universes are united though -- links between left and right. The everyday world is determined by atoms, how they stick together to make molecules. Stars are fueled by how the nuclei in those atoms react together. And, as we've learned in the last few years, galaxies are held together by the gravitational pull of so-called dark matter: particles in huge swarms, far smaller even than atomic nuclei. But we'd like to know the synthesis symbolized at the very top. The micro-world of the quantum is understood. On the right hand side, gravity holds sway. Einstein explained that. But the unfinished business for 21st-century science is to link together cosmos and micro-world with a unified theory -- symbolized, as it were, gastronomically at the top of that picture. (Laughter) And until we have that synthesis, we won't be able to understand the very beginning of our universe because when our universe was itself the size of an atom, quantum effects could shake everything. And so we need a theory that unifies the very large and the very small, which we don't yet have. One idea, incidentally -- and I had this hazard sign to say I'm going to speculate from now on -- is that our Big Bang was not the only one. One idea is that our three-dimensional universe may be embedded in a high-dimensional space, just as you can imagine on these sheets of paper. You can imagine ants on one of them thinking it's a two-dimensional universe, not being aware of another population of ants on the other. So there could be another universe just a millimeter away from ours, but we're not aware of it because that millimeter is measured in some fourth spatial dimension, and we're imprisoned in our three. And so we believe that there may be a lot more to physical reality than what we've normally called our universe -- the aftermath of our Big Bang. And here's another picture. Bottom right depicts our universe, which on the horizon is not beyond that, but even that is just one bubble, as it were, in some vaster reality. Many people suspect that just as we've gone from believing in one solar system to zillions of solar systems, one galaxy to many galaxies, we have to go to many Big Bangs from one Big Bang, perhaps these many Big Bangs displaying an immense variety of properties. Well, let's go back to this picture. There's one challenge symbolized at the top, but there's another challenge to science symbolized at the bottom. You want to not only synthesize the very large and the very small, but we want to understand the very complex. And the most complex things are ourselves, midway between atoms and stars. We depend on stars to make the atoms we're made of. We depend on chemistry to determine our complex structure. We clearly have to be large, compared to atoms, to have layer upon layer of complex structure. We clearly have to be small, compared to stars and planets -- otherwise we'd be crushed by gravity. And in fact, we are midway. It would take as many human bodies to make up the sun as there are atoms in each of us. The geometric mean of the mass of a proton and the mass of the sun is 50 kilograms, within a factor of two of the mass of each person here. Well, most of you anyway. The science of complexity is probably the greatest challenge of all, greater than that of the very small on the left and the very large on the right. And it's this science, which is not only enlightening our understanding of the biological world, but also transforming our world faster than ever. And more than that, it's engendering new kinds of change. And I now move on to the second part of my talk, and the book "Our Final Century" was mentioned. If I was not a self-effacing Brit, I would mention the book myself, and I would add that it's available in paperback. (Laughter) And in America it was called "Our Final Hour" because Americans like instant gratification. (Laughter) But my theme is that in this century, not only has science changed the world faster than ever, but in new and different ways. Targeted drugs, genetic modification, artificial intelligence, perhaps even implants into our brains, may change human beings themselves. And human beings, their physique and character, has not changed for thousands of years. It may change this century. It's new in our history. And the human impact on the global environment -- greenhouse warming, mass extinctions and so forth -- is unprecedented, too. And so, this makes this coming century a challenge. Bio- and cybertechnologies are environmentally benign in that they offer marvelous prospects, while, nonetheless, reducing pressure on energy and resources. But they will have a dark side. In our interconnected world, novel technology could empower just one fanatic, or some weirdo with a mindset of those who now design computer viruses, to trigger some kind on disaster. Indeed, catastrophe could arise simply from technical misadventure -- error rather than terror. And even a tiny probability of catastrophe is unacceptable when the downside could be of global consequence. In fact, some years ago, Bill Joy wrote an article expressing tremendous concern about robots taking us over, etc. I don't go along with all that, but it's interesting that he had a simple solution. It was what he called "fine-grained relinquishment." He wanted to give up the dangerous kind of science and keep the good bits. Now, that's absurdly naive for two reasons. First, any scientific discovery has benign consequences as well as dangerous ones. And also, when a scientist makes a discovery, he or she normally has no clue what the applications are going to be. And so what this means is that we have to accept the risks if we are going to enjoy the benefits of science. We have to accept that there will be hazards. And I think we have to go back to what happened in the post-War era, post-World War II, when the nuclear scientists who'd been involved in making the atomic bomb, in many cases were concerned that they should do all they could to alert the world to the dangers. And they were inspired not by the young Einstein, who did the great work in relativity, but by the old Einstein, the icon of poster and t-shirt, who failed in his scientific efforts to unify the physical laws. He was premature. But he was a moral compass -- an inspiration to scientists who were concerned with arms control. And perhaps the greatest living person is someone I'm privileged to know, Joe Rothblatt. Equally untidy office there, as you can see. He's 96 years old, and he founded the Pugwash movement. He persuaded Einstein, as his last act, to sign the famous memorandum of Bertrand Russell. And he sets an example of the concerned scientist. And I think to harness science optimally, to choose which doors to open and which to leave closed, we need latter-day counterparts of people like Joseph Rothblatt. We need not just campaigning physicists, but we need biologists, computer experts and environmentalists as well. And I think academics and independent entrepreneurs have a special obligation because they have more freedom than those in government service, or company employees subject to commercial pressure. I wrote my book, "Our Final Century," as a scientist, just a general scientist. But there's one respect, I think, in which being a cosmologist offered a special perspective, and that's that it offers an awareness of the immense future. The stupendous time spans of the evolutionary past are now part of common culture -- outside the American Bible Belt, anyway -- (Laughter) but most people, even those who are familiar with evolution, aren't mindful that even more time lies ahead. The sun has been shining for four and a half billion years, but it'll be another six billion years before its fuel runs out. On that schematic picture, a sort of time-lapse picture, we're halfway. And it'll be another six billion before that happens, and any remaining life on Earth is vaporized. There's an unthinking tendency to imagine that humans will be there, experiencing the sun's demise, but any life and intelligence that exists then will be as different from us as we are from bacteria. The unfolding of intelligence and complexity still has immensely far to go, here on Earth and probably far beyond. So we are still at the beginning of the emergence of complexity in our Earth and beyond. If you represent the Earth's lifetime by a single year, say from January when it was made to December, the 21st-century would be a quarter of a second in June -- a tiny fraction of the year. But even in this concertinaed cosmic perspective, our century is very, very special, the first when humans can change themselves and their home planet. As I should have shown this earlier, it will not be humans who witness the end point of the sun; it will be creatures as different from us as we are from bacteria. When Einstein died in 1955, one striking tribute to his global status was this cartoon by Herblock in the Washington Post. The plaque reads, "Albert Einstein lived here." And I'd like to end with a vignette, as it were, inspired by this image. We've been familiar for 40 years with this image: the fragile beauty of land, ocean and clouds, contrasted with the sterile moonscape on which the astronauts left their footprints. But let's suppose some aliens had been watching our pale blue dot in the cosmos from afar, not just for 40 years, but for the entire 4.5 billion-year history of our Earth. What would they have seen? Over nearly all that immense time, Earth's appearance would have changed very gradually. The only abrupt worldwide change would have been major asteroid impacts or volcanic super-eruptions. Apart from those brief traumas, nothing happens suddenly. The continental landmasses drifted around. Ice cover waxed and waned. Successions of new species emerged, evolved and became extinct. But in just a tiny sliver of the Earth's history, the last one-millionth part, a few thousand years, the patterns of vegetation altered much faster than before. This signaled the start of agriculture. Change has accelerated as human populations rose. Then other things happened even more abruptly. Within just 50 years -- that's one hundredth of one millionth of the Earth's age -- the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere started to rise, and ominously fast. The planet became an intense emitter of radio waves -- the total output from all TV and cell phones and radar transmissions. And something else happened. Metallic objects -- albeit very small ones, a few tons at most -- escaped into orbit around the Earth. Some journeyed to the moons and planets. A race of advanced extraterrestrials watching our solar system from afar could confidently predict Earth's final doom in another six billion years. But could they have predicted this unprecedented spike less than halfway through the Earth's life? These human-induced alterations occupying overall less than a millionth of the elapsed lifetime and seemingly occurring with runaway speed? If they continued their vigil, what might these hypothetical aliens witness in the next hundred years? Will some spasm foreclose Earth's future? Or will the biosphere stabilize? Or will some of the metallic objects launched from the Earth spawn new oases, a post-human life elsewhere? The science done by the young Einstein will continue as long as our civilization, but for civilization to survive, we'll need the wisdom of the old Einstein -- humane, global and farseeing. And whatever happens in this uniquely crucial century will resonate into the remote future and perhaps far beyond the Earth, far beyond the Earth as depicted here. Thank you very much. (Applause)

I was here four years ago, and I remember, at the time, that the talks weren't put online. I think they were given to TEDsters in a box, a box set of DVDs, which they put on their shelves, where they are now. (Laughter) And actually, Chris called me a week after I'd given my talk, and said, "We're going to start putting them online. Can we put yours online?" And I said, "Sure." And four years later, it's been downloaded four million times. So I suppose you could multiply that by 20 or something to get the number of people who've seen it. And, as Chris says, there is a hunger for videos of me. (Laughter) (Applause) Don't you feel? (Laughter) So, this whole event has been an elaborate build-up to me doing another one for you, so here it is. (Laughter) Al Gore spoke at the TED conference I spoke at four years ago and talked about the climate crisis. And I referenced that at the end of my last talk. So I want to pick up from there because I only had 18 minutes, frankly. (Laughter) So, as I was saying -- (Laughter) You see, he's right. I mean, there is a major climate crisis, obviously, and I think if people don't believe it, they should get out more. (Laughter) But I believe there is a second climate crisis, which is as severe, which has the same origins, and that we have to deal with with the same urgency. And you may say, by the way, "Look, I'm good. I have one climate crisis, I don't really need the second one." (Laughter) But this is a crisis of, not natural resources -- though I believe that's true -- but a crisis of human resources. I believe fundamentally, as many speakers have said during the past few days, that we make very poor use of our talents. Very many people go through their whole lives having no real sense of what their talents may be, or if they have any to speak of. I meet all kinds of people who don't think they're really good at anything. Actually, I kind of divide the world into two groups now. Jeremy Bentham, the great utilitarian philosopher, once spiked this argument. He said, "There are two types of people in this world: those who divide the world into two types and those who do not." (Laughter) Well, I do. (Laughter) I meet all kinds of people who don't enjoy what they do. They simply go through their lives getting on with it. They get no great pleasure from what they do. They endure it rather than enjoy it, and wait for the weekend. But I also meet people who love what they do and couldn't imagine doing anything else. If you said, "Don't do this anymore," they'd wonder what you're talking about. It isn't what they do, it's who they are. They say, "But this is me, you know. It would be foolish to abandon this, because it speaks to my most authentic self." And it's not true of enough people. In fact, on the contrary, I think it's still true of a minority of people. And I think there are many possible explanations for it. And high among them is education, because education, in a way, dislocates very many people from their natural talents. And human resources are like natural resources; they're often buried deep. You have to go looking for them, they're not just lying around on the surface. You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves. And you might imagine education would be the way that happens, but too often, it's not. Every education system in the world is being reformed at the moment and it's not enough. Reform is no use anymore, because that's simply improving a broken model. What we need -- and the word's been used many times in the past few days -- is not evolution, but a revolution in education. This has to be transformed into something else. (Applause) One of the real challenges is to innovate fundamentally in education. Innovation is hard, because it means doing something that people don't find very easy, for the most part. It means challenging what we take for granted, things that we think are obvious. The great problem for reform or transformation is the tyranny of common sense. Things that people think, "It can't be done differently, that's how it's done." I came across a great quote recently from Abraham Lincoln, who I thought you'd be pleased to have quoted at this point. (Laughter) He said this in December 1862 to the second annual meeting of Congress. I ought to explain that I have no idea what was happening at the time. We don't teach American history in Britain. (Laughter) We suppress it. You know, this is our policy. (Laughter) No doubt, something fascinating was happening then, which the Americans among us will be aware of. But he said this: "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion." I love that. Not rise to it, rise with it. "As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country." I love that word, "disenthrall." You know what it means? That there are ideas that all of us are enthralled to, which we simply take for granted as the natural order of things, the way things are. And many of our ideas have been formed, not to meet the circumstances of this century, but to cope with the circumstances of previous centuries. But our minds are still hypnotized by them, and we have to disenthrall ourselves of some of them. Now, doing this is easier said than done. It's very hard to know, by the way, what it is you take for granted. And the reason is that you take it for granted. (Laughter) Let me ask you something you may take for granted. How many of you here are over the age of 25? That's not what you take for granted, I'm sure you're familiar with that. Are there any people here under the age of 25? Great. Now, those over 25, could you put your hands up if you're wearing your wristwatch? Now that's a great deal of us, isn't it? Ask a room full of teenagers the same thing. Teenagers do not wear wristwatches. I don't mean they can't, they just often choose not to. And the reason is we were brought up in a pre-digital culture, those of us over 25. And so for us, if you want to know the time, you have to wear something to tell it. Kids now live in a world which is digitized, and the time, for them, is everywhere. They see no reason to do this. And by the way, you don't need either; it's just that you've always done it and you carry on doing it. My daughter never wears a watch, my daughter Kate, who's 20. She doesn't see the point. As she says, "It's a single-function device." (Laughter) "Like, how lame is that?" And I say, "No, no, it tells the date as well." (Laughter) "It has multiple functions." (Laughter) But, you see, there are things we're enthralled to in education. A couple of examples. One of them is the idea of linearity: that it starts here and you go through a track and if you do everything right, you will end up set for the rest of your life. Everybody who's spoken at TED has told us implicitly, or sometimes explicitly, a different story: that life is not linear; it's organic. We create our lives symbiotically as we explore our talents in relation to the circumstances they help to create for us. But, you know, we have become obsessed with this linear narrative. And probably the pinnacle for education is getting you to college. I think we are obsessed with getting people to college. Certain sorts of college. I don't mean you shouldn't go, but not everybody needs to go, or go now. Maybe they go later, not right away. And I was up in San Francisco a while ago doing a book signing. There was this guy buying a book, he was in his 30s. I said, "What do you do?" And he said, "I'm a fireman." I asked, "How long have you been a fireman?" "Always. I've always been a fireman." "Well, when did you decide?" He said, "As a kid. Actually, it was a problem for me at school, because at school, everybody wanted to be a fireman." (Laughter) He said, "But I wanted to be a fireman." And he said, "When I got to the senior year of school, my teachers didn't take it seriously. This one teacher didn't take it seriously. He said I was throwing my life away if that's all I chose to do with it; that I should go to college, I should become a professional person, that I had great potential and I was wasting my talent to do that." He said, "It was humiliating. It was in front of the whole class and I felt dreadful. But it's what I wanted, and as soon as I left school, I applied to the fire service and I was accepted. You know, I was thinking about that guy recently, just a few minutes ago when you were speaking, about this teacher, because six months ago, I saved his life." (Laughter) He said, "He was in a car wreck, and I pulled him out, gave him CPR, and I saved his wife's life as well." He said, "I think he thinks better of me now." (Laughter) (Applause) You know, to me, human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a singular conception of ability. And at the heart of our challenges -- (Applause) At the heart of the challenge is to reconstitute our sense of ability and of intelligence. This linearity thing is a problem. When I arrived in L.A. about nine years ago, I came across a policy statement -- very well-intentioned -- which said, "College begins in kindergarten." No, it doesn't. (Laughter) It doesn't. If we had time, I could go into this, but we don't. (Laughter) Kindergarten begins in kindergarten. (Laughter) A friend of mine once said, "A three year-old is not half a six year-old." (Laughter) (Applause) They're three. But as we just heard in this last session, there's such competition now to get into kindergarten -- to get to the right kindergarten -- that people are being interviewed for it at three. Kids sitting in front of unimpressed panels, you know, with their resumes -- (Laughter) Flicking through and saying, "What, this is it?" (Laughter) (Applause) "You've been around for 36 months, and this is it?" (Laughter) "You've achieved nothing -- commit. (Laughter) Spent the first six months breastfeeding, I can see." (Laughter) See, it's outrageous as a conception. The other big issue is conformity. We have built our education systems on the model of fast food. This is something Jamie Oliver talked about the other day. There are two models of quality assurance in catering. One is fast food, where everything is standardized. The other is like Zagat and Michelin restaurants, where everything is not standardized, they're customized to local circumstances. And we have sold ourselves into a fast-food model of education, and it's impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies. (Applause) We have to recognize a couple of things here. One is that human talent is tremendously diverse. People have very different aptitudes. I worked out recently that I was given a guitar as a kid at about the same time that Eric Clapton got his first guitar. (Laughter) It worked out for Eric, that's all I'm saying. (Laughter) In a way -- it did not for me. I could not get this thing to work no matter how often or how hard I blew into it. It just wouldn't work. (Laughter) But it's not only about that. It's about passion. Often, people are good at things they don't really care for. It's about passion, and what excites our spirit and our energy. And if you're doing the thing that you love to do, that you're good at, time takes a different course entirely. My wife's just finished writing a novel, and I think it's a great book, but she disappears for hours on end. You know this, if you're doing something you love, an hour feels like five minutes. If you're doing something that doesn't resonate with your spirit, five minutes feels like an hour. And the reason so many people are opting out of education is because it doesn't feed their spirit, it doesn't feed their energy or their passion. So I think we have to change metaphors. We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it's an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish. So when we look at reforming education and transforming it, it isn't like cloning a system. There are great ones, like KIPP's; it's a great system. There are many great models. It's about customizing to your circumstances and personalizing education to the people you're actually teaching. And doing that, I think, is the answer to the future because it's not about scaling a new solution; it's about creating a movement in education in which people develop their own solutions, but with external support based on a personalized curriculum. Now in this room, there are people who represent extraordinary resources in business, in multimedia, in the Internet. These technologies, combined with the extraordinary talents of teachers, provide an opportunity to revolutionize education. And I urge you to get involved in it because it's vital, not just to ourselves, but to the future of our children. But we have to change from the industrial model to an agricultural model, where each school can be flourishing tomorrow. That's where children experience life. Or at home, if that's what they choose, to be educated with their families or friends. There's been a lot of talk about dreams over the course of these few days. And I wanted to just very quickly -- I was very struck by Natalie Merchant's songs last night, recovering old poems. I wanted to read you a quick, very short poem from W. B. Yeats, who some of you may know. He wrote this to his love, Maud Gonne, and he was bewailing the fact that he couldn't really give her what he thought she wanted from him. And he says, "I've got something else, but it may not be for you." He says this: "Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with gold and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams." And every day, everywhere, our children spread their dreams beneath our feet. And we should tread softly. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

I'm going to talk to you about power in this 21st century. And basically, what I'd like to tell you is that power is changing, and there are two types of changes I want to discuss. One is power transition, which is change of power amongst states. And there the simple version of the message is it's moving from West to East. The other is power diffusion, the way power is moving from all states West or East to non-state actors. Those two things are the huge shifts of power in our century. And I want to tell you about them each separately and then how they interact and why, in the end, there may be some good news. When we talk about power transition, we often talk about the rise of Asia. It really should be called the recovery or return of Asia. If we looked at the world in 1800, you'd find that more than half of the world's people lived in Asia and they made more than half the world's product. Now fast forward to 1900: half the world's people -- more than half -- still live in Asia, but they're now making only a fifth of the world's product. What happened? The Industrial Revolution, which meant that all of a sudden, Europe and America became the dominant center of the world. What we're going to see in the 21st century is Asia gradually returning to being more than half of the world's population and more than half of the world's product. That's important and it's an important shift. But let me tell you a little bit about the other shift that I'm talking about, which is power diffusion. To understand power diffusion put this in your mind: computing and communications costs have fallen a thousandfold between 1970 and the beginning of this century. Now that's a big abstract number. But to make it more real, if the price of an automobile had fallen as rapidly as the price of computing power, you could buy a car today for five dollars. Now when the price of any technology declines that dramatically, the barriers to entry go down. Anybody can play in the game. So in 1970, if you wanted to communicate from Oxford to Johannesburg to New Delhi to Brasilia and anywhere simultaneously, you could do it. The technology was there. But to be able to do it, you had to be very rich -- a government, a multinational corporation, maybe the Catholic Church -- but you had to be pretty wealthy. Now, anybody has that capacity, which previously was restricted by price just to a few actors. If they have the price of entry into an Internet cafe -- the last time I looked, it was something like a pound an hour -- and if you have Skype, it's free. So capabilities that were once restricted are now available to everyone. And what that means is not that the age of the State is over. The State still matters. But the stage is crowded. The State's not alone. There are many, many actors. Some of that's good: Oxfam, a great non-governmental actor. Some of it's bad: Al Qaeda, another non-governmental actor. But think of what it does to how we think in traditional terms and concepts. We think in terms of war and interstate war. And you can think back to 1941 when the government of Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor. It's worth noticing that a non-state actor attacking the United States in 2001 killed more Americans than the government of Japan did in 1941. You might think of that as the privatization of war. So we're seeing a great change in terms of diffusion of power. Now the problem is that we're not thinking about it in very innovative ways. So let me step back and ask: what's power? Power is simple the ability to affect others to get the outcomes you want, and you can do it in three ways. You can do it with threats of coercion, "sticks," you can do it with payments, "carrots," or you can do it by getting others to want what you want. And that ability to get others to want what you want, to get the outcomes you want without coercion or payment, is what I call soft power. And that soft power has been much neglected and much misunderstood, and yet it's tremendously important. Indeed, if you can learn to use more soft power, you can save a lot on carrots and sticks. Traditionally, the way people thought about power was primarily in terms of military power. For example, the great Oxford historian who taught here at this university, A.J.P. Taylor, defined a great power as a country able to prevail in war. But we need a new narrative if we're to understand power in the 21st century. It's not just prevailing at war, though war still persists. It's not whose army wins; it's also whose story wins. And we have to think much more in terms of narratives and whose narrative is going to be effective. Now let me go back to the question of power transition between states and what's happening there. the narratives that we use now tend to be the rise and fall of the great powers. And the current narrative is all about the rise of China and the decline of the United States. Indeed, with the 2008 financial crisis, many people said this was the beginning of the end of American power. The tectonic plates of world politics were shifting. And president Medvedev of Russia, for example, pronounced in 2008 this was the beginning of the end of United States power. But in fact, this metaphor of decline is often very misleading. If you look at history, in recent history, you'll see the cycles of belief in American decline come and go every 10 or 15 years or so. In 1958, after the Soviets put up Sputnik, it was "That's the end of America." In 1973, with the oil embargo and the closing of the gold window, that was the end of America. In the 1980s, as America went through a transition in the Reagan period, between the rust belt economy of the midwest to the Silicon Valley economy of California, that was the end of America. But in fact, what we've seen is none of those were true. Indeed, people were over-enthusiastic in the early 2000s, thinking America could do anything, which led us into some disastrous foreign policy adventures, and now we're back to decline again. The moral of this story is all these narratives about rise and fall and decline tell us a lot more about psychology than they do about reality. If we try to focus on the reality, then what we need to focus on is what's really happening in terms of China and the United States. Goldman Sachs has projected that China, the Chinese economy, will surpass that of the U.S. by 2027. So we've got, what, 17 more years to go or so before China's bigger. Now someday, with a billion point three people getting richer, they are going to be bigger than the United States. But be very careful about these projections such as the Goldman Sachs projection as though that gives you an accurate picture of power transition in this century. Let me mention three reasons why it's too simple. First of all, it's a linear projection. You know, everything says, here's the growth rate of China, here's the growth rate of the U.S., here it goes -- straight line. History is not linear. There are often bumps along the road, accidents along the way. The second thing is that the Chinese economy passes the U.S. economy in, let's say, 2030, which it may it, that will be a measure of total economic size, but not of per capita income -- won't tell you about the composition of the economy. China still has large areas of underdevelopment and per capita income is a better measure of the sophistication of the economy. And that the Chinese won't catch up or pass the Americans until somewhere in the latter part, after 2050, of this century. The other point that's worth noticing is how one-dimensional this projection is. You know, it looks at economic power measured by GDP. Doesn't tell you much about military power, doesn't tell you very much about soft power. It's all very one-dimensional. And also, when we think about the rise of Asia, or return of Asia as I called it a little bit earlier, it's worth remembering Asia's not one thing. If you're sitting in Japan, or in New Delhi, or in Hanoi, your view of the rise of China is a little different than if you're sitting in Beijing. Indeed, one of the advantages that the Americans will have in terms of power in Asia is all those countries want an American insurance policy against the rise of China. It's as though Mexico and Canada were hostile neighbors to the United States, which they're not. So these simple projections of the Goldman Sachs type are not telling us what we need to know about power transition. But you might ask, well so what in any case? Why does it matter? Who cares? Is this just a game that diplomats and academics play? The answer is it matters quite a lot. Because, if you believe in decline and you get the answers wrong on this, the facts, not the myths, you may have policies which are very dangerous. Let me give you an example from history. The Peloponnesian War was the great conflict in which the Greek city state system tore itself apart two and a half millennia ago. What caused it? Thucydides, the great historian of the the Peloponnesian War, said it was the rise in the power of Athens and the fear it created in Sparta. Notice both halves of that explanation. Many people argue that the 21st century is going to repeat the 20th century, in which World War One, the great conflagration in which the European state system tore itself apart and destroyed its centrality in the world, that that was caused by the rise in the power of Germany and the fear it created in Britain. So there are people who are telling us this is going to be reproduced today, that what we're going to see is the same thing now in this century. No, I think that's wrong. It's bad history. For one thing, Germany had surpassed Britain in industrial strength by 1900. And as I said earlier, China has not passed the United States. But also, if you have this belief and it creates a sense of fear, it leads to overreaction. And the greatest danger we have of managing this power transition of the shift toward the East is fear. To paraphrase Franklin Roosevelt from a different context, the greatest thing we have to fear is fear itself. We don't have to fear the rise of China or the return of Asia. And if we have policies in which we take it in that larger historical perspective, we're going to be able to manage this process. Let me say a word now about the distribution of power and how it relates to power diffusion and then pull these two types together. If you ask how is power distributed in the world today, it's distributed much like a three-dimensional chess game. Top board: military power among states. The United States is the only superpower, and it's likely to remain that way for two or three decades. China's not going to replace the U.S. on this military board. Middle board of this three-dimensional chess game: economic power among states. Power is multi-polar. There are balancers -- the U.S., Europe, China, Japan can balance each other. The bottom board of this three-dimensional, the board of transnational relations, things that cross borders outside the control of governments, things like climate change, drug trade, financial flows, pandemics, all these things that cross borders outside the control of governments, there nobody's in charge. It makes no sense to call this unipolar or multi-polar. Power is chaotically distributed. And the only way you can solve these problems -- and this is where many greatest challenges are coming in this century -- is through cooperation, through working together, which means that soft power becomes more important, that ability to organize networks to deal with these kinds of problems and to be able to get cooperation. Another way of putting it is that as we think of power in the 21st century, we want to get away from the idea that power's always zero sum -- my gain is your loss and vice versa. Power can also be positive sum, where your gain can be my gain. If China develops greater energy security and greater capacity to deal with its problems of carbon emissions, that's good for us as well as good for China as well as good for everybody else. So empowering China to deal with its own problems of carbon is good for everybody, and it's not a zero sum, I win, you lose. It's one in which we can all gain. So as we think about power in this century, we want to get away from this view that it's all I win, you lose. Now I don't mean to be Pollyannaish about this. Wars persist. Power persists. Military power is important. Keeping balances is important. All this still persists. Hard power is there, and it will remain. But unless you learn how to mix hard power with soft power into strategies that I call smart power, you're not going to deal with the new kinds of problems that we're facing. So the key question that we need to think about as we look at this is how do we work together to produce global public goods, things from which all of us can benefit? How do we define our national interests so that it's not just zero sum, but positive sum. In that sense, if we define our interests, for example, for the United States the way Britain defined its interests in the 19th century, keeping an open trading system, keeping a monetary stability, keeping freedom of the seas -- those were good for Britain, they were good for others as well. And in the 21st century, you have to do an analog to that. How do we produce global public goods, which are good for us, but good for everyone at the same time? And that's going to be the good news dimension of what we need to think about as we think of power in the 21st century. There are ways to define our interests in which, while protecting ourselves with hard power, we can organize with others in networks to produce, not only public goods, but ways that will enhance our soft power. So if one looks at the statements that have been made about this, I am impressed that when Hillary Clinton described the foreign policy of the Obama administration, she said that the foreign policy of the Obama administration was going to be smart power, as she put it, "using all the tools in our foreign policy tool box." And if we're going to deal with these two great power shifts that I've described, the power shift represented by transition among states, the power shift represented by diffusion of power away from all states, we're going to have to develop a new narrative of power in which we combine hard and soft power into strategies of smart power. And that's the good news I have. We can do that. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Yeah, so a couple of years ago I was turning 60, and I don't like being 60. (Laughter) And I started grappling with this existential angst of what little I had done with my life. It wasn't the resume of breaking this record here, it was more like, who had I become? How had I spent my valuable time? How could this have gone by like lightning? And I couldn't forgive myself for the countless, countless hours I had lost in negative thought -- all the time I had spent beating myself up for losing my marriage and not stopping the sexual abuse when I was a kid and career moves and this and this and this. Just why, why didn't I do it better? Why? Why? Why? And then my mother died at 82. And so I starting thinking, not only am I not happy with the past, now I'm getting choked with, "I've only got 22 years left." What am I going to do with this short amount of time that's just fleeting? And I'm not in the present whatsoever. And I decided the remedy to all this malaise was going to be for me to chase an elevated dream, an extreme dream, something that would require utter conviction and unwavering passion, something that would make me be my best self in every aspect of my life, every minute of every day, because the dream was so big that I couldn't get there without that kind of behavior and that kind of conviction. And I decided, it was an old dream that was lingering, that was from so many years ago, three decades ago -- the only sort of world class swim I had tried and failed at back in my 20s -- was going from Cuba to Florida. It was deep in my imagination. No one's ever done it without a shark cage. It's daunting. It's more than a hundred miles across a difficult passage of ocean. It's probably, at my speed, at my age -- for anybody's speed at anybody's age -- going to take 60, maybe 70, hours of continuous swimming, never getting out on the boat. And I started to train. I hadn't swum for 31 years, not a stroke. And I had kept in good shape, but swimming's a whole different animal. As a matter of fact, this picture is supposed to be me during training. It's a smiling face. And when you're training for this sport, you are not smiling. (Laughter) It's an arduous, difficult sport, and I don't remember smiling at any time during this sport. As I said, I respect other sports, and I compare this sport sometimes to cycling and to mountain climbing and other of the expedition type events, but this is a sensory deprivation, a physical duress. And when I started in with the eight hours and the 10 hours and the 12 hours and the 14 hours and the 15 hours and the 24-hour swims, I knew I had it, because I was making it through these. And when I said I'm going to go out and do a 15-hour swim, and we're coming into the dock after a long day and it's now night, and we come in and it's 14 hours and 58 minutes and I can touch the dock and we're done, the trainer says, "That's great. It's 14 hours 58 minutes. Who cares the last two minutes?" I say, "No, it's got to be 15 hours," and I swim another minute out and another minute back to make the 15 hours. And I put together an expedition. It's not that I didn't have help, but honestly, I sort of led, I was the team leader. And to get the government permissions, you read in the paper, you think it's easy to get into Cuba everyday? Try going in with an armada like we had of 50 people and five boats and CNN's crew, etc. The navigation is difficult. There's a big river called the Gulf Stream that runs across and it's not going in the direction you are. It's going to the east and you'd like to go north. It's tricky. And there's dehydration. And there's hypothermia. And there are sharks. And there are all kinds of problems. And I gathered together, honestly, the world's leading experts in every possible way. And a month ago, the 23rd of September, I stood on that shore and I looked across to that long, long faraway horizon and I asked myself, do you have it? Are your shoulders ready? And they were. They were prepared. No stone left unturned. Was the mind ready? You know, you're swimming with the fogged goggles, you're swimming at 60 strokes a minute, so you're never really focused on anything, you don't see well. You've got tight bathing caps over your ears trying to keep the heat of the head, because it's where the hypothermia starts, and so you don't hear very well. You're really left alone with your own thoughts. And I had all kinds of counting systems ready there in English, followed by German, followed by Spanish, followed by French. You save the French for last. And I had songs, I had a playlist in my head -- not through headphones, in my own head -- of 65 songs. And I couldn't wait to get into the dark in the middle of the night, because that's when Neil Young comes out. (Laughter) And it's odd, isn't it? You'd think you'd be singing Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" out in the majesty of the ocean, not songs about heroin addiction in New York City. But no, for some reason I couldn't wait to get into the dark of the night and be singing, ♫ "A heard you knocking at my cellar door ♫ ♫ I love you baby and I want some more ♫ ♫ Ooh, ooh, the damage done" ♫ (Applause) The night before I started, I finished Stephen Hawking's "The Grand Design." And I couldn't wait to trip the mind fantastic. About the 50th hour, I was going to start thinking about the edge of the universe. Is there an edge? Is this an envelope we're living inside of, or no, does it go onto infinity in both time and space? And there's nothing like swimming for 50 hours in the ocean that gets you thinking about things like this. I couldn't wait to prove the athlete I am, that nobody else in the world can do this swim. And I knew I could do it. And when I jumped into that water, I yelled in my mother's French, "Courage!" And I started swimming, and, oh my God, it was glassy. And we knew it, all 50 people on the boat, we all knew this was it, this was our time. And I reminded myself a couple hours in, you know, the sport is sort of a microcosm of life itself. First of all, you're going to hit obstacles. And even though you're feeling great at any one moment, don't take it for granted, be ready, because there's going to be pain, there's going to be suffering. It's not going to feel this good all the way across. And I was thinking of the hypothermia and maybe some shoulder pain and all the other things -- the vomiting that comes from being in the saltwater. You're immersed in the liquid. Your body doesn't like the saltwater. After a couple of days, three days, you tend to rebel in a lot of physical ways. But no, two hours in, wham! Never in my life ... I knew there were Portuguese men o' war, all kinds of moon jellies, all kinds of things, but the box jellyfish from the southern oceans is not supposed to be in these waters. And I was on fire -- excruciating, excruciating pain. I don't know if you can still see the red line here and up the arm. Evidently, a piece this big of tentacle has a hundred-thousand little barbs on it and each barb is not just stinging your skin, it's sending a venom. The most venomous animal that lives in the ocean is the box jellyfish. And every one of those barbs is sending that venom into this central nervous system. So first I feel like boiling hot oil, I've been dipped in. And I'm yelling out, "Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire! Help me! Somebody help me!" And the next thing is paralysis. I feel it in the back and then I feel it in the chest up here, and I can't breathe. And now I'm not swimming with a nice long stroke, I'm sort of crabbing it this way. Then come convulsions. A young man on our boat is an EMT. He dives in to try to help me. He's stung. They drag him out on the boat, and he's -- evidently, I didn't see any of this -- but lying on the boat and giving himself epinephrine shots and crying out. He's 29 years old, very well-built, lean, he's six-foot, five, weighs 265 lbs., and he is down. And he is crying and he's yelling to my trainer who's trying to help me. And he's saying, "Bonnie, I think I'm going to die. My breath is down to three breaths a minute. I need help, and I can't help Diana." So that was at eight o'clock at night. The doctor, medical team from University of Miami arrived at five in the morning. So I swam through the night, and at dawn they got there and they started with prednisone shots. I didn't get out, but was in the water taking prednisone shots, taking Xanax, oxygen to the face. It was like an ICU unit in the water. (Laughter) And I guess the story is that even Navy SEALS who are stung by the box jelly, they're done. They either die or they quickly get to a hospital. And I swam through the night and I swam through the next day. And the next night at dusk, again, wham! The box jelly again -- all across the neck, all across here. And this time, I don't like it, I didn't want to give into it, but there's a difference between a non-stop swim and a staged swim. And I gave in to the staged swim. And they got me out and they started again with the epinephrine and the prednisone and with the oxygen and with everything they had on board. And I got back in. And I swam through that night and into the next day. And at 41 hours, this body couldn't make it. The devastation of those stings had taken the respiratory system down so that I couldn't make the progress I wanted. And the dream was crushed. And how odd is this intelligent person who put this together and got all these world experts together. And I knew about the jellyfish, but I was sort of cavalier. A lot of athletes have this, you know, sort of invincibility. They should worry about me. I don't worry about them. I'll just swim right through them. We've got benadryl on board. If I get stung, I'll just grin and bear it. Well there was no grin and bearing this. As a matter of fact, the best advice I got was from an elementary school class in the Caribbean. And I was telling these kids, 120 of them -- they were all in the school on the gymnasium floor -- and I was telling them about the jellyfish and how they're gelatinous and you can't see them at night especially. And they have these long 30 to 40 to 50-ft. tentacles. And they do this wrapping. And they can send the poison into the system. And a little kid from the back was like this. And I said, "What's your name?" "Henry." "Henry, what's your question?" He said, "Well, I didn't have a question so much as I had a suggestion." He said, "You know those guys who really believe in what they believe in and so they wear bombs?" And I said, "Well it's odd that you've learned of this as a noble kind of pursuit, but yeah, I know those guys." He said, "That's what you need. You need like a school of fish that would swim in front of you like this." (Laughter) "And when the jellyfish come and they wrap their tentacles around the fish, they're going to be busy with them, and you'll just scoot around." I said, "Oh, it's like a suicide army." He said, "That's what I'm talking about. That's what you need." And little did I know, that you should listen to eight year-olds. And so I started that swim in a bathing suit like normal, and, no joke, this is it; it came from the shark divers. I finished the swim like this. I was swimming with this thing on. That's how scared of the jellyfish I was. So now what do I do? I wouldn't mind if every one of you came up on this stage tonight and told us how you've gotten over the big disappointments of your lives. Because we've all had them, haven't we? We've all had a heartache. And so my journey now is to find some sort of grace in the face of this defeat. And I can look at the journey, not just the destination. I can feel proud. I can stand here in front of you tonight and say I was courageous. Yeah. (Applause) Thank you. And with all sincerity, I can say, I am glad I lived those two years of my life that way, because my goal to not suffer regrets anymore, I got there with that goal. When you live that way, when you live with that kind of passion, there's no time, there's no time for regrets, you're just moving forward. And I want to live every day of the rest of my life that way, swim or no swim. But the difference in accepting this particular defeat is that sometimes, if cancer has won, if there's death and we have no choice, then grace and acceptance are necessary. But that ocean's still there. This hope is still alive. And I don't want to be the crazy woman who does it for years and years and years, and tries and fails and tries and fails and tries and fails, but I can swim from Cuba to Florida, and I will swim from Cuba to Florida. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) And so, what after that? Are you going to swim the Atlantic? No, that's the last swim. It's the only swim I'm interested in. But I'm ready. And by the way, a reporter called me the other day and he said he looked on Wikipedia and he said he saw my birthday was August 22nd 1949, and for some odd reason in Wikipedia, they had my death date too. (Laughter) He said, "Did you know you're going to die the same place you were born, New York City, and it's going to be in January of '35?" I said, "Nope. I didn't know." And now I'm going to live to 85. I have three more years than I thought. And so I ask myself, I'm starting to ask myself now, even before this extreme dream gets achieved for me, I'm asking myself, and maybe I can ask you tonight too, to paraphrase the poet Mary Oliver, she says, "So what is it, what is it you're doing, with this one wild and precious life of yours?" Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Live it large. Live it large.

Beverly Joubert: We are truly passionate about the African wilderness and protecting the African wilderness, and so what we've done is we've focused on iconic cats. And I know, in the light of human suffering and poverty and even climate change, one would wonder, why worry about a few cats? Well today we're here to share with you a message that we have learned from a very important and special character -- this leopard. Dereck Joubert: Well, our lives have basically been like a super long episode of "CSI" -- something like 28 years. In essence, what we've done is we've studied the science, we've looked at the behavior, we've seen over 2,000 kills by these amazing animals. But one of the things that science really lets us down on is that personality, that individual personality that these animals have. And here's a prime example. We found this leopard in a 2,000-year-old baobab tree in Africa, the same tree that we found her mother in and her grandmother. And she took us on a journey and revealed something very special to us -- her own daughter, eight days old. And the minute we found this leopard, we realized that we needed to move in, and so we basically stayed with this leopard for the next four-and-a-half years -- following her every day, getting to know her, that individual personality of hers, and really coming to know her. Now I'm destined to spend a lot of time with some unique, very, very special, individualistic and often seductive female characters. (Laughter) Beverly's clearly one of them, and this little leopard, Legadema, is another, and she changed our lives. BJ: Well we certainly did spend a lot of time with her -- in fact, more time than even her mother did. When her mother would go off hunting, we would stay and film. And early on, a lightning bolt hit a tree 20 paces away from us. It was frightening, and it showered us with leaves and a pungent smell. And of course, we were stunned for a while, but when we managed to get our wits about us, we looked at it and said, "My gosh, what's going to happen with that little cub? She's probably going to forever associate that deafening crash with us." Well, we needn't have worried. She came charging out of the thicket straight towards us, sat next to us, shivering, with her back towards Dereck, and looking out. And actually from that day on, she's been comfortable with us. So we felt that that day was the day that she really earned her name. We called her Legadema, which means, "light from the sky." DJ: Now we've found these individualisms in all sorts of animals, in particular in the cats. This particular one is called Eetwidomayloh, "he who greets with fire," and you can just see that about him, you know -- that's his character. But only by getting up close to these animals and spending time with them can we actually even reach out and dig out these personal characters that they have. BJ: But through our investigation, we have to seek the wildest places in Africa. And right now this is in the Okavango Delta in Botswana. Yes, it is swamp. We live in the swamp in a tent, but I must tell you, every day is exhilarating. But also, our hearts are in our throats a huge amount of the time, because we're driving through water, and it's an unknown territory. But we're really there seeking and searching and filming the iconic cats. DJ: Now one of the big things, of course, everybody knows that cats hate water, and so this was a real revelation for us. And we could only find this by pushing ourselves, by going where no sane person should go -- not without some prompting, by the way, from Beverly -- and just pushing the envelope, going out there, pushing our vehicle, pushing ourselves. But we've managed to find that these lions are 15 percent bigger than any others, and they specialize in hunting buffalo in the water. BJ: And then of course, the challenge is knowing when to turn around. We don't always get that right, and on this particular day, we seriously underestimated the depth. We got deeper and deeper, until it was at Dereck's chest-height. Well then we hit a deep depression, and we seriously submerged the vehicle. We actually managed to drown two million dollars' worth of camera gear. We drowned our pride, I must tell you, which was really serious, and we seized the engine. DJ: And of course, one of the rules that we have in the vehicle is that he who drowns the vehicle gets to swim with the crocodiles. (Laughter) You will notice also that all of these images here are taken from the top angle by Beverly -- the dry top angle, by the way. (Laughter) But all the places we get stuck in really have great views. And it wasn't a moment, and these lions came back towards us, and Beverly was able to get a great photograph. BJ: But we truly do spend day and night trying to capture unique footage. And 20 years ago, we did a film called "Eternal Enemies" where we managed to capture this unusual disturbing behavior across two species -- lions and hyenas. And surprisingly, it became a cult film. And we can only work that out as people were seeing parallels between the thuggish side of nature and gang warfare. DJ: It was amazing, because you can see that this lion is doing exactly what his name, Eetwidomayloh, represents. He's focused on this hyena, and he is going to get it. (Animal sounds) But that's, I think, what this is all about, is that these individuals have these personalities and characters. But for us to get them, not only do we push ourselves, but we live by certain rules of engagement, which mean we can't interfere. This sort of behavior has been going on for three, four, five million years, and we can't step in and say, "That's wrong, and that's right." But that's not always easy for us. BJ: So, as Dereck says, we have to work through extremes -- extreme temperatures, push ourselves at night. Sleep deprivation is extreme. We're on the edge through a large part of the time. But, for 10 years, we tried to capture lions and elephants together -- and never ever managed until this particular night. And I have to tell you that it was a disturbing night for me. I had tears rolling down my cheeks. I was shaking with anxiety, but I knew that [I had] to capture something that had never been seen before, had never been documented. And I do believe you should stay with us. DJ: The amazing thing about these moments -- and this is probably a highlight of our career -- is that you never know how it's going to end. Many people believe, in fact, that death begins in the eyes, not in the heart, not in the lungs, and that's when people give up hope, or when any life form gives up hope. And you can see the start of it here. This elephant, against overwhelming odds, simply gives up hope. But by the same token, you can get your hope back again. So just when you think it's all over, something else happens, some spark gets into you, some sort of will to fight -- that iron will that we all have, that this elephant has, that conservation has, that big cats have. Everything has that will to survive, to fight, to push through that mental barrier and to keep going. And for us, in many ways, this elephant has become a symbol of inspiration for us, a symbol of that hope as we go forward in our work. (Applause) Now back to the leopard. We were spending so much time with this leopard and getting to understand her individualism, her personal character, that maybe we were taking it a little bit far. We were perhaps taking her for granted, and maybe she didn't like that that much. This is about couples working together, and so I do need to say that within the vehicle we have quite strict territories, Beverly and I. Beverly sits on the one side where all her camera gear is, and I'm on the other side where my space is. These are precious to us, these divides. BJ: But when this little cub saw that I had vacated my seat and climbed to the back to get some camera gear, she came in like a curious cat to come and investigate. It was phenomenal, and we felt grateful that she trusted us to that extent. But at the same time, we were concerned that if she created this as a habit and jumped into somebody else's car, it might not turn out the same way -- she might get shot for that. So we knew we had to react quickly. And the only way we thought we could without scaring her is to try and simulate a growl like her mother would make -- a hiss and a sound. So Dereck turned on the heater fan in the car -- very innovative. DJ: It was the only way for me to save the marriage, because Beverly felt she was being replaced, you see. (Laughter) But really and truly, this was how this little leopard was displaying her individual personality. But nothing prepared us for what happened next in our relationship with her, when she started hunting. BJ: And on this first hunt, we truly were excited. It was like watching a graduation ceremony. We felt like we were surrogate parents. And of course, we knew now that she was going to survive. But only when we saw the tiny baby baboon clinging to the mother's fur did we realize that something very unique was taking place here with Legadema. And of course, the baby baboon was so innocent, it didn't turn and run. So what we watched over the next couple of hours was very unique. It was absolutely amazing when she picked it up to safety, protecting it from the hyena. And over the next five hours, she took care of it. We realized that we actually don't know everything, and that nature is so unpredictable, we have to be open at all times. DJ: Okay, so she was a little bit rough. (Laughter) But in fact, what we were seeing here was interesting. Because she is a cub wanting to play, but she was also a predator needing to kill, and yet conflicted in some way, because she was also an emerging mother. She had this maternal instinct, much like a young girl on her way to womanhood, and so this really took us to this new level of understanding that personality. BJ: And of course, through the night, they lay together. They ended up sleeping for hours. But I have to tell you -- everybody always asks, "What happened to the baby baboon?" It did die, and we suspect it was from the freezing winter nights. DJ: So at this stage, I guess, we had very, very firm ideas on what conservation meant. We had to deal with these individual personalities. We had to deal with them with respect and celebrate them. And so we, with the National Geographic, formed the Big Cats Initiative to march forward into conservation, taking care of the big cats that we loved -- and then had an opportunity to look back over the last 50 years to see how well we had all collectively been doing. So when Beverly and I were born, there were 450,000 lions, and today there are 20,000. Tigers haven't fared any better -- 45,000 down to maybe 3,000. BJ: And then cheetahs have crashed all the way down to 12,000. Leopards have plummeted from 700,000 down to a mere 50,000. Now in the extraordinary time that we have worked with Legadema -- which is really over a five-year period -- 10,000 leopards were legally shot by safari hunters. And that's not the only leopards that were being killed through that period. There's an immense amount of poaching as well, and so possibly the same amount. It's simply not sustainable. We admire them, and we fear them, and yet, as man, we want to steal their power. It used to be the time where only kings wore a leopard skin, but now throughout rituals and ceremonies, traditional healers and ministers. And of course, looking at this lion paw that has been skinned, it eerily reminds me of a human hand, and that's ironic, because their fate is in our hands. DJ: There's a burgeoning bone trade. South Africa just released some lion bones onto the market. Lion bones and tiger bones look exactly the same, and so in a stroke, the lion bone industry is going to wipe out all the tigers. So we have a real problem here, no more so than the lions do, the male lions. So the 20,000 lion figure that you just saw is actually a red herring, because there may be 3,000 or 4,000 male lions, and they all are actually infected with the same disease. I call it complacency -- our complacency. Because there's a sport, there's an activity going on that we're all aware of, that we condone. And that's probably because we haven't seen it like we are today. BJ: And you have to know that, when a male lion is killed, it completely disrupts the whole pride. A new male comes into the area and takes over the pride, and, of course, first of all kills all the cubs and possibly some of the females that are defending their cubs. So we've estimated that between 20 [and] 30 lions are killed when one lion is hanging on a wall somewhere in a far-off place. DJ: So what our investigations have shown is that these lions are essential. They're essential to the habitat. If they disappear, whole ecosystems in Africa disappear. There's an 80-billion-dollar-a-year ecotourism revenue stream into Africa. So this is not just a concern about lions; it's a concern about communities in Africa as well. If they disappear, all of that goes away. But what I'm more concerned about in many ways is that, as we de-link ourselves from nature, as we de-link ourselves spiritually from these animals, we lose hope, we lose that spiritual connection, our dignity, that thing within us that keeps us connected to the planet. BJ: So you have to know, looking into the eyes of lions and leopards right now, it is all about critical awareness. And so what we are doing, in February, we're bringing out a film called "The Last Lion," and "The Last Lion" is exactly what is happening right now. That is the situation we're in -- the last lions. That is, if we don't take action and do something, these plains will be completely devoid of big cats, and then, in turn, everything else will disappear. And simply, if we can't protect them, we're going to have a job protecting ourselves as well. DJ: And in fact, that original thing that we spoke about and designed our lives by -- that conservation was all about respect and celebration -- is probably true. That's really what it needs. We need it. We respect and celebrate each other as a man and a woman, as a community and as part of this planet, and we need to continue that. And Legadema? Well we can report, in fact, that we're grandparents. (Laughter) BJ/DJ: Thank you very much. (Applause)

Trees are wonderful arenas for discovery because of their tall stature, their complex structure, the biodiversity they foster and their quiet beauty. I used to climb trees for fun all the time and now, as a grown-up, I have made my profession understanding trees and forests, through the medium of science. The most mysterious part of forests is the upper tree canopy. And Dr. Terry Erwin, in 1983, called the canopy, "the last biotic frontier." I'd like to take you all on a journey up to the forest canopy, and share with you what canopy researchers are asking and also how they're communicating with other people outside of science. Let's start our journey on the forest floor of one of my study sites in Costa Rica. Because of the overhanging leaves and branches, you'll notice that the understory is very dark, it's very still. And what I'd like to do is take you up to the canopy, not by putting all of you into ropes and harnesses, but rather showing you a very short clip from a National Geographic film called "Heroes of the High Frontier." This was filmed in Monteverde, Costa Rica and I think it gives us the best impression of what it's like to climb a giant strangler fig. (Music) (Growling) (Rustling) So what you'll see up there is that it's really like the atmosphere of an open field, and there are tremendous numbers of plants and animals that have adapted to make their way and their life in the canopy. Common groups, like the sloth here, have clear adaptations for forest canopies, hanging on with their very strong claws. But I'd like to describe to you a more subtle kind of diversity and tell you about the ants. There are 10,000 species of ants that taxonomists -- people who describe and name animals -- have named. 4,000 of those ants live exclusively in the forest canopy. One of the reasons I tell you about ants is because of my husband, who is in fact an ant taxonomist and when we got married, he promised to name an ant after me, which he did -- Procryptocerus nalini, a canopy ant. We've had two children, August Andrew and Erika and actually, he named ants after them. So we may be the only family that has an ant named after each one of us. But my passion -- in addition to Jack and my children -- are the plants, the so-called epiphytes, those plants that grow up on trees. They don't have roots that go into trunks nor to the forest floor. But rather, it is their leaves that are adapted to intercept the dissolved nutrients that come to them in the form of mist and fog. These plants occur in great diversity, over 28,000 species around the world. They grow in tropical forests like this one and they also grow in temperate rainforests, that we find in Washington state. These epiphytes are mainly dominated by the mosses. One thing I want to point out is that underneath these live epiphytes, as they die and decompose, they actually construct an arboreal soil, both in the temperate zone and in the tropics. And these mosses, generated by decomposing, are like peat moss in your garden. They have a tremendous capacity for holding on to nutrients and water. One of the surprising things I discovered is that, if you pull back with me on those mats of epiphytes, what you'll find underneath them are connections, networks of what we call canopy roots. These are not epiphyte roots: these are roots that emerge from the trunk and branch of the host trees themselves. And so those epiphytes are actually paying the landlord a bit of rent in exchange for being supported high above the forest floor. I was interested, and my canopy researcher colleagues have been interested in the dynamics of the canopy plants that live in the forest. We've done stripping experiments where we've removed mats of epiphytes and looked at the rates of recolonization. We had predicted that they would grow back very quickly and that they would come in encroaching from the side. What we found, however, was that they took an extremely long time -- over 20 years -- to regenerate, starting from the bottom and growing up. And even now, after 25 years, they're not up there, they have not recolonized completely. And I use this little image to say this is what happens to mosses. If it's gone, it's gone, and if you're really lucky you might get something growing back from the bottom. (Laughter) So, recolonization is really very slow. These canopy communities are fragile. Well, when we look out, you and I, over that canopy of the intact primary forest, what we see is this enormous carpet of carbon. One of the challenges that canopy researchers are attacking today is trying to understand the amount of carbon that is being sequestered. We know it's a lot, but we do not yet know the answers to how much, and by what processes, carbon is being taken out of the atmosphere, held in its biomass, and moving on through the ecosystem. So I hope I've showed you that canopy-dwellers are not just insignificant bits of green up high in the canopy that Tarzan and Jane were interested in, but rather that they foster biodiversity contribute to ecosystem nutrient cycles, and they also help to keep our global climate stable. Up in the canopy, if you were sitting next to me and you turned around from those primary forest ecosystems, you would also see scenes like this. Scenes of forest destruction, forest harvesting and forest fragmentation, thereby making that intact tapestry of the canopy unable to function in the marvelous ways that it has when it is not disturbed by humans. I've also looked out on urban places like this and thought about people who are disassociated from trees in their lives. People who grew up in a place like this did not have the opportunity to climb trees and form a relationship with trees and forests, as I did when I was a young girl. This troubles me. Here in 2009, you know, it's not an easy thing to be a forest ecologist, gripping ourselves with these kinds of questions and trying to figure out how we can answer them. And especially, you know, as a small brown woman in a little college, in the upper northwest part of our country, far away from the areas of power and money, I really have to ask myself, "What can I do about this? How can I reconnect people with trees?" Well, I think that I can do something. I know that as a scientist, I have information and as a human being, I can communicate with anybody, inside or outside of academia. And so, that's what I've begin doing, and so I'd like to unveil the International Canopy Network here. We consult to the media about canopy questions; we have a canopy newsletter; we have an email LISTSERV. And so we're trying to disseminate information about the importance of the canopy, the beauty of the canopy, the necessity of intact canopies, to people outside of academia. We also recognize that a lot of the products that we make -- those videos and so forth -- you know, they don't reach everybody, and so we've been fostering projects that reach people outside of academia, and outside of the choir that most ecologists preach to. Treetop Barbie is a great example of that. What we do, my students in my lab and I, is we buy Barbies from Goodwill and Value Village, we dress her in clothes that have been made by seamstresses and we send her out with a canopy handbook. And my feeling is -- (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) -- that we've taken this pop icon and we have just tweaked her a little bit to become an ambassador who can carry the message that being a woman scientist studying treetops is actually a really great thing. We've also made partnerships with artists, with people who understand and can communicate the aesthetic beauty of trees and forest canopies. And I'd like to just tell you one of our projects, which is the generation of Canopy Confluences. What I do is I bring together scientists and artists of all kinds, and we spend a week in the forest on these little platforms; and we look at nature, we look at trees, we look at the canopy, and we communicate, and exchange, and express what we see together. The results have been fantastic. I'll just give you a few examples. This is a fantastic installation by Bruce Chao who is chair of the Sculpture and Glass Blowing Department at Rhode Island School of Design. He saw nests in the canopy at one of our Canopy Confluences in the Pacific Northwest, and created this beautiful sculpture. We've had dance people up in the canopy. Jodi Lomask, and her wonderful troupe Capacitor, joined me in the canopy in my rainforest site in Costa Rica. They made a fabulous dance called "Biome." They danced in the forest, and we are taking this dance, my scientific outreach communications, and also linking up with environmental groups, to go to different cities and to perform the science, the dance and the environmental outreach that we hope will make a difference. We brought musicians to the canopy, and they made their music -- and it's fantastic music. We had wooden flutists, we had oboists, we had opera singers, we had guitar players, and we had rap singers. And I brought a little segment to give you of Duke Brady's "Canopy Rap." (Music) That's Duke! (Applause) This experience of working with Duke also led me to initiate a program called Sound Science. I saw the power of Duke's song with urban youth -- an audience, you know, I as a middle-aged professor, I don't have a hope of getting to -- in terms of convincing them of the importance of wildlands. So I engaged Caution, this rap singer, with a group of young people from inner-city Tacoma. We went out to the forest, I would pick up a branch, Caution would rap on it, and suddenly that branch was really cool. And then the students would come into our sound studios, they would make their own rap songs with their own beats. They ended up making a CD which they took home to their family and friends, thereby expressing their own experiences with nature in their own medium. The final project I'll talk about is one that's very close to my heart, and it involves an economic and social value that is associated with epiphytic plants. In the Pacific Northwest, there's a whole industry of moss-harvesting from old-growth forests. These mosses are taken from the forest; they're used by the floriculture industry, by florists, to make arrangements and make hanging baskets. It's a 265 million dollar industry and it's increasing rapidly. If you remember that bald guy, you'll know that what has been stripped off of these trunks in the Pacific Northwest old-growth forest is going to take decades and decades to come back. So this whole industry is unsustainable. What can I, as an ecologist, do about that? Well, my thought was that I could learn how to grow mosses, and that way we wouldn't have to take them out of the wild. And I thought, if I had some partners that could help me with this, that would be great. And so, I thought perhaps incarcerated men and women -- who don't have access to nature, who often have a lot of time, they often have space, and you don't need any sharp tools to work with mosses -- would be great partners. And they have become excellent partners. The best I can imagine. They were very enthusiastic. (Applause) They were incredibly enthusiastic about the work. They learned how to distinguish different species of mosses, which, to tell you the truth, is a lot more than my undergraduate students at the Evergreen College can do. And they embraced the idea that they could help develop a research design in order to grow these mosses. We've been successful as partners in figuring out which species grow the fastest, and I've just been overwhelmed with how successful this has been. Because the prison wardens were very enthusiastic about this as well, I started a Science and Sustainability Seminar in the prisons. I brought my scientific colleagues and sustainability practitioners into the prison. We gave talks once a month, and that actually ended up implementing some amazing sustainability projects at the prisons -- organic gardens, worm culture, recycling, water catchment and beekeeping. (Applause) Our latest endeavor, with a grant from the Department of Corrections at Washington state, they've asked us to expand this program to three more prisons. And our new project is having the inmates and ourselves learn how to raise the Oregon spotted frog which is a highly endangered amphibian in Washington state and Oregon. So they will raise them -- in captivity, of course -- from eggs to tadpoles and onward to frogs. And they will have the pleasure, many of them, of seeing those frogs that they've raised from eggs and helped develop, helped nurture, move out into protected wildlands to augment the number of endangered species out there in the wild. And so, I think for many reasons -- ecological, social, economic and perhaps even spiritual -- this has been a tremendous project and I'm really looking forward to not only myself and my students doing it, but also to promote and teach other scientists how to do this. As many of you are aware, the world of academia is a rather inward-looking one. I'm trying to help researchers move more outward to have their own partnerships with people outside of the academic community. And so I'm hoping that my husband Jack, the ant taxonomist, can perhaps work with Mattel to make Taxonomist Ken. Perhaps Ben Zander and Bill Gates could get together and make an opera about AIDS. Or perhaps Al Gore and Naturally 7 could make a song about climate change that would really make you clap your hands. So, although it's a little bit of a fantasy, I think it's also a reality. Given the duress that we're feeling environmentally in these times, it is time for scientists to reach outward, and time for those outside of science to reach towards academia as well. I started my career with trying to understand the mysteries of forests with the tools of science. By making these partnerships that I described to you, I have really opened my mind and, I have to say, my heart to have a greater understanding, to make other discoveries about nature and myself. When I look into my heart, I see trees -- this is actually an image of a real heart -- there are trees in our hearts, there are trees in your hearts. When we come to understand nature, we are touching the most deep, the most important parts of our self. In these partnerships, I have also learned that people tend to compartmentalize themselves into IT people, and movie star people, and scientists, but when we share nature, when we share our perspectives about nature, we find a common denominator. Finally, as a scientist and as a person and now, as part of the TED community, I feel that I have better tools to go out to trees, to go out to forests, to go out to nature, to make new discoveries about nature -- and about humans' place in nature wherever we are and whomever you are. Thank you very much. (Applause)

One of my favorite parts of my job at the Gates Foundation is that I get to travel to the developing world, and I do that quite regularly. And when I meet the mothers in so many of these remote places, I'm really struck by the things that we have in common. They want what we want for our children and that is for their children to grow up successful, to be healthy, and to have a successful life. But I also see lots of poverty, and it's quite jarring, both in the scale and the scope of it. My first trip in India, I was in a person's home where they had dirt floors, no running water, no electricity, and that's really what I see all over the world. So in short, I'm startled by all the things that they don't have. But I am surprised by one thing that they do have: Coca-Cola. Coke is everywhere. In fact, when I travel to the developing world, Coke feels ubiquitous. And so when I come back from these trips, and I'm thinking about development, and I'm flying home and I'm thinking, "We're trying to deliver condoms to people or vaccinations," you know, Coke's success kind of stops and makes you wonder: how is it that they can get Coke to these far-flung places? If they can do that, why can't governments and NGOs do the same thing? And I'm not the first person to ask this question. But I think, as a community, we still have a lot to learn. It's staggering, if you think about Coca-Cola. They sell 1.5 billion servings every single day. That's like every man, woman and child on the planet having a serving of Coke every week. So why does this matter? Well, if we're going to speed up the progress and go even faster on the set of Millennium Development Goals that we're set as a world, we need to learn from the innovators, and those innovators come from every single sector. I feel that, if we can understand what makes something like Coca-Cola ubiquitous, we can apply those lessons then for the public good. Coke's success is relevant, because if we can analyze it, learn from it, then we can save lives. So that's why I took a bit of time to study Coke. And I think there are really three things we can take away from Coca-Cola. They take real-time data and immediately feed it back into the product. They tap into local entrepreneurial talent, and they do incredible marketing. So let's start with the data. Now Coke has a very clear bottom line -- they report to a set of shareholders, they have to turn a profit. So they take the data, and they use it to measure progress. They have this very continuous feedback loop. They learn something, they put it back into the product, they put it back into the market. They have a whole team called "Knowledge and Insight." It's a lot like other consumer companies. So if you're running Namibia for Coca-Cola, and you have a 107 constituencies, you know where every can versus bottle of Sprite, Fanta or Coke was sold, whether it was a corner store, a supermarket or a pushcart. So if sales start to drop, then the person can identify the problem and address the issue. Let's contrast that for a minute to development. In development, the evaluation comes at the very end of the project. I've sat in a lot of those meetings, and by then, it is way too late to use the data. I had somebody from an NGO once describe it to me as bowling in the dark. They said, "You roll the ball, you hear some pins go down. It's dark, you can't see which one goes down until the lights come on, and then you an see your impact." Real-time data turns on the lights. So what's the second thing that Coke's good at? They're good at tapping into that local entrepreneurial talent. Coke's been in Africa since 1928, but most of the time they couldn't reach the distant markets, because they had a system that was a lot like in the developed world, which was a large truck rolling down the street. And in Africa, the remote places, it's hard to find a good road. But Coke noticed something -- they noticed that local people were taking the product, buying it in bulk and then reselling it in these hard-to-reach places. And so they took a bit of time to learn about that. And they decided in 1990 that they wanted to start training the local entrepreneurs, giving them small loans. They set them up as what they called micro-distribution centers, and those local entrepreneurs then hire sales people, who go out with bicycles and pushcarts and wheelbarrows to sell the product. There are now some 3,000 of these centers employing about 15,000 people in Africa. In Tanzania and Uganda, they represent 90 percent of Coke's sales. Let's look at the development side. What is it that governments and NGOs can learn from Coke? Governments and NGOs need to tap into that local entrepreneurial talent as well, because the locals know how to reach the very hard-to-serve places, their neighbors, and they know what motivates them to make change. I think a great example of this is Ethiopia's new health extension program. The government noticed in Ethiopia that many of the people were so far away from a health clinic, they were over a day's travel away from a health clinic. So if you're in an emergency situation -- or if you're a mom about to deliver a baby -- forget it, to get to the health care center. They decided that wasn't good enough, so they went to India and studied the Indian state of Kerala that also had a system like this, and they adapted it for Ethiopia. And in 2003, the government of Ethiopia started this new system in their own country. They trained 35,000 health extension workers to deliver care directly to the people. In just five years, their ratio went from one worker for every 30,000 people to one worker for every 2,500 people. Now, think about how this can change people's lives. Health extension workers can help with so many things, whether it's family planning, prenatal care, immunizations for the children, or advising the woman to get to the facility on time for an on-time delivery. That is having real impact in a country like Ethiopia, and it's why you see their child mortality numbers coming down 25 percent from 2000 to 2008. In Ethiopia, there are hundreds of thousands of children living because of this health extension worker program. So what's the next step for Ethiopia? Well, they're already starting talk about this. They're starting to talk about, "How do you have the health community workers generate their own ideas? How do you incent them based on the impact that they're getting out in those remote villages?" That's how you tap into local entrepreneurial talent and you unlock people's potential. The third component of Coke's success is marketing. Ultimately, Coke's success depends on one crucial fact and that is that people want a Coca-Cola. Now the reason these micro-entrepreneurs can sell or make a profit is they have to sell every single bottle in their pushcart or their wheelbarrow. So, they rely on Coca-Cola in terms of its marketing, and what's the secret to their marketing? Well, it's aspirational. It is associated that product with a kind of life that people want to live. So even though it's a global company, they take a very local approach. Coke's global campaign slogan is "Open Happiness." But they localize it. And they don't just guess what makes people happy; they go to places like Latin America and they realize that happiness there is associated with family life. And in South Africa, they associate happiness with seriti or community respect. Now, that played itself out in the World Cup campaign. Let's listen to this song that Coke created for it, "Wavin' Flag" by a Somali hip hop artist. (Video) K'Naan: ♫ Oh oh oh oh oh o-oh ♫ ♫ Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh ♫ ♫ Oh oh oh oh oh o-oh ♫ ♫ Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh o-oh ♫ ♫Give you freedom, give you fire♫ ♫ Give you reason, take you higher ♫ ♫ See the champions take the field now ♫ ♫ You define us, make us feel proud ♫ ♫ In the streets our heads are lifted ♫ ♫ As we lose our inhibition ♫ ♫ Celebration, it's around us ♫ ♫ Every nation, all around us ♫ Melinda French Gates: It feels pretty good, right? Well, they didn't stop there -- they localized it into 18 different languages. And it went number one on the pop chart in 17 countries. It reminds me of a song that I remember from my childhood, "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing," that also went number one on the pop charts. Both songs have something in common: that same appeal of celebration and unity. So how does health and development market? Well, it's based on avoidance, not aspirations. I'm sure you've heard some of these messages. "Use a condom, don't get AIDS." "Wash you hands, you might not get diarrhea." It doesn't sound anything like "Wavin' Flag" to me. And I think we make a fundamental mistake -- we make an assumption, that we think that, if people need something, we don't have to make them want that. And I think that's a mistake. And there's some indications around the world that this is starting to change. One example is sanitation. We know that a million and a half children die a year from diarrhea and a lot of it is because of open defecation. But there's a solution: you build a toilet. But what we're finding around the world, over and over again, is, if you build a toilet and you leave it there, it doesn't get used. People reuse it for a slab for their home. They sometimes store grain in it. I've even seen it used for a chicken coop. (Laughter) But what does marketing really entail that would make a sanitation solution get a result in diarrhea? Well, you work with the community. You start to talk to them about why open defecation is something that shouldn't be done in the village, and they agree to that. But then you take the toilet and you position it as a modern, trendy convenience. One state in Northern India has gone so far as to link toilets to courtship. And it works -- look at these headlines. (Laughter) I'm not kidding. Women are refusing to marry men without toilets. No loo, no "I do." (Laughter) Now, it's not just a funny headline -- it's innovative. It's an innovative marketing campaign. But more importantly, it saves lives. Take a look at this -- this is a room full of young men and my husband, Bill. And can you guess what the young men are waiting for? They're waiting to be circumcised. Can you you believe that? We know that circumcision reduces HIV infection by 60 percent in men. And when we first heard this result inside the Foundation, I have to admit, Bill and I were scratching our heads a little bit and we were saying, "But who's going to volunteer for this procedure?" But it turns out the men do, because they're hearing from their girlfriends that they prefer it, and the men also believe it improves their sex life. So if we can start to understand what people really want in health and development, we can change communities and we can change whole nations. Well, why is all of this so important? So let's talk about what happens when this all comes together, when you tie the three things together. And polio, I think, is one of the most powerful examples. We've seen a 99 percent reduction in polio in 20 years. So if you look back to 1988, there are about 350,000 cases of polio on the planet that year. In 2009, we're down to 1,600 cases. Well how did that happen? Let's look at a country like India. They have over a billion people in this country, but they have 35,000 local doctors who report paralysis, and clinicians, a huge reporting system in chemists. They have two and a half million vaccinators. But let me make the story a little bit more concrete for you. Let me tell you the story of Shriram, an 18 month boy in Bihar, a northern state in India. This year on August 8th, he felt paralysis and on the 13th, his parents took him to the doctor. On August 14th and 15th, they took a stool sample, and by the 25th of August, it was confirmed he had Type 1 polio. By August 30th, a genetic test was done, and we knew what strain of polio Shriram had. Now it could have come from one of two places. It could have come from Nepal, just to the north, across the border, or from Jharkhand, a state just to the south. Luckily, the genetic testing proved that, in fact, this strand came north, because, had it come from the south, it would have had a much wider impact in terms of transmission. So many more people would have been affected. So what's the endgame? Well on September 4th, there was a huge mop-up campaign, which is what you do in polio. They went out and where Shriram lives, they vaccinated two million people. So in less than a month, we went from one case of paralysis to a targeted vaccination program. And I'm happy to say only one other person in that area got polio. That's how you keep a huge outbreak from spreading, and it shows what can happen when local people have the data in their hands; they can save lives. Now one of the challenges in polio, still, is marketing, but it might not be what you think. It's not the marketing on the ground. It's not telling the parents, "If you see paralysis, take your child to the doctor or get your child vaccinated." We have a problem with marketing in the donor community. The G8 nations have been incredibly generous on polio over the last 20 years, but we're starting to have something called polio fatigue and that is that the donor nations aren't willing to fund polio any longer. So by next summer, we're sighted to run out of money on polio. So we are 99 percent of the way there on this goal and we're about to run short of money. And I think that if the marketing were more aspirational, if we could focus as a community on how far we've come and how amazing it would be to eradicate this disease, we could put polio fatigue and polio behind us. And if we could do that, we could stop vaccinating everybody, worldwide, in all of our countries for polio. And it would only be the second disease ever wiped off the face of the planet. And we are so close. And this victory is so possible. So if Coke's marketers came to me and asked me to define happiness, I'd say my vision of happiness is a mother holding healthy baby in her arms. To me, that is deep happiness. And so if we can learn lessons from the innovators in every sector, then in the future we make together, that happiness can be just as ubiquitous as Coca-Cola. Thank you. (Applause)

We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination. And we are familiar with the landscapes of our own imagination, our inscapes. We've lived with them all our lives. But there are also hallucinations as well, and hallucinations are completely different. They don't seem to be of our creation. They don't seem to be under our control. They seem to come from the outside, and to mimic perception. So I am going to be talking about hallucinations, and a particular sort of visual hallucination which I see among my patients. A few months ago, I got a phone call from a nursing home where I work. They told me that one of their residents, an old lady in her 90s, was seeing things, and they wondered if she'd gone bonkers or, because she was an old lady, whether she'd had a stroke, or whether she had Alzheimer's. And so they asked me if I would come and see Rosalie, the old lady. I went in to see her. It was evident straight away that she was perfectly sane and lucid and of good intelligence, but she'd been very startled and very bewildered, because she'd been seeing things. And she told me -- the nurses hadn't mentioned this -- that she was blind, that she had been completely blind from macular degeneration for five years. But now, for the last few days, she'd been seeing things. So I said, "What sort of things?" And she said, "People in Eastern dress, in drapes, walking up and down stairs. A man who turns towards me and smiles. But he has huge teeth on one side of his mouth. Animals too. I see a white building. It's snowing, a soft snow. I see this horse with a harness, dragging the snow away. Then, one night, the scene changes. I see cats and dogs walking towards me. They come to a certain point and then stop. Then it changes again. I see a lot of children. They are walking up and down stairs. They wear bright colors, rose and blue, like Eastern dress." Sometimes, she said, before the people come on, she may hallucinate pink and blue squares on the floor, which seem to go up to the ceiling. I said, "Is this like a dream?" And she said, "No, it's not like a dream. It's like a movie." She said, "It's got color. It's got motion. But it's completely silent, like a silent movie." And she said that it's a rather boring movie. She said, "All these people with Eastern dress, walking up and down, very repetitive, very limited." (Laughter) And she has a sense of humor. She knew it was a hallucination. But she was frightened. She'd lived 95 years and she'd never had a hallucination before. She said that the hallucinations were unrelated to anything she was thinking or feeling or doing, that they seemed to come on by themselves, or disappear. She had no control over them. She said she didn't recognize any of the people or places in the hallucinations. And none of the people or the animals, well, they all seemed oblivious of her. And she didn't know what was going on. She wondered if she was going mad or losing her mind. Well, I examined her carefully. She was a bright old lady, perfectly sane. She had no medical problems. She wasn't on any medications which could produce hallucinations. But she was blind. And I then said to her, "I think I know what you have." I said, "There is a special form of visual hallucination which may go with deteriorating vision or blindness. This was originally described," I said, "right back in the 18th century, by a man called Charles Bonnet. And you have Charles Bonnet syndrome. There is nothing wrong with your brain. There is nothing wrong with your mind. You have Charles Bonnet syndrome." And she was very relieved at this, that there was nothing seriously the matter, and also rather curious. She said, "Who is this Charles Bonnet?" She said, "Did he have them himself?" And she said, "Tell all the nurses that I have Charles Bonnet syndrome." (Laughter) "I'm not crazy. I'm not demented. I have Charles Bonnet syndrome." Well, so I did tell the nurses. Now this, for me, is a common situation. I work in old-age homes, largely. I see a lot of elderly people who are hearing impaired or visually impaired. About 10 percent of the hearing impaired people get musical hallucinations. And about 10 percent of the visually impaired people get visual hallucinations. You don't have to be completely blind, only sufficiently impaired. Now with the original description in the 18th century, Charles Bonnet did not have them. His grandfather had these hallucinations. His grandfather was a magistrate, an elderly man. He'd had cataract surgery. His vision was pretty poor. And in 1759, he described to his grandson various things he was seeing. The first thing he said was he saw a handkerchief in midair. It was a large blue handkerchief with four orange circles. And he knew it was a hallucination. You don't have handkerchiefs in midair. And then he saw a big wheel in midair. But sometimes he wasn't sure whether he was hallucinating or not, because the hallucinations would fit in the context of the visions. So on one occasion, when his granddaughters were visiting them, he said, "And who are these handsome young men with you?" And they said, "Alas, Grandpapa, there are no handsome young men." And then the handsome young men disappeared. It's typical of these hallucinations that they may come in a flash and disappear in a flash. They don't usually fade in and out. They are rather sudden, and they change suddenly. Charles Lullin, the grandfather, saw hundreds of different figures, different landscapes of all sorts. On one occasion, he saw a man in a bathrobe smoking a pipe, and realized it was himself. That was the only figure he recognized. On one occasion when he was walking in the streets of Paris, he saw -- this was real -- a scaffolding. But when he got back home, he saw a miniature of the scaffolding six inches high, on his study table. This repetition of perception is sometimes called palinopsia. With him and with Rosalie, what seems to be going on -- and Rosalie said, "What's going on?" -- and I said that as you lose vision, as the visual parts of the brain are no longer getting any input, they become hyperactive and excitable, and they start to fire spontaneously. And you start to see things. The things you see can be very complicated indeed. With another patient of mine, who, also had some vision, the vision she had could be disturbing. On one occasion, she said she saw a man in a striped shirt in a restaurant. And he turned around. And then he divided into six figures in striped shirts, who started walking towards her. And then the six figures came together again, like a concertina. Once, when she was driving, or rather, her husband was driving, the road divided into four and she felt herself going simultaneously up four roads. She had very mobile hallucinations as well. A lot of them had to do with a car. Sometimes she would see a teenage boy sitting on the hood of the car. He was very tenacious and he moved rather gracefully when the car turned. And then when they came to a stop, the boy would do a sudden vertical takeoff, 100 foot in the air, and then disappear. Another patient of mine had a different sort of hallucination. This was a woman who didn't have trouble with her eyes, but the visual parts of her brain, a little tumor in the occipital cortex. And, above all, she would see cartoons. These cartoons would be transparent and would cover half the visual field, like a screen. And especially she saw cartoons of Kermit the Frog. (Laughter) Now, I don't watch Sesame Street, but she made a point of saying, "Why Kermit?" she said, "Kermit the Frog means nothing to me. You know, I was wondering about Freudian determinants. Why Kermit? Kermit the Frog means nothing to me." She didn't mind the cartoons too much. But what did disturb her was she got very persistent images or hallucinations of faces and as with Rosalie, the faces were often deformed, with very large teeth or very large eyes. And these frightened her. Well, what is going on with these people? As a physician, I have to try and define what's going on, and to reassure people, especially to reassure them that they're not going insane. Something like 10 percent, as I said, of visually impaired people get these. But no more than one percent of the people acknowledge them, because they are afraid they will be seen as insane or something. And if they do mention them to their own doctors they may be misdiagnosed. In particular, the notion is that if you see things or hear things, you're going mad, but the psychotic hallucinations are quite different. Psychotic hallucinations, whether they are visual or vocal, they address you. They accuse you. They seduce you. They humiliate you. They jeer at you. You interact with them. There is none of this quality of being addressed with these Charles Bonnet hallucinations. There is a film. You're seeing a film which has nothing to do with you, or that's how people think about it. There is also a rare thing called temporal lobe epilepsy, and sometimes, if one has this, one may feel oneself transported back to a time and place in the past. You're at a particular road junction. You smell chestnuts roasting. You hear the traffic. All the senses are involved. And you're waiting for your girl. And it's that Tuesday evening back in 1982. And the temporal lobe hallucinations are all-sense hallucinations, full of feeling, full of familiarity, located in space and time, coherent, dramatic. The Charles Bonnet ones are quite different. So in the Charles Bonnet hallucinations, you have all sorts of levels, from the geometrical hallucinations -- the pink and blue squares the woman had -- up to quite elaborate hallucinations with figures and especially faces. Faces, and sometimes deformed faces, are the single commonest thing in these hallucinations. And one of the second commonest is cartoons. So, what is going on? Fascinatingly, in the last few years, it's been possible to do functional brain imagery, to do fMRI on people as they are hallucinating. And in fact, to find that different parts of the visual brain are activated as they are hallucinating. When people have these simple geometrical hallucinations, the primary visual cortex is activated. This is the part of the brain which perceives edges and patterns. You don't form images with your primary visual cortex. When images are formed, a higher part of the visual cortex is involved in the temporal lobe. And in particular, one area of the temporal lobe is called the fusiform gyrus. And it's known that if people have damage in the fusiform gyrus, they maybe lose the ability to recognize faces. But if there is an abnormal activity in the fusiform gyrus, they may hallucinate faces, and this is exactly what you find in some of these people. There is an area in the anterior part of this gyrus where teeth and eyes are represented, and that part of the gyrus is activated when people get the deformed hallucinations. There is another part of the brain which is especially activated when one sees cartoons. It's activated when one recognizes cartoons, when one draws cartoons, and when one hallucinates them. It's very interesting that that should be specific. There are other parts of the brain which are specifically involved with the recognition and hallucination of buildings and landscapes. Around 1970, it was found that there were not only parts of the brain, but particular cells. "Face cells" were discovered around 1970. And now we know that there are hundreds of other sorts of cells, which can be very, very specific. So you may not only have "car" cells, you may have "Aston Martin" cells. (Laughter) I saw an Aston Martin this morning. I had to bring it in. And now it's in there somewhere. (Laughter) Now, at this level, in what's called the inferotemporal cortex, there are only visual images, or figments or fragments. It's only at higher levels that the other senses join in and there are connections with memory and emotion. And in the Charles Bonnet syndrome, you don't go to those higher levels. You're in these levels of inferior visual cortex where you have thousands and tens of thousands and millions of images, or figments, or fragmentary figments, all neurally encoded in particular cells or small clusters of cells. Normally these are all part of the integrated stream of perception, or imagination, and one is not conscious of them. It is only if one is visually impaired or blind that the process is interrupted. And instead of getting normal perception, you're getting an anarchic, convulsive stimulation, or release, of all of these visual cells in the inferotemporal cortex. So, suddenly you see a face. Suddenly you see a car. Suddenly this, and suddenly that. The mind does its best to organize and to give some sort of coherence to this, but not terribly successfully. When these were first described, it was thought that they could be interpreted like dreams. But in fact people say, "I don't recognize the people. I can't form any associations." "Kermit means nothing to me." You don't get anywhere thinking of them as dreams. Well, I've more or less said what I wanted. I think I just want to recapitulate and say this is common. Think of the number of blind people. There must be hundreds of thousands of blind people who have these hallucinations, but are too scared to mention them. So this sort of thing needs to be brought into notice, for patients, for doctors, for the public. Finally, I think they are infinitely interesting and valuable, for giving one some insight as to how the brain works. Charles Bonnet said, 250 years ago -- he wondered how, thinking these hallucinations, how, as he put it, the theater of the mind could be generated by the machinery of the brain. Now, 250 years later, I think we're beginning to glimpse how this is done. Thanks very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: That was superb. Thank you so much. You speak about these things with so much insight and empathy for your patients. Have you yourself experienced any of the syndromes you write about? Oliver Sacks: I was afraid you'd ask that. (Laughter) Well, yeah, a lot of them. And actually I'm a little visually impaired myself. I'm blind in one eye, and not terribly good in the other. And I see the geometrical hallucinations. But they stop there. CA: And they don't disturb you? Because you understand what's doing it, it doesn't make you worried? OS: Well they don't disturb me any more than my tinnitus, which I ignore. They occasionally interest me, and I have many pictures of them in my notebooks. I've gone and had an fMRI myself, to see how my visual cortex is taking over. And when I see all these hexagons and complex things, which I also have, in visual migraine, I wonder whether everyone sees things like this, and whether things like cave art or ornamental art may have been derived from them a bit. CA: That was an utterly, utterly fascinating talk. Thank you so much for sharing. OS: Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)

We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination. And we are familiar with the landscapes of our own imagination, our inscapes. We've lived with them all our lives. But there are also hallucinations as well, and hallucinations are completely different. They don't seem to be of our creation. They don't seem to be under our control. They seem to come from the outside, and to mimic perception. So I am going to be talking about hallucinations, and a particular sort of visual hallucination which I see among my patients. A few months ago, I got a phone call from a nursing home where I work. They told me that one of their residents, an old lady in her 90s, was seeing things, and they wondered if she'd gone bonkers or, because she was an old lady, whether she'd had a stroke, or whether she had Alzheimer's. And so they asked me if I would come and see Rosalie, the old lady. I went in to see her. It was evident straight away that she was perfectly sane and lucid and of good intelligence, but she'd been very startled and very bewildered, because she'd been seeing things. And she told me -- the nurses hadn't mentioned this -- that she was blind, that she had been completely blind from macular degeneration for five years. But now, for the last few days, she'd been seeing things. So I said, "What sort of things?" And she said, "People in Eastern dress, in drapes, walking up and down stairs. A man who turns towards me and smiles. But he has huge teeth on one side of his mouth. Animals too. I see a white building. It's snowing, a soft snow. I see this horse with a harness, dragging the snow away. Then, one night, the scene changes. I see cats and dogs walking towards me. They come to a certain point and then stop. Then it changes again. I see a lot of children. They are walking up and down stairs. They wear bright colors, rose and blue, like Eastern dress." Sometimes, she said, before the people come on, she may hallucinate pink and blue squares on the floor, which seem to go up to the ceiling. I said, "Is this like a dream?" And she said, "No, it's not like a dream. It's like a movie." She said, "It's got color. It's got motion. But it's completely silent, like a silent movie." And she said that it's a rather boring movie. She said, "All these people with Eastern dress, walking up and down, very repetitive, very limited." (Laughter) And she has a sense of humor. She knew it was a hallucination. But she was frightened. She'd lived 95 years and she'd never had a hallucination before. She said that the hallucinations were unrelated to anything she was thinking or feeling or doing, that they seemed to come on by themselves, or disappear. She had no control over them. She said she didn't recognize any of the people or places in the hallucinations. And none of the people or the animals, well, they all seemed oblivious of her. And she didn't know what was going on. She wondered if she was going mad or losing her mind. Well, I examined her carefully. She was a bright old lady, perfectly sane. She had no medical problems. She wasn't on any medications which could produce hallucinations. But she was blind. And I then said to her, "I think I know what you have." I said, "There is a special form of visual hallucination which may go with deteriorating vision or blindness. This was originally described," I said, "right back in the 18th century, by a man called Charles Bonnet. And you have Charles Bonnet syndrome. There is nothing wrong with your brain. There is nothing wrong with your mind. You have Charles Bonnet syndrome." And she was very relieved at this, that there was nothing seriously the matter, and also rather curious. She said, "Who is this Charles Bonnet?" She said, "Did he have them himself?" And she said, "Tell all the nurses that I have Charles Bonnet syndrome." (Laughter) "I'm not crazy. I'm not demented. I have Charles Bonnet syndrome." Well, so I did tell the nurses. Now this, for me, is a common situation. I work in old-age homes, largely. I see a lot of elderly people who are hearing impaired or visually impaired. About 10 percent of the hearing impaired people get musical hallucinations. And about 10 percent of the visually impaired people get visual hallucinations. You don't have to be completely blind, only sufficiently impaired. Now with the original description in the 18th century, Charles Bonnet did not have them. His grandfather had these hallucinations. His grandfather was a magistrate, an elderly man. He'd had cataract surgery. His vision was pretty poor. And in 1759, he described to his grandson various things he was seeing. The first thing he said was he saw a handkerchief in midair. It was a large blue handkerchief with four orange circles. And he knew it was a hallucination. You don't have handkerchiefs in midair. And then he saw a big wheel in midair. But sometimes he wasn't sure whether he was hallucinating or not, because the hallucinations would fit in the context of the visions. So on one occasion, when his granddaughters were visiting them, he said, "And who are these handsome young men with you?" And they said, "Alas, Grandpapa, there are no handsome young men." And then the handsome young men disappeared. It's typical of these hallucinations that they may come in a flash and disappear in a flash. They don't usually fade in and out. They are rather sudden, and they change suddenly. Charles Lullin, the grandfather, saw hundreds of different figures, different landscapes of all sorts. On one occasion, he saw a man in a bathrobe smoking a pipe, and realized it was himself. That was the only figure he recognized. On one occasion when he was walking in the streets of Paris, he saw -- this was real -- a scaffolding. But when he got back home, he saw a miniature of the scaffolding six inches high, on his study table. This repetition of perception is sometimes called palinopsia. With him and with Rosalie, what seems to be going on -- and Rosalie said, "What's going on?" -- and I said that as you lose vision, as the visual parts of the brain are no longer getting any input, they become hyperactive and excitable, and they start to fire spontaneously. And you start to see things. The things you see can be very complicated indeed. With another patient of mine, who, also had some vision, the vision she had could be disturbing. On one occasion, she said she saw a man in a striped shirt in a restaurant. And he turned around. And then he divided into six figures in striped shirts, who started walking towards her. And then the six figures came together again, like a concertina. Once, when she was driving, or rather, her husband was driving, the road divided into four and she felt herself going simultaneously up four roads. She had very mobile hallucinations as well. A lot of them had to do with a car. Sometimes she would see a teenage boy sitting on the hood of the car. He was very tenacious and he moved rather gracefully when the car turned. And then when they came to a stop, the boy would do a sudden vertical takeoff, 100 foot in the air, and then disappear. Another patient of mine had a different sort of hallucination. This was a woman who didn't have trouble with her eyes, but the visual parts of her brain, a little tumor in the occipital cortex. And, above all, she would see cartoons. These cartoons would be transparent and would cover half the visual field, like a screen. And especially she saw cartoons of Kermit the Frog. (Laughter) Now, I don't watch Sesame Street, but she made a point of saying, "Why Kermit?" She said, "Kermit the Frog means nothing to me. You know, I was wondering about Freudian determinants. Why Kermit? Kermit the Frog means nothing to me." She didn't mind the cartoons too much. But what did disturb her was she got very persistent images or hallucinations of faces and as with Rosalie, the faces were often deformed, with very large teeth or very large eyes. And these frightened her. Well, what is going on with these people? As a physician, I have to try and define what's going on, and to reassure people, especially to reassure them that they're not going insane. Something like 10 percent, as I said, of visually impaired people get these. But no more than one percent of the people acknowledge them, because they are afraid they will be seen as insane or something. And if they do mention them to their own doctors they may be misdiagnosed. In particular, the notion is that if you see things or hear things, you're going mad, but the psychotic hallucinations are quite different. Psychotic hallucinations, whether they are visual or vocal, they address you. They accuse you. They seduce you. They humiliate you. They jeer at you. You interact with them. There is none of this quality of being addressed with these Charles Bonnet hallucinations. There is a film. You're seeing a film which has nothing to do with you, or that's how people think about it. There is also a rare thing called temporal lobe epilepsy, and sometimes, if one has this, one may feel oneself transported back to a time and place in the past. You're at a particular road junction. You smell chestnuts roasting. You hear the traffic. All the senses are involved. And you're waiting for your girl. And it's that Tuesday evening back in 1982. And the temporal lobe hallucinations are all-sense hallucinations, full of feeling, full of familiarity, located in space and time, coherent, dramatic. The Charles Bonnet ones are quite different. So in the Charles Bonnet hallucinations, you have all sorts of levels, from the geometrical hallucinations -- the pink and blue squares the woman had -- up to quite elaborate hallucinations with figures and especially faces. Faces, and sometimes deformed faces, are the single commonest thing in these hallucinations. And one of the second commonest is cartoons. So, what is going on? Fascinatingly, in the last few years, it's been possible to do functional brain imagery, to do fMRI on people as they are hallucinating. And in fact, to find that different parts of the visual brain are activated as they are hallucinating. When people have these simple geometrical hallucinations, the primary visual cortex is activated. This is the part of the brain which perceives edges and patterns. You don't form images with your primary visual cortex. When images are formed, a higher part of the visual cortex is involved in the temporal lobe. And in particular, one area of the temporal lobe is called the fusiform gyrus. And it's known that if people have damage in the fusiform gyrus, they maybe lose the ability to recognize faces. But if there is an abnormal activity in the fusiform gyrus, they may hallucinate faces, and this is exactly what you find in some of these people. There is an area in the anterior part of this gyrus where teeth and eyes are represented, and that part of the gyrus is activated when people get the deformed hallucinations. There is another part of the brain which is especially activated when one sees cartoons. It's activated when one recognizes cartoons, when one draws cartoons, and when one hallucinates them. It's very interesting that that should be specific. There are other parts of the brain which are specifically involved with the recognition and hallucination of buildings and landscapes. Around 1970, it was found that there were not only parts of the brain, but particular cells. "Face cells" were discovered around 1970. And now we know that there are hundreds of other sorts of cells, which can be very, very specific. So you may not only have "car" cells, you may have "Aston Martin" cells. (Laughter) I saw an Aston Martin this morning. I had to bring it in. And now it's in there somewhere. (Laughter) Now, at this level, in what's called the inferotemporal cortex, there are only visual images, or figments or fragments. It's only at higher levels that the other senses join in and there are connections with memory and emotion. And in the Charles Bonnet syndrome, you don't go to those higher levels. You're in these levels of inferior visual cortex where you have thousands and tens of thousands and millions of images, or figments, or fragmentary figments, all neurally encoded in particular cells or small clusters of cells. Normally these are all part of the integrated stream of perception, or imagination, and one is not conscious of them. It is only if one is visually impaired or blind that the process is interrupted. And instead of getting normal perception, you're getting an anarchic, convulsive stimulation, or release, of all of these visual cells in the inferotemporal cortex. So, suddenly you see a face. Suddenly you see a car. Suddenly this, and suddenly that. The mind does its best to organize and to give some sort of coherence to this, but not terribly successfully. When these were first described, it was thought that they could be interpreted like dreams. But in fact people say, "I don't recognize the people. I can't form any associations." "Kermit means nothing to me." You don't get anywhere thinking of them as dreams. Well, I've more or less said what I wanted. I think I just want to recapitulate and say this is common. Think of the number of blind people. There must be hundreds of thousands of blind people who have these hallucinations, but are too scared to mention them. So this sort of thing needs to be brought into notice, for patients, for doctors, for the public. Finally, I think they are infinitely interesting and valuable, for giving one some insight as to how the brain works. Charles Bonnet said, 250 years ago -- he wondered how, thinking these hallucinations, how, as he put it, the theater of the mind could be generated by the machinery of the brain. Now, 250 years later, I think we're beginning to glimpse how this is done. Thanks very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: That was superb. Thank you so much. You speak about these things with so much insight and empathy for your patients. Have you yourself experienced any of the syndromes you write about? Oliver Sacks: I was afraid you'd ask that. (Laughter) Well, yeah, a lot of them. And actually I'm a little visually impaired myself. I'm blind in one eye, and not terribly good in the other. And I see the geometrical hallucinations. But they stop there. CA: And they don't disturb you? Because you understand what's doing it, it doesn't make you worried? OS: Well they don't disturb me any more than my tinnitus, which I ignore. They occasionally interest me, and I have many pictures of them in my notebooks. I've gone and had an fMRI myself, to see how my visual cortex is taking over. And when I see all these hexagons and complex things, which I also have, in visual migraine, I wonder whether everyone sees things like this, and whether things like cave art or ornamental art may have been derived from them a bit. CA: That was an utterly, utterly fascinating talk. Thank you so much for sharing. OS: Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)

As humans, it's in our nature to want to improve our health and minimize our suffering. Whatever life throws at us, whether it's cancer, diabetes, heart disease, or even broken bones, we want to try and get better. Now I'm head of a biomaterials lab, and I'm really fascinated by the way that humans have used materials in really creative ways in the body over time. Take, for example, this beautiful blue nacre shell. This was actually used by the Mayans as an artificial tooth replacement. We're not quite sure why they did it. It's hard. It's durable. But it also had other very nice properties. In fact, when they put it into the jawbone, it could integrate into the jaw, and we know now with very sophisticated imaging technologies that part of that integration comes from the fact that this material is designed in a very specific way, has a beautiful chemistry, has a beautiful architecture. And I think in many ways we can sort of think of the use of the blue nacre shell and the Mayans as the first real application of the bluetooth technology. (Laughter) But if we move on and think throughout history how people have used different materials in the body, very often it's been physicians that have been quite creative. They've taken things off the shelf. One of my favorite examples is that of Sir Harold Ridley, who was a famous ophthalmologist, or at least became a famous ophthalmologist. And during World War II, what he would see would be pilots coming back from their missions, and he noticed that within their eyes they had shards of small bits of material lodged within the eye, but the very interesting thing about it was that material, actually, wasn't causing any inflammatory response. So he looked into this, and he figured out that actually that material was little shards of plastic that were coming from the canopy of the Spitfires. And this led him to propose that material as a new material for intraocular lenses. It's called PMMA, and it's now used in millions of people every year and helps in preventing cataracts. And that example, I think, is a really nice one, because it helps remind us that in the early days, people often chose materials because they were bioinert. Their very purpose was to perform a mechanical function. You'd put them in the body and you wouldn't get an adverse response. And what I want to show you is that in regenerative medicine, we've really shifted away from that idea of taking a bioinert material. We're actually actively looking for materials that will be bioactive, that will interact with the body, and that furthermore we can put in the body, they'll have their function, and then they'll dissolve away over time. If we look at this schematic, this is showing you what we think of as the typical tissue-engineering approach. We have cells there, typically from the patient. We can put those onto a material, and we can make that material very complex if we want to, and we can then grow that up in the lab or we can put it straight back into the patient. And this is an approach that's used all over the world, including in our lab. But one of the things that's really important when we're thinking about stem cells is that obviously stem cells can be many different things, and they want to be many different things, and so we want to make sure that the environment we put them into has enough information so that they can become the right sort of specialist tissue. And if we think about the different types of tissues that people are looking at regenerating all over the world, in all the different labs in the world, there's pretty much every tissue you can think of. And actually, the structure of those tissues is quite different, and it's going to really depend on whether your patient has any underlying disease, other conditions, in terms of how you're going to regenerate your tissue, and you're going to need to think about the materials you're going to use really carefully, their biochemistry, their mechanics, and many other properties as well. Our tissues all have very different abilities to regenerate, and here we see poor Prometheus, who made a rather tricky career choice and was punished by the Greek gods. He was tied to a rock, and an eagle would come every day to eat his liver. But of course his liver would regenerate every day, and so day after day he was punished for eternity by the gods. And liver will regenerate in this very nice way, but actually if we think of other tissues, like cartilage, for example, even the simplest nick and you're going to find it really difficult to regenerate your cartilage. So it's going to be very different from tissue to tissue. Now, bone is somewhere in between, and this is one of the tissues that we work on a lot in our lab. And bone is actually quite good at repairing. It has to be. We've probably all had fractures at some point or other. And one of the ways that you can think about repairing your fracture is this procedure here, called an iliac crest harvest. And what the surgeon might do is take some bone from your iliac crest, which is just here, and then transplant that somewhere else in the body. And it actually works really well, because it's your own bone, and it's well vascularized, which means it's got a really good blood supply. But the problem is, there's only so much you can take, and also when you do that operation, your patients might actually have significant pain in that defect site even two years after the operation. So what we were thinking is, there's a tremendous need for bone repair, of course, but this iliac crest-type approach really has a lot of limitations to it, and could we perhaps recreate the generation of bone within the body on demand and then be able to transplant it without these very, very painful aftereffects that you would have with the iliac crest harvest? And so this is what we did, and the way we did it was by coming back to this typical tissue-engineering approach but actually thinking about it rather differently. And we simplified it a lot, so we got rid of a lot of these steps. We got rid of the need to harvest cells from the patient, we got rid of the need to put in really fancy chemistries, and we got rid of the need to culture these scaffolds in the lab. And what we really focused on was our material system and making it quite simple, but because we used it in a really clever way, we were able to generate enormous amounts of bone using this approach. So we were using the body as really the catalyst to help us to make lots of new bone. And it's an approach that we call the in vivo bioreactor, and we were able to make enormous amounts of bone using this approach. And I'll talk you through this. So what we do is, in humans, we all have a layer of stem cells on the outside of our long bones. That layer is called the periosteum. And that layer is actually normally very, very tightly bound to the underlying bone, and it's got stem cells in it. Those stem cells are really important in the embryo when it develops, and they also sort of wake up if you have a fracture to help you with repairing the bone. So we take that periosteum layer and we developed a way to inject underneath it a liquid that then, within 30 seconds, would turn into quite a rigid gel and can actually lift the periosteum away from the bone. So it creates, in essence, an artificial cavity that is right next to both the bone but also this really rich layer of stem cells. And we go in through a pinhole incision so that no other cells from the body can get in, and what happens is that that artificial in vivo bioreactor cavity can then lead to the proliferation of these stem cells, and they can form lots of new tissue, and then over time, you can harvest that tissue and use it elsewhere in the body. This is a histology slide of what we see when we do that, and essentially what we see is very large amounts of bone. So in this picture, you can see the middle of the leg, so the bone marrow, then you can see the original bone, and you can see where that original bone finishes, and just to the left of that is the new bone that's grown within that bioreactor cavity, and you can actually make it even larger. And that demarcation that you can see between the original bone and the new bone acts as a very slight point of weakness, so actually now the surgeon can come along, can harvest away that new bone, and the periosteum can grow back, so you're left with the leg in the same sort of state as if you hadn't operated on it in the first place. So it's very, very low in terms of after-pain compared to an iliac crest harvest. And you can grow different amounts of bone depending on how much gel you put in there, so it really is an on demand sort of procedure. Now, at the time that we did this, this received a lot of attention in the press, because it was a really nice way of generating new bone, and we got many, many contacts from different people that were interested in using this. And I'm just going to tell you, sometimes those contacts are very strange, slightly unexpected, and the very most interesting, let me put it that way, contact that I had, was actually from a team of American footballers that all wanted to have double-thickness skulls made on their head. And so you do get these kinds of contacts, and of course, being British and also growing up in France, I tend to be very blunt, and so I had to explain to them very nicely that in their particular case, there probably wasn't that much in there to protect in the first place. (Laughter) (Applause) So this was our approach, and it was simple materials, but we thought about it carefully. And actually we know that those cells in the body, in the embryo, as they develop can form a different kind of tissue, cartilage, and so we developed a gel that was slightly different in nature and slightly different chemistry, put it in there, and we were able to get 100 percent cartilage instead. And this approach works really well, I think, for pre-planned procedures, but it's something you do have to pre-plan. So for other kinds of operations, there's definitely a need for other scaffold-based approaches. And when you think about designing those other scaffolds, actually, you need a really multi-disciplinary team. And so our team has chemists, it has cell biologists, surgeons, physicists even, and those people all come together and we think really hard about designing the materials. But we want to make them have enough information that we can get the cells to do what we want, but not be so complex as to make it difficult to get to clinic. And so one of the things we think about a lot is really trying to understand the structure of the tissues in the body. And so if we think of bone, obviously my own favorite tissue, we zoom in, we can see, even if you don't know anything about bone structure, it's beautifully organized, really beautifully organized. We've lots of blood vessels in there. And if we zoom in again, we see that the cells are actually surrounded by a 3D matrix of nano-scale fibers, and they give a lot of information to the cells. And if we zoom in again, actually in the case of bone, the matrix around the cells is beautifully organized at the nano scale, and it's a hybrid material that's part organic, part inorganic. And that's led to a whole field, really, that has looked at developing materials that have this hybrid kind of structure. And so I'm showing here just two examples where we've made some materials that have that sort of structure, and you can really tailor it. You can see here a very squishy one and now a material that's also this hybrid sort of material but actually has remarkable toughness, and it's no longer brittle. And an inorganic material would normally be really brittle, and you wouldn't be able to have that sort of strength and toughness in it. One other thing I want to quickly mention is that many of the scaffolds we make are porous, and they have to be, because you want blood vessels to grow in there. But the pores are actually oftentimes much bigger than the cells, and so even though it's 3D, the cell might see it more as a slightly curved surface, and that's a little bit unnatural. And so one of the things you can think about doing is actually making scaffolds with slightly different dimensions that might be able to surround your cells in 3D and give them a little bit more information. And there's a lot of work going on in both of these areas. Now finally, I just want to talk a little bit about applying this sort of thing to cardiovascular disease, because this is a really big clinical problem. And one of the things that we know is that, unfortunately, if you have a heart attack, then that tissue can start to die, and your outcome may not be very good over time. And it would be really great, actually, if we could stop that dead tissue either from dying or help it to regenerate. And there's lots and lots of stem cell trials going on worldwide, and they use many different types of cells, but one common theme that seems to be coming out is that actually, very often, those cells will die once you've implanted them. And you can either put them into the heart or into the blood system, but either way, we don't seem to be able to get quite the right number of cells getting to the location we want them to and being able to deliver the sort of beautiful cell regeneration that we would like to have to get good clinical outcomes. And so some of the things that we're thinking of, and many other people in the field are thinking of, are actually developing materials for that. But there's a difference here. We still need chemistry, we still need mechanics, we still need really interesting topography, and we still need really interesting ways to surround the cells. But now, the cells also would probably quite like a material that's going to be able to be conductive, because the cells themselves will respond very well and will actually conduct signals between themselves. You can see them now beating synchronously on these materials, and that's a very, very exciting development that's going on. So just to wrap up, I'd like to actually say that being able to work in this sort of field, all of us that work in this field that's not only super-exciting science, but also has the potential to impact on patients, however big or small they are, is really a great privilege. And so for that, I'd like to thank all of you as well. Thank you. (Applause)

Because of what I'm about to say, I really should establish my green credentials. When I was a small boy, I took my pledge as an American, to save and faithfully defend from waste the natural resources of my country, its air, soil and minerals, its forests, waters and wildlife. And I've stuck to that. Stanford, I majored in ecology and evolution. 1968, I put out the Whole Earth Catalog. Was "mister natural" for a while. And then worked for the Jerry Brown administration. The Brown administration, and a bunch of my friends, basically leveled the energy efficiency of California, so it's the same now, 30 years later, even though our economy has gone up 80 percent, per capita. And we are putting out less greenhouse gasses than any other state. California is basically the equivalent of Europe, in this. This year, Whole Earth Catalog has a supplement that I'll preview today, called Whole Earth Discipline. The dominant demographic event of our time is this screamingly rapid urbanization that we have going on. By mid-century we'll be about 80 percent urban, and that's mostly in the developing world, where that's happening. It's interesting, because history is driven to a large degree by the size of cities. The developing world now has all of the biggest cities, and they are developing three times faster than the developed countries, and nine times bigger. It's qualitatively different. They are the drivers of history, as we see by looking at history. 1,000 years ago this is what the world looked like. Well we now have a distribution of urban power similar to what we had 1,000 years ago. In other words, the rise of the West, dramatic as it was, is over. The aggregate numbers are absolutely overwhelming: 1.3 million people a week coming to town, decade after decade. What's really going on? Well, what's going on is the villages of the world are emptying out. Subsistence farming is drying up basically. People are following opportunity into town. And this is why. I used to have a very romantic idea about villages, and it's because I never lived in one. (Laughter) Because in town -- this is the bustling squatter city of Kibera, near Nairobi -- they see action. They see opportunity. They see a cash economy that they were not able to participate in back in the subsistence farm. As you go around these places there's plenty of aesthetics. There is plenty going on. They are poor, but they are intensely urban. And they are intensely creative. The aggregate numbers now are that basically squatters, all one billion of them, are building the urban world, which means they're building the world -- personally, one by one, family by family, clan by clan, neighborhood by neighborhood. They start flimsy and they get substantial as time goes by. They even build their own infrastructure. Well, steal their own infrastructure, at first. Cable TV, water, the whole gamut, all gets stolen. And then gradually gentrifies. It is not the case that slums undermine prosperity, not the working slums; they help create prosperity. So in a town like Mumbai, which is half slums, it's 1/6th of the GDP of India. Social capital in the slums is at its most urban and dense. These people are valuable as a group. And that's how they work. There is a lot of people who think about all these poor people, "Oh there's terrible things. We've got to fix their housing." It used to be, "Oh we've got to get them phone service." Now they're showing us how they do their phone service. Famine mostly is a rural event now. There are things they care about. And this is where we can help. And the nations they're in can help. And they are helping each other solve these issues. And you go to a nice dense place like this slum in Mumbai. You look at that lane on the right. And you can ask, "Okay what's going on there?" The answer is, "Everything." This is better than a mall. It's much denser. It's much more interactive. And the scale is terrific. The main event is, these are not people crushed by poverty. These are people busy getting out of poverty just as fast as they can. They're helping each other do it. They're doing it through an outlaw thing, the informal economy. The informal economy, it's sort of like dark energy in astrophysics: it's not supposed to be there, but it's huge. We don't understand how it works yet, but we have to. Furthermore, people in the informal economy, the gray economy -- as time goes by, crime is happening around them. And they can join the criminal world, or they can join the legitimate world. We should be able to make that choice easier for them to get toward the legitimate world, because if we don't, they will go toward the criminal world. There's all kinds of activity. In Dharavi the slum performs not only a lot of services for itself, but it performs services for the city at large. And one of the main events are these ad-hoc schools. Parents pool their money to hire some local teachers to a private, tiny, unofficial school. Education is more possible in the cities, and that changes the world. So you see some interesting, typical, urban things. So one thing slammed up against another, such as in Sao Paulo here. That's what cities do. That's how they create value, is by slamming things together. In this case, supply right next to demand. So the maids and the gardeners and the guards that live in this lively part of town on the left walk to work, in the boring, rich neighborhood. Proximity is amazing. We are learning about how dense proximity can be. Connectivity between the city and the country is what's going to keep the country good, because the city has interesting ways of doing things. This is what makes cities -- (Applause) this is what makes cities so green in the developing world. Because people leave the poverty trap, an ecological disaster of subsistence farms, and head to town. And when they're gone the natural environment starts to come back very rapidly. And those who remain in the village can shift over to cash crops to send food to the new growing markets in town. So if you want to save a village, you do it with a good road, or with a good cell phone connection, and ideally some grid electrical power. So the event is: we're a city planet. That just happened. More than half. The numbers are considerable. A billion live in the squatter cities now. Another billion is expected. That's more than a sixth of humanity living a certain way. And that will determine a lot of how we function. Now, for us environmentalists, maybe the greenest thing about the cities is they diffuse the population bomb. People get into town. The immediately have fewer children. They don't even have to get rich yet. Just the opportunity of coming up in the world means they will have fewer, higher-quality kids, and the birthrate goes down radically. Very interesting side effect here, here's a slide from Phillip Longman. Shows what is happening. As we have more and more old people, like me, and fewer and fewer babies. And they are regionally separated. What you're getting is a world which is old folks, and old cities, going around doing things the old way, in the north. And young people in brand new cities they're inventing, doing new things, in the south. Where do you think the action is going to be? Shift of subject. Quickly drop by climate. The climate news, I'm sorry to say, is going to keep getting worse than we think, faster than we think. Climate is a profoundly complex, nonlinear system, full of runaway positive feedbacks, hidden thresholds and irrevocable tipping points. Here's just a few samples. We're going to keep being surprised. And almost all the surprises are going to be bad ones. From your standpoint this means a great increase in climate refugees over the coming decades, and what goes along with that, which is resource wars and chaos wars, as we're seeing in Darfur. That's what drought does. It brings carrying capacity down, and there's not enough carrying capacity to support the people. And then you're in trouble. Shift to the power situation. Baseload electricity is what it takes to run a city, or a city planet. So far there is only three sources of baseload electricity: coal, some gas, nuclear and hydro. Of those, only nuclear and hydro are green. Coal is what is causing the climate problems. And everyone will keep burning it because it's so cheap, until governments make it expensive. Wind and solar can't help, because so far we don't have a way to store that energy. So with hydro maxed out, coal and lose the climate, or nuclear, which is the current operating low-carbon source, and maybe save the climate. And if we can eventually get good solar in space, that also could help. Because remember, this is what drives the prosperity in the developing world in the villages and in the cities. So, between coal and nuclear, compare their waste products. If all of the electricity you used in your lifetime was nuclear, the amount of waste that would be added up would fit in a Coke can. Whereas a coal-burning plant, a normal one gigawatt coal plant, burns 80 rail cars of coal a day, each car having 100 tons. And it puts 18 thousand tons of carbon dioxide in the air. So and then when you compare the lifetime emissions of these various energy forms, nuclear is about even with solar and wind, and ahead of solar -- oh, I'm sorry -- with hydro and wind, and ahead of solar. And does nuclear really compete with coal? Just ask the coal miners in Australia. That's where you see some of the source, not from my fellow environmentalists, but from people who feel threatened by nuclear power. Well the good news is that the developing world, but frankly, the whole world, is busy building, and starting to build, nuclear reactors. This is good for the atmosphere. It's good for their prosperity. I want to point out one interesting thing, which is that environmentalists like the thing we call micropower. It's supposed to be, I don't know, local solar and wind and cogeneration, and good things like that. But frankly micro-reactors which are just now coming on, might serve even better. The Russians, who started this, are building floating reactors, for their new passage, where the ice is melting, north of Russia. And they're selling these floating reactors, only 35 megawatts, to developing countries. Here's the design of an early one from Toshiba. It's interesting, say, to take a 25-megawatt, 25 million watts, and you compare it to the standard big iron of an ordinary Westinghouse or Ariva, which is 1.2, 1.6 billion watts. These things are way smaller. They're much more adaptable. Here's an American design from Lawrence Livermore Lab. Here's another American design that came out of Los Alamos, and is now commercial. Almost all of these are not only small, they are proliferation-proof. They're typically buried in the ground. And the innovation is moving very rapidly. So I think microreactors is going to be important for the future. In terms of proliferation, nuclear energy has done more to dismantle nuclear weapons than any other activity. And that's why 10 percent of the electricity in this room, 20 percent of electricity in this room is probably nuclear. Half of that is coming from dismantled warheads from Russia, soon to be joined by our dismantled warheads. And so I would like to see the GNEP program, that was developed in the Bush administration, go forward aggressively. And I was glad to see that president Obama supported the nuclear fuel bank strategy when he spoke in Prague the other week. One more subject. Genetically engineered food crops, in my view, as a biologist, have no reason to be controversial. My fellow environmentalists, on this subject, have been irrational, anti-scientific, and very harmful. Despite their best efforts, genetically engineered crops are the most rapidly successful agricultural innovation in history. They're good for the environment because they enable no-till farming, which leaves the soil in place, getting healthier from year to year -- slso keeps less carbon dioxide going from the soil into the atmosphere. They reduce pesticide use. And they increase yield, which allows you to have your agricultural area be smaller, and therefore more wild area is freed up. By the way, this map from 2006 is out of date because it shows Africa still under the thumb of Greenpeace, and Friends of the Earth from Europe, and they're finally getting out from under that. And biotech is moving rapidly in Africa, at last. This is a moral issue. The Nuffield Council on Bioethics met on this issue twice in great detail and said it is a moral imperative to make genetically engineered crops readily available. Speaking of imperatives, geoengineering is taboo now, especially in government circles, though I think there was a DARPA meeting on it a couple of weeks ago, but it will be on your plate -- not this year but pretty soon, because some harsh realizations are coming along. This is a list of them. Basically the news is going to keep getting more scary. There will be events, like 35,000 people dying of a heat wave, which happened a while back. Like cyclones coming up toward Bangladesh. Like wars over water, such as in the Indus. And as those events keep happening we're going to say, "Okay, what can we do about that really?" But there's this little problem with geoengineering: what body is going to decide who gets to engineer? How much they do? Where they do it? Because everybody is downstream, downwind of whatever is done. And if we just taboo it completely we could lose civilization. But if we just say "OK, China, you're worried, you go ahead. You geoengineer your way. We'll geoengineer our way." That would be considered an act of war by both nations. So this is very interesting diplomacy coming along. I should say, it is more practical than people think. Here is an example that climatologists like a lot, one of the dozens of geoengineering ideas. This one came from the sulfur dioxide from Mount Pinatubo in 1991 -- cooled the earth by half a degree. There was so much ice in 1992, the following year, that there was a bumper crop of polar bear cubs who were known as the Pinatubo cubs. To put sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere would cost on the order of a billion dollars a year. That's nothing, compared to all of the other things we may be trying to do about energy. Just to run by another one: this is a plan to brighten the reflectance of ocean clouds, by atomizing seawater; that would brighten the albedo of the whole planet. A nice one, because it can happen lots of little ways in lots of little places, is by copying the ancient Amazon Indians who made good agricultural soil by pyrolizing, smoldering, plant waste, and biochar fixes large quantities of carbon while it's improving the soil. So here is where we are. Nobel Prize-winning climatologist Paul Crutzen calls our geological era the Anthropocene, the human-dominated era. We are stuck with its obligations. In the Whole Earth Catalog, my first words were, "We are as Gods, and might as well get good at it." The first words of Whole Earth Discipline are, "We are as Gods, and have to get good at it." Thank you. (Applause)

Food crisis. It's in the news every day. But what is it? Some places in the world it's too little food, maybe too much. Other places, GMO is saving the world. Maybe GMO is the problem? Too much agricultural runoff creating bad oceans, toxic oceans, attenuation of nutrition. They go on and on. And I find the current climate of this discussion incredibly disempowering. So how do we bring that to something that we understand? How is this apple food crisis? You've all eaten an apple in the last week, I'm sure. How old do you think it was from when it was picked? Two weeks? Two months? Eleven months -- the average age of an apple in a grocery store in the United States. And I don't expect it to be much different in Europe or anywhere else in the world. We pick them, we put them in cold storage, we gas the cold storage -- there's actually documented proof of workers trying to go into these environments to retrieve an apple, and dying, because the atmosphere that they slow down the process of the apple with is also toxic to humans. How is it that none of you knew this? Why didn't I know this? Ninety percent of the quality of that apple -- all of the antioxidants -- are gone by the time we get it. It's basically a little ball of sugar. How did we get so information poor and how can we do better? I think what's missing is a platform. I know platforms -- I know computers, they put me on the Internet when I was young. I did very weird things -- (Laughter) on this platform. But I met people, and I could express myself. How do you express yourself in food? If we had a platform, we might feel empowered to question: What if? For me, I questioned: What if climate was democratic? So, this is a map of climate in the world. The most productive areas in green, the least productive in red. They shift and they change, and Californian farmers now become Mexican farmers. China picks up land in Brazil to grow better food, and we're a slave to climate. What if each country had its own productive climate? What would that change about how we live? What would that change about quality of life and nutrition? The last generation's problem was, we need more food and we need it cheap. Welcome to your global farm. We built a huge analog farm. All these traces -- these are cars, planes, trains and automobiles. It's a miracle that we feed seven billion people with just a few of us involved in the production of food. What if ... we built a digital farm? A digital world farm. What if you could take this apple, digitize it somehow, send it through particles in the air and reconstitute it on the other side? What if? Going through some of these quotes, you know, they inspire me to do what I do. First one: ["Japanese farming has no youth, no water, no land and no future."] That's what I landed to the day that I went to Minamisanriku, one stop south of Fukushima, after the disaster. The kids have headed to Sendai and Tokyo, the land is contaminated, they already import 70 percent of their own food. But it's not unique to Japan. Two percent of the American population is involved in farming. What good answer comes from two percent of any population? As we go around the world, 50 percent of the African population is under 18. Eighty percent don't want to be farmers. Farming is hard. The life of a small-shareholder farmer is miserable. They go into the city. In India: farmers' families not being able to have basic access to utilities, more farmer suicides this year and the previous 10 before that. It's uncomfortable to talk about. Where are they going? Into the city. No young people, and everyone's headed in. So how do we build this platform that inspires the youth? Welcome to the new tractor. This is my combine. A number of years ago now, I went to Bed Bath and Beyond and Home Depot and I started hacking. And I built silly things and I made plants dance and I attached them to my computer and I killed them all -- a lot. (Laughter) I eventually got them to survive. And I created one of the most intimate relationships I've ever had in my life, because I was learning the language of plants. I wanted to make it bigger. They said, "Knock yourself out, kid! Here's an old electronics room that nobody wants. What can you do?" With my team, we built a farm inside of the media lab, a place historically known not for anything about biology but everything about digital life. Inside of these 60 square feet, we produced enough food to feed about 300 people once a month -- not a lot of food. And there's a lot of interesting technology in there. But the most interesting thing? Beautiful, white roots, deep, green colors and a monthly harvest. Is this a new cafeteria? Is this a new retail experience? Is this a new grocery store? I can tell you one thing for sure: this is the first time anybody in the media lab ripped the roots off of anything. (Laughter) We get our salad in bags; there's nothing wrong with that. But what happens when you have an image-based processing expert, a data scientist, a roboticist, ripping roots off and thinking, "Huh. I know something about -- I could make this happen, I want to try." In that process we would bring the plants out and we would take some back to the lab, because if you grew it, you don't throw it away; it's kind of precious to you. I have this weird tongue now, because I'm afraid to let anybody eat anything until I've eaten it first, because I want it to be good. So I eat lettuce every day and I can tell the pH of a lettuce within .1. (Laughter) I'm like, "No, that's 6.1 -- no, no, you can't eat it today." (Applause) This lettuce that day was hyper sweet. It was hyper sweet because the plant had been stressed and it created a chemical reaction in the plant to protect itself: "I'm not going to die!" And the plants not-going-to-die, taste sweet to me. Technologists falling backwards into plant physiology. So we thought other people needed to be able to try this. We want to see what people can create, so we conceived of a lab that could be shipped anywhere. And then we built it. So on the facade of the media lab is my lab, that has about 30 points of sensing per plant. If you know about the genome or genetics, this is the phenome, right? The phenomena. When you say, "I like the strawberries from Mexico," you really like the strawberries from the climate that produced the expression that you like. So if you're coding climate -- this much CO2, this much O2 creates a recipe -- you're coding the expression of that plant, the nutrition of that plant, the size of that plant, the shape, the color, the texture. We need data, so we put a bunch of sensors in there to tell us what's going on. If you think of your houseplants, and you look at your houseplant and you're super sad, because you're like, "Why are you dying? Won't you talk to me?" (Laughter) Farmers develop the most beautiful fortune-telling eyes by the time they're in their late 60s and 70s. They can tell you when you see that plant dying that it's a nitrogen deficiency, a calcium deficiency or it needs more humidity. Those beautiful eyes are not being passed down. These are eyes in the cloud of a farmer. We trend those data points over time. We correlate those data points to individual plants. These are all the broccoli in my lab that day, by IP address. (Laughter) We have IP-addressable broccoli. (Applause) So if that's not weird enough, you can click one and you get a plant profile. And what this tells you is downloadable progress on that plant, but not like you'd think, it's not just when it's ready. When does it achieve the nutrition that I need? When does it achieve the taste that I desire? Is it getting too much water? Is it getting too much sun? Alerts. It can talk to me, it's conversant, we have a language. (Laughter) (Applause) I think of that as the first user on the plant Facebook, right? That's a plant profile and that plant will start making friends. (Laughter) And I mean it -- it will make friends with other plants that use less nitrogen, more phosphorus, less potassium. We're going to learn about a complexity that we can only guess at now. And they may not friend us back -- I don't know, they might friend us back, it depends on how we act. So this is my lab now. It's a little bit more systematized, my background is designing data centers in hospitals of all things, so I know a little bit about creating a controlled environment. And so -- inside of this environment, we're experimenting with all kinds of things. This process, aeroponics, was developed by NASA for Mir Space Station for reducing the amount of water they send into space. What it really does is give the plant exactly what it wants: water, minerals and oxygen. Roots are not that complicated, so when you give them that, you get this amazing expression. It's like the plant has two hearts. And because it has two hearts, it grows four or five times faster. It's a perfect world. We've gone a long way into technology and seed for an adverse world and we're going to continue to do that, but we're going to have a new tool, too, which is perfect world. So we've grown all kinds of things. These tomatoes hadn't been in commercial production for 150 years. Do you know that we have rare and ancient seed banks? Banks of seed. It's amazing. They have germplasm alive and things that you've never eaten. I am the only person in this room that's eaten that kind of tomato. Problem is it was a sauce tomato and we don't know how to cook, so we ate a sauce tomato, which is not that great. But we've done things with protein -- we've grown all kinds of things. We've grown humans -- (Laughter) Well maybe you could, but we didn't. But what we realized is, the tool was too big, it was too expensive. I was starting to put them around the world and they were about 100,000 dollars. Finding somebody with 100 grand in their back pocket isn't easy, so we wanted to make a small one. This project was actually one of my student's -- mechanical engineering undergraduate, Camille. So Camille and I and my team, we iterated all summer, how to make it cheaper, how to make it work better, how to make it so other people can make it. Then we dropped them off in schools, seventh through eleventh grade. And if you want to be humbled, try to teach a kid something. So I went into this school and I said, "Set it to 65 percent humidity." The seventh grader said, "What's humidity?" And I said, "Oh, it's water in air." He said, "There's no water in air, you're an idiot." (Laughter) And I was like, "Alright, don't trust me. Actually -- don't trust me, right? Set it to 100. He sets it to 100 and what happens? It starts to condense, make a fog and eventually drip. And he says, "Oh. Humidity is rain. Why didn't you just tell me that?" (Laughter) We've created an interface for this that's much like a game. They have a 3D environment, they can log into it anywhere in the world on their smartphone, on their tablet. They have different parts of the bots -- the physical, the sensors. They select recipes that have been created by other kids anywhere in the world. They select and activate that recipe, they plant a seedling. While it's growing, they make changes. They're like, "Why does a plant need CO2 anyway? Isn't CO2 bad? It kills people." Crank up CO2, plant dies. Or crank down CO2, plant does very well. Harvest plant, and you've created a new digital recipe. It's an iterative design and development and exploration process. They can download, then, all of the data about that new plant that they developed or the new digital recipe and what did it do -- was it better or was it worse? Imagine these as little cores of processing. We're going to learn so much. Here's one of the food computers, as we call them, in a school in three weeks' time. This is three weeks of growth. But more importantly, it was the first time that this kid ever thought he could be a farmer -- or that he would want to be a farmer. So, we've open-sourced all of this. It's all online; go home, try to build your first food computer. It's going to be difficult -- I'm just telling you. We're in the beginning, but it's all there. It's very important to me that this is easily accessible. We're going to keep making it more so. These are farmers, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, environmental engineer, computer scientist, plant scientist, economist, urban planners. On one platform, doing what they're good at. But we got a little too big. This is my new facility that I'm just starting. This warehouse could be anywhere. That's why I chose it. And inside of this warehouse we're going to build something kind of like this. These exist right now. Take a look at it. These exist, too. One grows greens, one grows Ebola vaccine. Pretty amazing that plants and this DARPA Grand Challenge winner is one of the reasons we're getting ahead of Ebola. The plants are producing the protein that's Ebola resistant. So pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals, all they way down to lettuce. But these two things look nothing alike, and that's where I am with my field. Everything is different. We're in that weird "We're alright" stage and it's like, "Here's my black box --" "No, buy mine." "No, no, no -- I've got intellectual property that's totally valuable. Don't buy his, buy mine." And the reality is, we're just at the beginning, in a time when society is shifting, too. When we ask for more, cheaper food, we're now asking for better, environmentally friendly food. And when you have McDonald's advertising what's in the Chicken McNugget, the most mysterious food item of all time -- they are now basing their marketing plan on that -- everything is changing. So into the world now. Personal food computers, food servers and food data centers run on the open phenome. Think open genome, but we're going to put little climate recipes, like Wikipedia, that you can pull down, actuate and grow. What does this look like in a world? You remember the world connected by strings? We start having beacons. We start sending information about food, rather than sending food. This is not just my fantasy, this is where we're already deploying. Food computers, food servers, soon-to-be food data centers, connecting people together to share information. The future of food is not about fighting over what's wrong with this. We know what's wrong with this. The future of food is about networking the next one billion farmers and empowering them with a platform to ask and answer the question, "What if?" Thank you. (Applause)

To be new at TED -- it's like being the last high-school virgin. (Laughter) You know that all of the cool people are -- they're doing it. And you're on the outside, you're at home. You're like the Raspyni Brothers, where you've got your balls in cold water. And -- (Laughter) -- you just play with your fingers all day. And then you get invited. And you're on the inside, and it's everything you hoped it would be. It's exciting and there's music playing all of the time and then suddenly it's over. And it's only taken five minutes. And you want to go back and do it again. But I really appreciate being here. And thank you, Chris, and also, thank you, Deborah Patton, for making this possible. So anyway, today we'll talk about architecture a little bit, within the subject of creation and optimism. And if you put creation and optimism together, you've got two choices that you can talk about. You can talk about creationism -- which I think wouldn't go down well with this audience, at least not from a view where you were a proponent of it -- or you can talk about optimisations, spelled the British way, with an S, instead of a Z. And I think that's what I'd like to talk about today. But any kind of conversation about architecture -- which is, in fact, what you were just talking about, what was going on here, setting up TED, small-scale architecture -- at the present time can't really happen without a conversation about this, the World Trade Center, and what's been going on there, what it means to us. Because if architecture is what I believe it to be, which is the built form of our cultural ambitions, what do you do when presented with an opportunity to rectify a situation that represents somebody else's cultural ambitions relative to us? And our own opportunity to make something new there? This has been a really galvanizing issue for a long time. I think that the World Trade Center in, rather an unfortunate way, brought architecture into focus in a way that I don't think people had thought of in a long time, and made it a subject for common conversation. I don't remember, in my 20-year career of practicing and writing about architecture, a time when five people sat me down at a table and asked me very serious questions about zoning, fire exiting, safety concerns and whether carpet burns. These are just not things we talked about very often. And yet, now, it's talked about all the time. At the point where you can weaponize your buildings, you have to suddenly think about architecture in a very different way. And so now we're going to think about architecture in a very different way, we're going to think about it like this. How many of you saw USA Today, today? There it is. Looks like that. There's the World Trade Center site, on the front cover. They've made a selection. They've chosen a project by Daniel Libeskind, the enfant terrible of the moment of architecture. Child-prodigy piano player, he started on the squeezebox, and moved to a little more serious issue, a bigger instrument, and now to an even larger instrument, upon which to work his particular brand of deconstructivist magic, as you see here. He was one of six people who were invited to participate in this competition, after six previous firms struck out with things that were so stupid and banal that even the city of New York was forced to go, "Oh, I'm really sorry, we screwed up." Right. Can we do this again from the top, except use some people with a vague hint of talent, instead of just six utter boobs like we brought in last time, real estate hacks of the kind who usually plan our cities. Let's bring in some real architects for a change. And so we got this, or we had a choice of that. Oh, stop clapping. (Laughter) It's too late. That is gone. This was a scheme by a team called THINK, a New York-based team, and then there was that one, which was the Libeskind scheme. This one, this is going to be the new World Trade Center: a giant hole in the ground with big buildings falling into it. Now, I don't know what you think, but I think this is a pretty stupid decision, because what you've done is just made a permanent memorial to destruction by making it look like the destruction is going to continue forever. But that's what we're going to do. But I want you to think about these things in terms of a kind of ongoing struggle that American architecture represents, and that these two things talk about very specifically. And that is the wild divergence in how we choose our architects, in trying to decide whether we want architecture from the kind of technocratic solution to everything -- that there is a large, technical answer that can solve all problems, be they social, be they physical, be they chemical -- or something that's more of a romantic solution. Now, I don't mean romantic as in, this is a nice place to take someone on a date. I mean romantic in the sense of, there are things larger and grander than us. So, in the American tradition, the difference between the technocratic and the romantic, would be the difference between Thomas Jefferson's Cartesian grids spreading across the United States, that gives us basically the whole shape of every western state in the United States, as a really, truly, technocratic solution, a bowing to the -- in Jefferson's time -- current, popular philosophy of rationalism. Or the way we went to describe that later: manifest destiny. Now, which would you rather be? A grid, or manifest destiny? Manifest destiny. (Laughter) It's a big deal. It sounds big, it sounds important, it sounds solid. It sounds American. Ballsy, serious, male. And that kind of fight has gone on back and forth in architecture all the time. I mean, it goes on in our private lives, too, every single day. We all want to go out and buy an Audi TT, don't we? Everyone here must own one, or at least they craved one the moment they saw one. And then they hopped in it, turned the little electronic key, rather than the real key, zipped home on their new superhighway, and drove straight into a garage that looks like a Tudor castle. (Laughter) Why? Why? Why do you want to do that? Why do we all want to do that? I even owned a Tudor thing once myself. (Laughter) It's in our nature to go ricocheting back and forth between this technocratic solution and a larger, sort of more romantic image of where we are. So we're going to go straight into this. Can I have the lights off for a moment? I'm going to talk about two architects very, very briefly that represent the current split, architecturally, between these two traditions of a technocratic or technological solution and a romantic solution. And these are two of the top architectural practices in the United States today. One very young, one a little more mature. This is the work of a firm called SHoP, and what you're seeing here, is their isometric drawings of what will be a large-scale camera obscura in a public park. Does everybody know what a camera obscura is? Yeah, it's one of those giant camera lenses that takes a picture of the outside world -- it's sort of a little movie, without any moving parts -- and projects it on a page, and you can see the world outside you as you walk around it. This is just the outline of it, and you can see, does it look like a regular building? No. It's actually non-orthogonal: it's not up and down, square, rectangular, anything like that, that you'd see in a normal shape of a building. The computer revolution, the technocratic, technological revolution, has allowed us to jettison normal-shaped buildings, traditionally shaped buildings, in favor of non-orthogonal buildings such as this. What's interesting about it is not the shape. What's interesting about it is how it's made. How it's made. A brand-new way to put buildings together, something called mass customization. No, it is not an oxymoron. What makes the building expensive, in the traditional sense, is making individual parts custom, that you can't do over and over again. That's why we all live in developer houses. They all want to save money by building the same thing 500 times. That's because it's cheaper. Mass customization works by an architect feeding into a computer, a program that says, manufacture these parts. The computer then talks to a machine -- a computer-operated machine, a cad-cam machine -- that can make a zillion different changes, at a moment's notice, because the computer is just a machine. It doesn't care. It's manufacturing the parts. It doesn't see any excess cost. It doesn't spend any extra time. It's not a laborer -- it's simply an electronic lathe, so the parts can all be cut at the same time. Meanwhile, instead of sending someone working drawings, which are those huge sets of blueprints that you've seen your whole life, what the architect can do is send a set of assembly instructions, like you used to get when you were a child, when you bought little models that said, "Bolt A to B, and C to D." And so what the builder will get is every single individual part that has been custom manufactured off-site and delivered on a truck to the site, to that builder, and a set of these instruction manuals. Just simple "Bolt A to B" and they will be able to put them together. Here's the little drawing that tells them how that works -- and that's what will happen in the end. You're underneath it, looking up into the lens of the camera obscura. Lest you think this is all fiction, lest you think this is all fantasy, or romance, these same architects were asked to produce something for the central courtyard of PS1, which is a museum in Brooklyn, New York, as part of their young architects summer series. And they said, well, it's summer, what do you do? In the summer, you go to the beach. And when you go to the beach, what do you get? You get sand dunes. So let's make architectural sand dunes and a beach cabana. So they went out and they modeled a computer model of a sand dune. They took photographs, they fed the photographs into their computer program, and that computer program shaped a sand dune and then took that sand dune shape and turned it into -- at their instructions, using standard software with slight modifications -- a set of instructions for pieces of wood. And those are the pieces of wood. Those are the instructions. These are the pieces, and here's a little of that blown up. What you can see is there's about six different colors, and each color represents a type of wood to be cut, a piece of wood to be cut. All of which were delivered by flat bed, on a truck, and hand assembled in 48 hours by a team of eight people, only one of whom had ever seen the plans before. Only one of whom had ever seen the plans before. And here comes dune-scape, coming up out of the courtyard, and there it is fully built. There are only 16 different pieces of wood, only 16 different assembly parts here. Looks like a beautiful piano sounding board on the inside. It has its own built-in swimming pool, very, very cool. It's a great place for parties -- it was, it was only up for six weeks. It's got little dressing rooms and cabanas, where lots of interesting things went on, all summer long. Now, lest you think that this is only for the light at heart, or just temporary installations, this is the same firm working at the World Trade Center, replacing the bridge that used to go across West Street, that very important pedestrian connection between the city of New York and the redevelopment of the West Side. They were asked to design, replace that bridge in six weeks, building it, including all of the parts, manufactured. And they were able to do it. That was their design, using that same computer modeling system and only five or six really different kinds of parts, a couple of struts, like this, some exterior cladding material and a very simple framing system that was all manufactured off-site and delivered by truck. They were able to create that. They were able to create something wonderful. They're now building a 16-story building on the side of New York, using the same technology. Here we're going to walk across the bridge at night. It's self-lit, you don't need any overhead lighting, so the neighbors don't complain about metal-halide lighting in their face. Here it is going across. And there, down the other side, and you get the same kind of grandeur. Now, let me show you, quickly, the opposite, if I may. Woo, pretty, huh. This is the other side of the coin. This is the work of David Rockwell from New York City, whose work you can see out here today. The current king of the romantics, who approaches his work in a very different fashion. It's not to create a technological solution, it's to seduce you into something that you can do, into something that will please you, something that will lift your spirits, something that will make you feel as if are in another world -- such as his Nobu restaurant in New York, which is supposed to take you from the clutter of New York City to the simplicity of Japan and the elegance of Japanese tradition. "When it's all said and done, it's got to look like seaweed," said the owner. Or his restaurant, Pod, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I want you to know the room you're looking at is stark white. Every single surface of this restaurant is white. The reason it has so much color is that it changes using lighting. It's all about sensuality. It's all about transforming. Watch this -- I'm not touching any buttons, ladies and gentlemen. This is happening by itself. It transforms through the magic of lighting. It's all about sensuality. It's all about touch. Rosa Mexicano restaurant, where he transports us to the shores of Acapulco, up on the Upper West Side, with this wall of cliff divers who -- there you go, like that. Let's see it one more time. Okay, just to make sure that you've enjoyed it. And finally, it's about comfort, it's about making you feel good in places that you wouldn't have felt good before. It's about bringing nature to the inside. In the Guardian Tower of New York, converted to a W Union Square -- I'm sorry I'm rushing -- where we had to bring in the best horticulturists in the world to make sure that the interior of this dragged the garden space of the court garden of the Union Square into the building itself. It's about stimulation. This is a wine-buying experience simplified by color and taste. Fizzy, fresh, soft, luscious, juicy, smooth, big and sweet wines, all explained to you by color and texture on the wall. And finally, it's about entertainment, as in his headquarters for the Cirque du Soleil, Orlando, Florida, where you're asked to enter the Greek theater, look under the tent and join the magic world of Cirque du Soleil. And I think I'll probably leave it at that. Thank you very much.

I'd like to take you to another world. And I'd like to share a 45 year-old love story with the poor, living on less than one dollar a day. I went to a very elitist, snobbish, expensive education in India, and that almost destroyed me. I was all set to be a diplomat, teacher, doctor -- all laid out. Then, I don't look it, but I was the Indian national squash champion for three years. (Laughter) The whole world was laid out for me. Everything was at my feet. I could do nothing wrong. And then I thought out of curiosity I'd like to go and live and work and just see what a village is like. So in 1965, I went to what was called the worst Bihar famine in India, and I saw starvation, death, people dying of hunger, for the first time. It changed my life. I came back home, told my mother, "I'd like to live and work in a village." Mother went into a coma. (Laughter) "What is this? The whole world is laid out for you, the best jobs are laid out for you, and you want to go and work in a village? I mean, is there something wrong with you?" I said, "No, I've got the best eduction. It made me think. And I wanted to give something back in my own way." "What do you want to do in a village? No job, no money, no security, no prospect." I said, "I want to live and dig wells for five years." "Dig wells for five years? You went to the most expensive school and college in India, and you want to dig wells for five years?" She didn't speak to me for a very long time, because she thought I'd let my family down. But then, I was exposed to the most extraordinary knowledge and skills that very poor people have, which are never brought into the mainstream -- which is never identified, respected, applied on a large scale. And I thought I'd start a Barefoot College -- college only for the poor. What the poor thought was important would be reflected in the college. I went to this village for the first time. Elders came to me and said, "Are you running from the police?" I said, "No." (Laughter) "You failed in your exam?" I said, "No." "You didn't get a government job?" I said, "No." "What are you doing here? Why are you here? The education system in India makes you look at Paris and New Delhi and Zurich; what are you doing in this village? Is there something wrong with you you're not telling us?" I said, "No, I want to actually start a college only for the poor. What the poor thought was important would be reflected in the college." So the elders gave me some very sound and profound advice. They said, "Please, don't bring anyone with a degree and qualification into your college." So it's the only college in India where, if you should have a Ph.D. or a Master's, you are disqualified to come. You have to be a cop-out or a wash-out or a dropout to come to our college. You have to work with your hands. You have to have a dignity of labor. You have to show that you have a skill that you can offer to the community and provide a service to the community. So we started the Barefoot College, and we redefined professionalism. Who is a professional? A professional is someone who has a combination of competence, confidence and belief. A water diviner is a professional. A traditional midwife is a professional. A traditional bone setter is a professional. These are professionals all over the world. You find them in any inaccessible village around the world. And we thought that these people should come into the mainstream and show that the knowledge and skills that they have is universal. It needs to be used, needs to be applied, needs to be shown to the world outside -- that these knowledge and skills are relevant even today. So the college works following the lifestyle and workstyle of Mahatma Gandhi. You eat on the floor, you sleep on the floor, you work on the floor. There are no contracts, no written contracts. You can stay with me for 20 years, go tomorrow. And no one can get more than $100 a month. You come for the money, you don't come to Barefoot College. You come for the work and the challenge, you'll come to the Barefoot College. That is where we want you to try crazy ideas. Whatever idea you have, come and try it. It doesn't matter if you fail. Battered, bruised, you start again. It's the only college where the teacher is the learner and the learner is the teacher. And it's the only college where we don't give a certificate. You are certified by the community you serve. You don't need a paper to hang on the wall to show that you are an engineer. So when I said that, they said, "Well show us what is possible. What are you doing? This is all mumbo-jumbo if you can't show it on the ground." So we built the first Barefoot College in 1986. It was built by 12 Barefoot architects who can't read and write, built on $1.50 a sq. ft. 150 people lived there, worked there. They got the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2002. But then they suspected, they thought there was an architect behind it. I said, "Yes, they made the blueprints, but the Barefoot architects actually constructed the college." We are the only ones who actually returned the award for $50,000, because they didn't believe us, and we thought that they were actually casting aspersions on the Barefoot architects of Tilonia. I asked a forester -- high-powered, paper-qualified expert -- I said, "What can you build in this place?" He had one look at the soil and said, "Forget it. No way. Not even worth it. No water, rocky soil." I was in a bit of a spot. And I said, "Okay, I'll go to the old man in village and say, 'What should I grow in this spot?'" He looked quietly at me and said, "You build this, you build this, you put this, and it'll work." This is what it looks like today. Went to the roof, and all the women said, "Clear out. The men should clear out because we don't want to share this technology with the men. This is waterproofing the roof." (Laughter) It is a bit of jaggery, a bit of urens and a bit of other things I don't know. But it actually doesn't leak. Since 1986, it hasn't leaked. This technology, the women will not share with the men. (Laughter) It's the only college which is fully solar-electrified. All the power comes from the sun. 45 kilowatts of panels on the roof. And everything works off the sun for the next 25 years. So long as the sun shines, we'll have no problem with power. But the beauty is that is was installed by a priest, a Hindu priest, who's only done eight years of primary schooling -- never been to school, never been to college. He knows more about solar than anyone I know anywhere in the world guaranteed. Food, if you come to the Barefoot College, is solar cooked. But the people who fabricated that solar cooker are women, illiterate women, who actually fabricate the most sophisticated solar cooker. It's a parabolic Scheffler solar cooker. Unfortunately, they're almost half German, they're so precise. (Laughter) You'll never find Indian women so precise. Absolutely to the last inch, they can make that cooker. And we have 60 meals twice a day of solar cooking. We have a dentist -- she's a grandmother, illiterate, who's a dentist. She actually looks after the teeth of 7,000 children. Barefoot technology: this was 1986 -- no engineer, no architect thought of it -- but we are collecting rainwater from the roofs. Very little water is wasted. All the roofs are connected underground to a 400,000 liter tank, and no water is wasted. If we have four years of drought, we still have water on the campus, because we collect rainwater. 60 percent of children don't go to school, because they have to look after animals -- sheep, goats -- domestic chores. So we thought of starting a school at night for the children. Because the night schools of Tilonia, over 75,000 children have gone through these night schools. Because it's for the convenience of the child; it's not for the convenience of the teacher. And what do we teach in these schools? Democracy, citizenship, how you should measure your land, what you should do if you're arrested, what you should do if your animal is sick. This is what we teach in the night schools. But all the schools are solar-lit. Every five years we have an election. Between six to 14 year-old children participate in a democratic process, and they elect a prime minister. The prime minister is 12 years old. She looks after 20 goats in the morning, but she's prime minister in the evening. She has a cabinet, a minister of education, a minister for energy, a minister for health. And they actually monitor and supervise 150 schools for 7,000 children. She got the World's Children's Prize five years ago, and she went to Sweden. First time ever going out of her village. Never seen Sweden. Wasn't dazzled at all by what was happening. And the Queen of Sweden, who's there, turned to me and said, "Can you ask this child where she got her confidence from? She's only 12 years old, and she's not dazzled by anything." And the girl, who's on her left, turned to me and looked at the queen straight in the eye and said, "Please tell her I'm the prime minister." (Laughter) (Applause) Where the percentage of illiteracy is very high, we use puppetry. Puppets is the way we communicate. You have Jokhim Chacha who is 300 years old. He is my psychoanalyst. He is my teacher. He's my doctor. He's my lawyer. He's my donor. He actually raises money, solves my disputes. He solves my problems in the village. If there's tension in the village, if attendance at the schools goes down and there's a friction between the teacher and the parent, the puppet calls the teacher and the parent in front of the whole village and says, "Shake hands. The attendance must not drop." These puppets are made out of recycled World Bank reports. (Laughter) (Applause) So this decentralized, demystified approach of solar-electrifying villages, we've covered all over India from Ladakh up to Bhutan -- all solar-electrified villages by people who have been trained. And we went to Ladakh, and we asked this woman -- this, at minus 40, you have to come out of the roof, because there's no place, it was all snowed up on both sides -- and we asked this woman, "What was the benefit you had from solar electricity?" And she thought for a minute and said, "It's the first time I can see my husband's face in winter." (Laughter) Went to Afghanistan. One lesson we learned in India was men are untrainable. (Laughter) Men are restless, men are ambitious, men are compulsively mobile, and they all want a certificate. (Laughter) All across the globe, you have this tendency of men wanting a certificate. Why? Because they want to leave the village and go to a city, looking for a job. So we came up with a great solution: train grandmothers. What's the best way of communicating in the world today? Television? No. Telegraph? No. Telephone? No. Tell a woman. (Laughter) (Applause) So we went to Afghanistan for the first time, and we picked three women and said, "We want to take them to India." They said, "Impossible. They don't even go out of their rooms, and you want to take them to India." I said, "I'll make a concession. I'll take the husbands along as well." So I took the husbands along. Of course, the women were much more intelligent than the men. In six months, how do we train these women? Sign language. You don't choose the written word. You don't choose the spoken word. You use sign language. And in six months they can become solar engineers. They go back and solar-electrify their own village. This woman went back and solar-electrified the first village, set up a workshop -- the first village ever to be solar-electrified in Afghanistan [was] by the three women. This woman is an extraordinary grandmother. 55 years old, and she's solar-electrified 200 houses for me in Afghanistan. And they haven't collapsed. She actually went and spoke to an engineering department in Afghanistan and told the head of the department the difference between AC and DC. He didn't know. Those three women have trained 27 more women and solar-electrified 100 villages in Afghanistan. We went to Africa, and we did the same thing. All these women sitting at one table from eight, nine countries, all chatting to each other, not understanding a word, because they're all speaking a different language. But their body language is great. They're speaking to each other and actually becoming solar engineers. I went to Sierra Leone, and there was this minister driving down in the dead of night -- comes across this village. Comes back, goes into the village, says, "Well what's the story?" They said, "These two grandmothers ... " "Grandmothers?" The minister couldn't believe what was happening. "Where did they go?" "Went to India and back." Went straight to the president. He said, "Do you know there's a solar-electrified village in Sierra Leone?" He said, "No." Half the cabinet went to see the grandmothers the next day. "What's the story." So he summoned me and said, "Can you train me 150 grandmothers?" I said, "I can't, Mr. President. But they will. The grandmothers will." So he built me the first Barefoot training center in Sierra Leone. And 150 grandmothers have been trained in Sierra Leone. Gambia: we went to select a grandmother in Gambia. Went to this village. I knew which woman I would like to take. The community got together and said, "Take these two women." I said, "No, I want to take this woman." They said, "Why? She doesn't know the language. You don't know her." I said, "I like the body language. I like the way she speaks." "Difficult husband; not possible." Called the husband, the husband came, swaggering, politician, mobile in his hand. "Not possible." "Why not?" "The woman, look how beautiful she is." I said, "Yeah, she is very beautiful." "What happens if she runs off with an Indian man?" That was his biggest fear. I said, "She'll be happy. She'll ring you up on the mobile." She went like a grandmother and came back like a tiger. She walked out of the plane and spoke to the whole press as if she was a veteran. She handled the national press, and she was a star. And when I went back six months later, I said, "Where's your husband?" "Oh, somewhere. It doesn't matter." (Laughter) Success story. (Laughter) (Applause) I'll just wind up by saying that I think you don't have to look for solutions outside. Look for solutions within. And listen to people. They have the solutions in front of you. They're all over the world. Don't even worry. Don't listen to the World Bank, listen to the people on the ground. They have all the solutions in the world. I'll end with a quotation by Mahatma Gandhi. "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win." Thank you. (Applause)

What I'd like to do is talk to you a little bit about fear and the cost of fear and the age of fear from which we are now emerging. I would like you to feel comfortable with my doing that by letting you know that I know something about fear and anxiety. I'm a Jewish guy from New Jersey. (Laughter) I could worry before I could walk. (Laughter) Please, applaud that. (Applause) Thank you. But I also grew up in a time where there was something to fear. We were brought out in the hall when I was a little kid and taught how to put our coats over our heads to protect us from global thermonuclear war. Now even my seven-year-old brain knew that wasn't going to work. But I also knew that global thermonuclear war was something to be concerned with. And yet, despite the fact that we lived for 50 years with the threat of such a war, the response of our government and of our society was to do wonderful things. We created the space program in response to that. We built our highway system in response to that. We created the Internet in response to that. So sometimes fear can produce a constructive response. But sometimes it can produce an un-constructive response. On September 11, 2001, 19 guys took over four airplanes and flew them into a couple of buildings. They exacted a horrible toll. It is not for us to minimize what that toll was. But the response that we had was clearly disproportionate -- disproportionate to the point of verging on the unhinged. We rearranged the national security apparatus of the United States and of many governments to address a threat that, at the time that those attacks took place, was quite limited. In fact, according to our intelligence services, on September 11, 2001, there were 100 members of core Al-Qaeda. There were just a few thousand terrorists. They posed an existential threat to no one. But we rearranged our entire national security apparatus in the most sweeping way since the end of the Second World War. We launched two wars. We spent trillions of dollars. We suspended our values. We violated international law. We embraced torture. We embraced the idea that if these 19 guys could do this, anybody could do it. And therefore, for the first time in history, we were seeing everybody as a threat. And what was the result of that? Surveillance programs that listened in on the emails and phone calls of entire countries -- hundreds of millions of people -- setting aside whether those countries were our allies, setting aside what our interests were. I would argue that 15 years later, since today there are more terrorists, more terrorist attacks, more terrorist casualties -- this by the count of the U.S. State Department -- since today the region from which those attacks emanate is more unstable than at any time in its history, since the Flood, perhaps, we have not succeeded in our response. Now you have to ask, where did we go wrong? What did we do? What was the mistake that was made? And you might say, well look, Washington is a dysfunctional place. There are political food fights. We've turned our discourse into a cage match. And that's true. But there are bigger problems, believe it or not, than that dysfunction, even though I would argue that dysfunction that makes it impossible to get anything done in the richest and most powerful country in the world is far more dangerous than anything that a group like ISIS could do, because it stops us in our tracks and it keeps us from progress. But there are other problems. And the other problems came from the fact that in Washington and in many capitals right now, we're in a creativity crisis. In Washington, in think tanks, where people are supposed to be thinking of new ideas, you don't get bold new ideas, because if you offer up a bold new idea, not only are you attacked on Twitter, but you will not get confirmed in a government job. Because we are reactive to the heightened venom of the political debate, you get governments that have an us-versus-them mentality, tiny groups of people making decisions. When you sit in a room with a small group of people making decisions, what do you get? You get groupthink. Everybody has the same worldview, and any view from outside of the group is seen as a threat. That's a danger. You also have processes that become reactive to news cycles. And so the parts of the U.S. government that do foresight, that look forward, that do strategy -- the parts in other governments that do this -- can't do it, because they're reacting to the news cycle. And so we're not looking ahead. On 9/11, we had a crisis because we were looking the wrong way. Today we have a crisis because, because of 9/11, we are still looking in the wrong direction, and we know because we see transformational trends on the horizon that are far more important than what we saw on 9/11; far more important than the threat posed by these terrorists; far more important even than the instability that we've got in some areas of the world that are racked by instability today. In fact, the things that we are seeing in those parts of the world may be symptoms. They may be a reaction to bigger trends. And if we are treating the symptom and ignoring the bigger trend, then we've got far bigger problems to deal with. And so what are those trends? Well, to a group like you, the trends are apparent. We are living at a moment in which the very fabric of human society is being rewoven. If you saw the cover of The Economist a couple of days ago -- it said that 80 percent of the people on the planet, by the year 2020, would have a smartphone. They would have a small computer connected to the Internet in their pocket. In most of Africa, the cell phone penetration rate is 80 percent. We passed the point last October when there were more mobile cellular devices, SIM cards, out in the world than there were people. We are within years of a profound moment in our history, when effectively every single human being on the planet is going to be part of a man-made system for the first time, able to touch anyone else -- touch them for good, touch them for ill. And the changes associated with that are changing the very nature of every aspect of governance and life on the planet in ways that our leaders ought to be thinking about, when they're thinking about these immediate threats. On the security side, we've come out of a Cold War in which it was too costly to fight a nuclear war, and so we didn't, to a period that I call Cool War, cyber war, where the costs of conflict are actually so low, that we may never stop. We may enter a period of constant warfare, and we know this because we've been in it for several years. And yet, we don't have the basic doctrines to guide us in this regard. We don't have the basic ideas formulated. If someone attacks us with a cyber attack, do have the ability to respond with a kinetic attack? We don't know. If somebody launches a cyber attack, how do we deter them? When China launched a series of cyber attacks, what did the U.S. government do? It said, we're going to indict a few of these Chinese guys, who are never coming to America. They're never going to be anywhere near a law enforcement officer who's going to take them into custody. It's a gesture -- it's not a deterrent. Special forces operators out there in the field today discover that small groups of insurgents with cell phones have access to satellite imagery that once only superpowers had. In fact, if you've got a cell phone, you've got access to power that a superpower didn't have, and would have highly classified 10 years ago. In my cell phone, I have an app that tells me where every plane in the world is, and its altitude, and its speed, and what kind of aircraft it is, and where it's going and where it's landing. They have apps that allow them to know what their adversary is about to do. They're using these tools in new ways. When a cafe in Sydney was taken over by a terrorist, he went in with a rifle... and an iPad. And the weapon was the iPad. Because he captured people, he terrorized them, he pointed the iPad at them, and then he took the video and he put it on the Internet, and he took over the world's media. But it doesn't just affect the security side. The relations between great powers -- we thought we were past the bipolar era. We thought we were in a unipolar world, where all the big issues were resolved. Remember? It was the end of history. But we're not. We're now seeing that our basic assumptions about the Internet -- that it was going to connect us, weave society together -- are not necessarily true. In countries like China, you have the Great Firewall of China. You've got countries saying no, if the Internet happens within our borders we control it within our borders. We control the content. We are going to control our security. We are going to manage that Internet. We are going to say what can be on it. We're going to set a different set of rules. Now you might think, well, that's just China. But it's not just China. It's China, India, Russia. It's Saudi Arabia, it's Singapore, it's Brazil. After the NSA scandal, the Russians, the Chinese, the Indians, the Brazilians, they said, let's create a new Internet backbone, because we can't be dependent on this other one. And so all of a sudden, what do you have? You have a new bipolar world in which cyber-internationalism, our belief, is challenged by cyber-nationalism, another belief. We are seeing these changes everywhere we look. We are seeing the advent of mobile money. It's happening in the places you wouldn't expect. It's happening in Kenya and Tanzania, where millions of people who haven't had access to financial services now conduct all those services on their phones. There are 2.5 million people who don't have financial service access that are going to get it soon. A billion of them are going to have the ability to access it on their cell phone soon. It's not just going to give them the ability to bank. It's going to change what monetary policy is. It's going to change what money is. Education is changing in the same way. Healthcare is changing in the same way. How government services are delivered is changing in the same way. And yet, in Washington, we are debating whether to call the terrorist group that has taken over Syria and Iraq ISIS or ISIL or Islamic State. We are trying to determine how much we want to give in a negotiation with the Iranians on a nuclear deal which deals with the technologies of 50 years ago, when in fact, we know that the Iranians right now are engaged in cyber war with us and we're ignoring it, partially because businesses are not willing to talk about the attacks that are being waged on them. And that gets us to another breakdown that's crucial, and another breakdown that couldn't be more important to a group like this, because the growth of America and real American national security and all of the things that drove progress even during the Cold War, was a public-private partnership between science, technology and government that began when Thomas Jefferson sat alone in his laboratory inventing new things. But it was the canals and railroads and telegraph; it was radar and the Internet. It was Tang, the breakfast drink -- probably not the most important of those developments. But what you had was a partnership and a dialogue, and the dialogue has broken down. It's broken down because in Washington, less government is considered more. It's broken down because there is, believe it or not, in Washington, a war on science -- despite the fact that in all of human history, every time anyone has waged a war on science, science has won. (Applause) But we have a government that doesn't want to listen, that doesn't have people at the highest levels that understand this. In the nuclear age, when there were people in senior national security jobs, they were expected to speak throw-weight. They were expected to know the lingo, the vocabulary. If you went to the highest level of the U.S. government now and said, "Talk to me about cyber, about neuroscience, about the things that are going to change the world of tomorrow," you'd get a blank stare. I know, because when I wrote this book, I talked to 150 people, many from the science and tech side, who felt like they were being shunted off to the kids' table. Meanwhile, on the tech side, we have lots of wonderful people creating wonderful things, but they started in garages and they didn't need the government and they don't want the government. Many of them have a political view that's somewhere between libertarian and anarchic: leave me alone. But the world's coming apart. All of a sudden, there are going to be massive regulatory changes and massive issues associated with conflict and massive issues associated with security and privacy. And we haven't even gotten to the next set of issues, which are philosophical issues. If you can't vote, if you can't have a job, if you can't bank, if you can't get health care, if you can't be educated without Internet access, is Internet access a fundamental right that should be written into constitutions? If Internet access is a fundamental right, is electricity access for the 1.2 billion who don't have access to electricity a fundamental right? These are fundamental issues. Where are the philosophers? Where's the dialogue? And that brings me to the reason that I'm here. I live in Washington. Pity me. (Laughter) The dialogue isn't happening there. These big issues that will change the world, change national security, change economics, create hope, create threats, can only be resolved when you bring together groups of people who understand science and technology back together with government. Both sides need each other. And until we recreate that connection, until we do what helped America grow and helped other countries grow, then we are going to grow ever more vulnerable. The risks associated with 9/11 will not be measured in terms of lives lost by terror attacks or buildings destroyed or trillions of dollars spent. They'll be measured in terms of the costs of our distraction from critical issues and our inability to get together scientists, technologists, government leaders, at a moment of transformation akin to the beginning of the Renaissance, akin to the beginning of the major transformational eras that have happened on Earth, and start coming up with, if not the right answers, then at least the right questions. We are not there yet, but discussions like this and groups like you are the places where those questions can be formulated and posed. And that's why I believe that groups like TED, discussions like this around the planet, are the place where the future of foreign policy, of economic policy, of social policy, of philosophy, will ultimately take place. And that's why it's been a pleasure speaking to you. Thank you very, very much. (Applause)

Have you ever wondered what animals think and feel? Let's start with a question: Does my dog really love me, or does she just want a treat? Well, it's easy to see that our dog really loves us, easy to see, right, what's going on in that fuzzy little head. What is going on? Something's going on. But why is the question always do they love us? Why is it always about us? Why are we such narcissists? I found a different question to ask animals. Who are you? There are capacities of the human mind that we tend to think are capacities only of the human mind. But is that true? What are other beings doing with those brains? What are they thinking and feeling? Is there a way to know? I think there is a way in. I think there are several ways in. We can look at evolution, we can look at their brains and we can watch what they do. The first thing to remember is: our brain is inherited. The first neurons came from jellyfish. Jellyfish gave rise to the first chordates. The first chordates gave rise to the first vertebrates. The vertebrates came out of the sea, and here we are. But it's still true that a neuron, a nerve cell, looks the same in a crayfish, a bird or you. What does that say about the minds of crayfish? Can we tell anything about that? Well, it turns out that if you give a crayfish a lot of little tiny electric shocks every time it tries to come out of its burrow, it will develop anxiety. If you give the crayfish the same drug used to treat anxiety disorder in humans, it relaxes and comes out and explores. How do we show how much we care about crayfish anxiety? Mostly, we boil them. (Laughter) Octopuses use tools, as well as do most apes and they recognize human faces. How do we celebrate the ape-like intelligence of this invertebrate? Mostly boiled. If a grouper chases a fish into a crevice in the coral, it will sometimes go to where it knows a moray eel is sleeping and it will signal to the moray, "Follow me," and the moray will understand that signal. The moray may go into the crevice and get the fish, but the fish may bolt and the grouper may get it. This is an ancient partnership that we have just recently found out about. How do we celebrate that ancient partnership? Mostly fried. A pattern is emerging and it says a lot more about us than it does about them. Sea otters use tools and they take time away from what they're doing to show their babies what to do, which is called teaching. Chimpanzees don't teach. Killer whales teach and killer whales share food. When evolution makes something new, it uses the parts it has in stock, off the shelf, before it fabricates a new twist. And our brain has come to us through the enormity of the deep sweep of time. If you look at the human brain compared to a chimpanzee brain, what you see is we have basically a very big chimpanzee brain. It's a good thing ours is bigger, because we're also really insecure. (Laughter) But, uh oh, there's a dolphin, a bigger brain with more convolutions. OK, maybe you're saying, all right, well, we see brains, but what does that have to say about minds? Well, we can see the working of the mind in the logic of behaviors. So these elephants, you can see, obviously, they are resting. They have found a patch of shade under the palm trees under which to let their babies sleep, while they doze but remain vigilant. We make perfect sense of that image just as they make perfect sense of what they're doing because under the arc of the same sun on the same plains, listening to the howls of the same dangers, they became who they are and we became who we are. We've been neighbors for a very long time. No one would mistake these elephants as being relaxed. They're obviously very concerned about something. What are they concerned about? It turns out that if you record the voices of tourists and you play that recording from a speaker hidden in bushes, elephants will ignore it, because tourists never bother elephants. But if you record the voices of herders who carry spears and often hurt elephants in confrontations at water holes, the elephants will bunch up and run away from the hidden speaker. Not only do elephants know that there are humans, they know that there are different kinds of humans, and that some are OK and some are dangerous. They have been watching us for much longer than we have been watching them. They know us better than we know them. We have the same imperatives: take care of our babies, find food, try to stay alive. Whether we're outfitted for hiking in the hills of Africa or outfitted for diving under the sea, we are basically the same. We are kin under the skin. The elephant has the same skeleton, the killer whale has the same skeleton, as do we. We see helping where help is needed. We see curiosity in the young. We see the bonds of family connections. We recognize affection. Courtship is courtship. And then we ask, "Are they conscious?" When you get general anesthesia, it makes you unconscious, which means you have no sensation of anything. Consciousness is simply the thing that feels like something. If you see, if you hear, if you feel, if you're aware of anything, you are conscious, and they are conscious. Some people say well, there are certain things that make humans humans, and one of those things is empathy. Empathy is the mind's ability to match moods with your companions. It's a very useful thing. If your companions start to move quickly, you have to feel like you need to hurry up. We're all in a hurry now. The oldest form of empathy is contagious fear. If your companions suddenly startle and fly away, it does not work very well for you to say, "Jeez, I wonder why everybody just left." (Laughter) Empathy is old, but empathy, like everything else in life, comes on a sliding scale and has its elaboration. So there's basic empathy: you feel sad, it makes me sad. I see you happy, it makes me happy. Then there's something that I call sympathy, a little more removed: "I'm sorry to hear that your grandmother has just passed away. I don't feel that same grief, but I get it; I know what you feel and it concerns me." And then if we're motivated to act on sympathy, I call that compassion. Far from being the thing that makes us human, human empathy is far from perfect. We round up empathic creatures, we kill them and we eat them. Now, maybe you say OK, well, those are different species. That's just predation, and humans are predators. But we don't treat our own kind too well either. People who seem to know only one thing about animal behavior know that you must never attribute human thoughts and emotions to other species. Well, I think that's silly, because attributing human thoughts and emotions to other species is the best first guess about what they're doing and how they're feeling, because their brains are basically the same as ours. They have the same structures. The same hormones that create mood and motivation in us are in those brains as well. It is not scientific to say that they are hungry when they're hunting and they're tired when their tongues are hanging out, and then say when they're playing with their children and acting joyful and happy, we have no idea if they can possibly be experiencing anything. That is not scientific. So OK, so a reporter said to me, "Maybe, but how do you really know that other animals can think and feel?" And I started to rifle through all the hundreds of scientific references that I put in my book and I realized that the answer was right in the room with me. When my dog gets off the rug and comes over to me -- not to the couch, to me -- and she rolls over on her back and exposes her belly, she has had the thought, "I would like my belly rubbed. I know that I can go over to Carl, he will understand what I'm asking. I know I can trust him because we're family. He'll get the job done, and it will feel good." (Laughter) She has thought and she has felt, and it's really not more complicated than that. But we see other animals and we say, "Oh look, killer whales, wolves, elephants: that's not how they see it." That tall-finned male is L41. He's 38 years old. The female right on his left side is L22. She's 44. They've known each other for decades. They know exactly who they are. They know who their friends are. They know who their rivals are. Their life follows the arc of a career. They know where they are all the time. This is an elephant named Philo. He was a young male. This is him four days later. Humans not only can feel grief, we create an awful lot of it. We want to carve their teeth. Why can't we wait for them to die? Elephants once ranged from the shores of the Mediterranean Sea all the way down to the Cape of Good Hope. In 1980, there were vast strongholds of elephant range in Central and Eastern Africa. And now their range is shattered into little shards. This is the geography of an animal that we are driving to extinction, a fellow being, the most magnificent creature on land. Of course, we take much better care of our wildlife in the United States. In Yellowstone National Park, we killed every single wolf. We killed every single wolf south of the Canadian border, actually. But in the park, park rangers did that in the 1920s, and then 60 years later they had to bring them back, because the elk numbers had gotten out of control. And then people came. People came by the thousands to see the wolves, the most accessibly visible wolves in the world. And I went there and I watched this incredible family of wolves. A pack is a family. It has some breeding adults and the young of several generations. And I watched the most famous, most stable pack in Yellowstone National Park. And then, when they wandered just outside the border, two of their adults were killed, including the mother, which we sometimes call the alpha female. The rest of the family immediately descended into sibling rivalry. Sisters kicked out other sisters. That one on the left tried for days to rejoin her family. They wouldn't let her because they were jealous of her. She was getting too much attention from two new males, and she was the precocious one. That was too much for them. She wound up wandering outside the park and getting shot. The alpha male wound up being ejected from his own family. As winter was coming in, he lost his territory, his hunting support, the members of his family and his mate. We cause so much pain to them. The mystery is, why don't they hurt us more than they do? This whale had just finished eating part of a grey whale with his companions who had killed that whale. Those people in the boat had nothing at all to fear. This whale is T20. He had just finished tearing a seal into three pieces with two companions. The seal weighed about as much as the people in the boat. They had nothing to fear. They eat seals. Why don't they eat us? Why can we trust them around our toddlers? Why is it that killer whales have returned to researchers lost in thick fog and led them miles until the fog parted and the researchers' home was right there on the shoreline? And that's happened more than one time. In the Bahamas, there's a woman named Denise Herzing, and she studies spotted dolphins and they know her. She knows them very well. She knows who they all are. They know her. They recognize the research boat. When she shows up, it's a big happy reunion. Except, one time showed up and they didn't want to come near the boat, and that was really strange. And they couldn't figure out what was going on until somebody came out on deck and announced that one of the people onboard had died during a nap in his bunk. How could dolphins know that one of the human hearts had just stopped? Why would they care? And why would it spook them? These mysterious things just hint at all of the things that are going on in the minds that are with us on Earth that we almost never think about at all. At an aquarium in South Africa was a little baby bottle-nosed dolphin named Dolly. She was nursing, and one day a keeper took a cigarette break and he was looking into the window into their pool, smoking. Dolly came over and looked at him, went back to her mother, nursed for a minute or two, came back to the window and released a cloud of milk that enveloped her head like smoke. Somehow, this baby bottle-nosed dolphin got the idea of using milk to represent smoke. When human beings use one thing to represent another, we call that art. (Laughter) The things that make us human are not the things that we think make us human. What makes us human is that, of all these things that our minds and their minds have, we are the most extreme. We are the most compassionate, most violent, most creative and most destructive animal that has ever been on this planet, and we are all of those things all jumbled up together. But love is not the thing that makes us human. It's not special to us. We are not the only ones who care about our mates. We are not the only ones who care about our children. Albatrosses frequently fly six, sometimes ten thousand miles over several weeks to deliver one meal, one big meal, to their chick who is waiting for them. They nest on the most remote islands in the oceans of the world, and this is what it looks like. Passing life from one generation to the next is the chain of being. If that stops, it all goes away. If anything is sacred, that is, and into that sacred relationship comes our plastic trash. All of these birds have plastic in them now. This is an albatross six months old, ready to fledge -- died, packed with red cigarette lighters. This is not the relationship we are supposed to have with the rest of the world. But we, who have named ourselves after our brains, never think about the consequences. When we welcome new human life into the world, we welcome our babies into the company of other creatures. We paint animals on the walls. We don't paint cell phones. We don't paint work cubicles. We paint animals to show them that we are not alone. We have company. And every one of those animals in every painting of Noah's ark, deemed worthy of salvation is in mortal danger now, and their flood is us. So we started with a question: Do they love us? We're going to ask another question. Are we capable of using what we have to care enough to simply let them continue? Thank you very much. (Applause)

My name's Seth Priebatsch. I'm the chief ninja of SCVNGR. I am a proud Princeton dropout. Also proud to have relocated here to Boston, where I actually grew up. Yeah, Boston. Easy wins. I should just go and name the counties that we've got around here. So, I'm also fairly determined to try and build a game layer on top of the world. And this is sort of a new concept, and it's really important. Because while the last decade was the decade of social and the decade of where the framework in which we connect with other people was built, this next decade will be the decade where the game framework is built, where the motivations that we use to actually influence behavior, and the framework in which that is constructed, is decided upon, and that's really important. And so I say that I want to build a game layer on top of the world, but that's not quite true because it's already under construction; it's already happening. And it looks like this right now. It looks like the Web did back in 1997, right? It's not very good. It's cluttered. It's filled with lots of different things that, in short, aren't that fun. There are credit card schemes and airline mile programs and coupon cards and all these loyalty schemes that actually do use game dynamics and actually are building the game layer: they just suck. They're not very well designed, right? So, that's unfortunate. But luckily, as my favorite action hero, Bob the Builder, says, "We can do better. We can build this better." And the tools, the resources that we use to build a game layer are game dynamics themselves. And so, sort of, the crux of this presentation is going to go through four really important game dynamics, really interesting things, that, if you use consciously, you can use to influence behavior, both for good, for bad, for in-between. Hopefully for good. But this is sort of the important stages in which that framework will get built, and so we want to all be thinking about it consciously now. Just before we jump into that, there's sort of a question of: why is this important? I'm sort of making this claim that there is a game layer on top of the world, and that it's very important that we build it properly. The reason that it's so important is that, the last decade, what we've seen has been building the social layer, has been this framework for connections, and construction on that layer is over, it's finished. There's still a lot to explore. There's still a lot of people who are trying to figure out social and how do we leverage this and how do we use this, but the framework itself is done, and it's called Facebook. And that's okay, right? A lot of people are very happy with Facebook. I like it quite a lot. They've created this thing called the Open Graph, and they own all of our connections. They own half a billion people. And so when you want to build on the social layer, the framework has been decided; it is the Open Graph API. And if you're happy with that, fantastic. If you're not, too bad. There's nothing you can do. But this next decade -- and that's a real thing. I mean, we want to build frameworks in a way that makes it acceptable and makes it, you know, productive down the road. So, the social layer is all about these connections. The game layer is all about influence. It's not about adding a social fabric to the Web and connecting you to other people everywhere you are and everywhere you go. It's actually about using dynamics, using forces, to influence the behavior of where you are, what you do there, how you do it. That's really, really powerful, and it's going to be more important than the social layer. It's going to affect our lives more deeply and perhaps more invisibly. And so it's incredibly critical that at this moment, while it's just getting constructed, while the frameworks like Facebook, like the Open Graph, are being created for the game layer equivalent, that we think about it very consciously, and that we do it in a way that is open, that is available, and that can be leveraged for good. And so that's what I want to talk about for game dynamics, because construction has just begun, and the more consciously we can think about this, the better we'll be able to use it for anything that we want. So like I said, the way that you go through and build on the game layer is not with glass and steel and cement. And the resources that we use are not this two-dimensional swath of land that we have. The resources are mindshare and the tools, the raw materials are these game dynamics. So with that, you know, a couple game dynamics to talk about. Four. Back at SCVNGR, we like to joke that with seven game dynamics, you can get anyone to do anything. And so today, I'm going to show you four, because I hope to have a competitive advantage at the end of this, still. (Laughter) So the first one, it's a very simple game dynamic. It's called the appointment dynamic. And this is a dynamic in which to succeed, players have to do something at a predefined time, generally at a predefined place. And these dynamics are a little scary sometimes, because you think, you know, other people can be using forces that will manipulate how I interact: what I do, where I do it, when I do it. This sort of loss of free will that occurs in games can be frightening, so with each dynamic, I'm going to give three examples: one that shows how this is already being used in the real world, so you can sort of rationalize it a little bit; one that shows it in what we consider a conventional game -- I think everything is a game, but this is sort of more of a what you would think is a game played on a board or on a computer screen, and then one how this can be used for good, so we can see that these forces can really be very powerful. So the first one -- the most famous appointment dynamic in the world -- is something called happy hour. So I just recently dropped out of Princeton and actually ended up for the first time in a bar, and I saw these happy hour things all over the place, right. And this is simply an appointment dynamic. Come here at a certain time, get your drinks half off. To win, all you have to do is show up at the right place at the right time. This game dynamic is so powerful that it doesn't just influence our behavior, it's influenced our entire culture. That's a really scary thought, that one game dynamic can change things so powerfully. It also exists in more conventional game forms. I'm sure you've all heard of Farmville by now. If you haven't, I recommend playing it. You won't do anything else with the rest of your day. Farmville has more active users than Twitter. It's incredibly powerful, and it has this dynamic where you have to return at a certain time to water your crops -- fake crops -- or they wilt. And this is so powerful that, when they tweak their stats, when they say your crops wilt after eight hours, or after six hours, or after 24 hours, it changes the lifecycle of 70 million-some people during the day. They will return like clockwork at different times. So if they wanted the world to end, if they wanted productivity to stop, they could make this a 30-minute cycle, and no one could do anything else, right? (Laughter) That's a little scary. But this could also be used for good. This is a local company called Vitality, and they've created a product to help people take their medicine on time. That's an appointment. It's something that people don't do very well. And they have these GlowCaps, which, you know, flash and email you and do all sorts of cool things to remind you to take your medicine. This is one that isn't a game yet, but really should be. You should get points for doing this on time. You should lose points for not doing this on time. They should consciously recognize that they've built an appointment dynamic and leverage the games. And then you can really achieve good in some interesting ways. We're going to jump onto the next one, maybe. Yes. Influence and status. So this is one of the most famous game dynamics. It's used all over the place. It's used in your wallets, right now. We all want that credit card on the far left because it's black. And you see someone at CVS or -- not CVS -- at Christian Dior or something, and then ... I don't know. I don't have a black card; I've got a debit card. (Laughter) So they whip it out. And you see men, they have that black card. I want that because that means that they're cooler than I am, and I need that. And this is used in games as well. "Modern Warfare," one of the most successful selling games of all time. I'm only a level four, but I desperately want to be a level 10, because they've got that cool red badge thing, and that means that I am somehow better than everyone else. And that's very powerful to me. Status is really good motivator. It's also used in more conventional settings and can be used more consciously in conventional settings. School -- and remember, I made it through one year, so I think I'm qualified to talk on school -- is a game, it's just not a terribly well-designed game, right. There are levels. There are C. There are B. There is A. There are statuses. I mean, what is valedictorian, but a status? If we called valedictorian a "white knight paladin level 20," I think people would probably work a lot harder. (Laughter) So school is a game, and there have been lots of experimentations on how we do this properly. But let's use it consciously. Like why have games that you can lose? Why go from an A to an F or a B to a C? That sucks. Why not level-up? And at Princeton, they've actually experimented with this, where they have quizzes where you gain experience points, and you level up from B to an A. And it's very powerful. It can be used in interesting ways. The third one I want to talk about quickly is the progression dynamic, where you have to sort of make progress, you have to move through different steps in a very granular fashion. This is used all over the place, including LinkedIn, where I am an un-whole individual. I am only 85 percent complete on LinkedIn, and that bothers me. And this is so deep-seated in our psyche that when we're presented with a progress bar and presented with easy, granular steps to take to try and complete that progress bar, we will do it. We will find a way to move that blue line all the way to the right edge of the screen. This is used in conventional games as well. I mean, you see this is a paladin level 10, and that's a paladin level 20, and if you were going to fight, you know, orcs on the fields of Mordor against the Raz al Ghul, you'd probably want to be the bigger one, right. I would. And so people work very hard to level-up. "World of Warcraft" is one of the most successful games of all time. The average player spends something like six, six-and-a-half hours a day on it. Their most dedicated players, it's like a full-time job. It's insane. And they have these systems where you can level-up. And that's a very powerful thing. Progression is powerful. It can also be used in very compelling ways for good. One of the things that we work on at SCVNGR is how do you use games to drive traffic and drive business to local businesses, to sort of something that is very key to the economy. And here we have a game that people play. They go places, they do challenges, they earn points. And we've introduced a progression dynamic into it, where, by going to the same place over and over, by doing challenges, by engaging with the business, you move a green bar from the left edge of the screen to the right edge of the screen, and you eventually unlock rewards. And this is powerful enough that we can see that it hooks people into these dynamics, pulls them back to the same local businesses, creates huge loyalty, creates engagement, and is able to drive meaningful revenue and fun and engagement to businesses. These progression dynamics are powerful and can be used in the real world. The final one I want to talk about -- and it's a great one to end on -- is this concept of communal discovery, a dynamic in which everyone has to work together to achieve something. And communal discovery is powerful because it leverages the network that is society to solve problems. This is used in some sort of famous consumer web stories, like Digg, which I'm sure you've all heard of. Digg is a communal dynamic to try to find and source the best news, the most interesting stories. And they made this into a game, initially. They had a leader board, where, if you recommended the best stories, you would get points. And that really motivated people to find the best stories. But it became so powerful that there was actually a cabal, a group of people, the top seven on the leader board, who would work together to make sure they maintained that position. And they would recommend other people's stories, and the game became more powerful than the goal. And they actually had to end up shutting down the leader board because while it was effective, it was so powerful that it stopped sourcing the best stories and started having people work to maintain their leadership. So we have to use this one carefully. It's also used in things like McDonald's Monopoly, where the game is not the Monopoly game you're playing, but the sort of cottage industries that form to try and find Boardwalk, right. And now they're just looking for a little sticker that says "Boardwalk." But it can also be used to find real things. This is the DARPA balloon challenge, where they hid a couple balloons all across the United States and said, "Use networks. Try and find these balloons fastest, and the winner will get $40,000." And the winner was actually a group out of MIT, where they created sort of a pyramid scheme, a network, where the first person to recommend the location of a balloon got $2,000 and anyone else to push that recommendation up also got a cut of it. And in 12 hours, they were able to find all these balloons, all across the country, right. Really powerful dynamic. And so, I've got about 20 seconds left, so if I'm going to leave you with anything, last decade was the decade of social. This next decade is the decade of games. We use game dynamics to build on it. We build with mindshare. We can influence behavior. It is very powerful. It is very exciting. Let's all build it together, let's do it well and have fun playing.

The fragrance that you will smell, you will never be able to smell this way again. It’s a fragrance called Beyond Paradise, which you can find in any store in the nation. Except here it’s been split up in parts by Estée Lauder and by the perfumer who did it, Calice Becker, and I'm most grateful to them for this. And it’s been split up in successive bits and a chord. So what you’re smelling now is the top note. And then will come what they call the heart, the lush heart note. I will show it to you. The Eden top note is named after the Eden Project in the U.K. The lush heart note, Melaleuca bark note -- which does not contain any Melaleuca bark, because it’s totally forbidden. And after that, the complete fragrance. Now what you are smelling is a combination of -- I asked how many molecules there were in there, and nobody would tell me. So I put it through a G.C., a Gas Chromatograph that I have in my office, and it’s about 400. So what you’re smelling is several hundred molecules floating through the air, hitting your nose. And do not get the impression that this is very subjective. You are all smelling pretty much the same thing, OK? Smell has this reputation of being somewhat different for each person. It’s not really true. And perfumery shows you that can’t be true, because if it were like that it wouldn’t be an art, OK? Now, while the smell wafts over you, let me tell you the history of an idea. Everything that you’re smelling in here is made up of atoms that come from what I call the Upper East Side of the periodic table -- a nice, safe neighborhood. (Laughter) You really don’t want to leave it if you want to have a career in perfumery. Some people have tried in the 1920s to add things from the bad parts, and it didn’t really work. These are the five atoms from which just about everything that you’re going to smell in real life, from coffee to fragrance, are made of. The top note that you smelled at the very beginning, the cut-grass green, what we call in perfumery -- they’re weird terms -- and this would be called a green note, because it smells of something green, like cut grass. This is cis-3-hexene-1-ol. And I had to learn chemistry on the fly in the last three years. A very expensive high school chemistry education. This has six carbon atoms, so "hexa," hexene-1-ol. It has one double bond, it has an alcohol on the end, so it’s "ol," and that’s why they call it cis-3-hexene-1-ol. Once you figure this out, you can really impress people at parties. This smells of cut grass. Now, this is the skeleton of the molecule. If you dress it up with atoms, hydrogen atoms -- that’s what it looks like when you have it on your computer -- but actually it’s sort of more like this, in the sense that the atoms have a certain sphere that you cannot penetrate. They repel. OK, now. Why does this thing smell of cut grass, OK? Why doesn’t it smell of potatoes or violets? Well, there are really two theories. But the first theory is: it must be the shape. And that’s a perfectly reasonable theory in the sense that almost everything else in biology works by shape. Enzymes that chew things up, antibodies, it’s all, you know, the fit between a protein and whatever it is grabbing, in this case a smell. And I will try and explain to you what’s wrong with this notion. And the other theory is that we smell molecular vibrations. Now, this is a totally insane idea. And when I first came across it in the early '90s, I thought my predecessor, Malcolm Dyson and Bob Wright, had really taken leave of their senses, and I’ll explain to you why this was the case. However, I came to realize gradually that they may be right -- and I have to convince all my colleagues that this is so, but I’m working on it. Here’s how shape works in normal receptors. You have a molecule coming in, it gets into the protein, which is schematic here, and it causes this thing to switch, to turn, to move in some way by binding in certain parts. And the attraction, the forces, between the molecule and the protein cause the motion. This is a shape-based idea. Now, what’s wrong with shape is summarized in this slide. The way --I expect everybody to memorize these compounds. This is one page of work from a chemist’s workbook, OK? Working for a fragrance company. He’s making 45 molecules, and he’s looking for a sandalwood, something that smells of sandalwood. Because there’s a lot of money in sandalwoods. And of these 45 molecules, only 4629 actually smells of sandalwood. And he puts an exclamation mark, OK? This is an awful lot of work. This actually is roughly, in man-years of work, 200,000 dollars roughly, if you keep them on the low salaries with no benefits. So this is a profoundly inefficient process. And my definition of a theory is, it’s not just something that you teach people; it’s labor saving. A theory is something that enables you to do less work. I love the idea of doing less work. So let me explain to you why -- a very simple fact that tells you why this shape theory really does not work very well. This is cis-3-hexene-1-ol. It smells of cut grass. This is cis-3-hexene-1-thiol, and this smells of rotten eggs, OK? Now, you will have noticed that vodka never smells of rotten eggs. If it does, you put the glass down, you go to a different bar. This is -- in other words, we never get the O-H -- we never mistake it for an S-H, OK? Like, at no concentration, even pure, you know, if you smelt pure ethanol, it doesn’t smell of rotten eggs. Conversely, there is no concentration at which the sulfur compound will smell like vodka. It’s very hard to explain this by molecular recognition. Now, I showed this to a physicist friend of mine who has a profound distaste for biology, and he says, "That’s easy! The things are a different color!" (Laughter) We have to go a little beyond that. Now let me explain why vibrational theory has some sort of interest in it. These molecules, as you saw in the beginning, the building blocks had springs connecting them to each other. In fact, molecules are able to vibrate at a set of frequencies which are very specific for each molecule and for the bonds connecting them. So this is the sound of the O-H stretch, translated into the audible range. S-H, quite a different frequency. Now, this is kind of interesting, because it tells you that you should be looking for a particular fact, which is this: nothing in the world smells like rotten eggs except S-H, OK? Now, Fact B: nothing in the world has that frequency except S-H. If you look on this, imagine a piano keyboard. The S-H stretch is in the middle of a part of the keyboard that has been, so to speak, damaged, and there are no neighboring notes, nothing is close to it. You have a unique smell, a unique vibration. So I went searching when I started in this game to convince myself that there was any degree of plausibility to this whole crazy story. I went searching for a type of molecule, any molecule, that would have that vibration and that -- the obvious prediction was that it should absolutely smell of sulfur. If it didn’t, the whole idea was toast, and I might as well move on to other things. Now, after searching high and low for several months, I discovered that there was a type of molecule called a Borane which has exactly the same vibration. Now the good news is, Boranes you can get hold of. The bad news is they’re rocket fuels. Most of them explode spontaneously in contact with air, and when you call up the companies, they only give you minimum ten tons, OK? (Laughter) So this was not what they call a laboratory-scale experiment, and they wouldn’t have liked it at my college. However, I managed to get a hold of a Borane eventually, and here is the beast. And it really does have the same -- if you calculate, if you measure the vibrational frequencies, they are the same as S-H. Now, does it smell of sulfur? Well, if you go back in the literature, there’s a man who knew more about Boranes than anyone alive then or since, Alfred Stock, he synthesized all of them. And in an enormous 40-page paper in German he says, at one point -- my wife is German and she translated it for me -- and at one point he says, "ganz widerlich Geruch," an "absolutely repulsive smell," which is good. Reminiscent of hydrogen sulfide. So this fact that Boranes smell of sulfur had been known since 1910, and utterly forgotten until 1997, 1998. Now, the slight fly in the ointment is this: that if we smell molecular vibrations, we must have a spectroscope in our nose. Now, this is a spectroscope, OK, on my laboratory bench. And it’s fair to say that if you look up somebody’s nose, you’re unlikely to see anything resembling this. And this is the main objection to the theory. OK, great, we smell vibrations. How? All right? Now when people ask this kind of question, they neglect something, which is that physicists are really clever, unlike biologists. (Laughter) This is a joke. I’m a biologist, OK? So it’s a joke against myself. Bob Jacklovich and John Lamb at Ford Motor Company, in the days when Ford Motor was spending vast amounts of money on fundamental research, discovered a way to build a spectroscope that was intrinsically nano-scale. In other words, no mirrors, no lasers, no prisms, no nonsense, just a tiny device, and he built this device. And this device uses electron tunneling. Now, I could do the dance of electron tunneling, but I’ve done a video instead, which is much more interesting. Here’s how it works. Electrons are fuzzy creatures, and they can jump across gaps, but only at equal energy. If the energy differs, they can’t jump. Unlike us, they won’t fall off the cliff. OK. Now. If something absorbs the energy, the electron can travel. So here you have a system, you have something -- and there’s plenty of that stuff in biology -- some substance giving an electron, and the electron tries to jump, and only when a molecule comes along that has the right vibration does the reaction happen, OK? This is the basis for the device that these two guys at Ford built. And every single part of this mechanism is actually plausible in biology. In other words, I’ve taken off-the-shelf components, and I’ve made a spectroscope. What’s nice about this idea, if you have a philosophical bent of mind, is that then it tells you that the nose, the ear and the eye are all vibrational senses. Of course, it doesn’t matter, because it could also be that they’re not. But it has a certain -- (Laughter) -- it has a certain ring to it which is attractive to people who read too much 19th-century German literature. And then a magnificent thing happened: I left academia and joined the real world of business, and a company was created around my ideas to make new molecules using my method, along the lines of, let’s put someone else’s money where your mouth is. And one of the first things that happened was we started going around to fragrance companies asking for what they needed, because, of course, if you could calculate smell, you don’t need chemists. You need a computer, a Mac will do it, if you know how to program the thing right, OK? So you can try a thousand molecules, you can try ten thousand molecules in a weekend, and then you only tell the chemists to make the right one. And so that’s a direct path to making new odorants. And one of the first things that happened was we went to see some perfumers in France -- and here’s where I do my Charles Fleischer impression -- and one of them says, "You cannot make a coumarin." He says to me, "I bet you cannot make a coumarin." Now, coumarin is a very common thing, a material, in fragrance which is derived from a bean that comes from South America. And it is the classic synthetic aroma chemical, OK? It’s the molecule that has made men’s fragrances smell the way they do since 1881, to be exact. And the problem is it’s a carcinogen. So nobody likes particularly to -- you know, aftershave with carcinogens. (Laughter) There are some reckless people, but it’s not worth it, OK? So they asked us to make a new coumarin. And so we started doing calculations. And the first thing you do is you calculate the vibrational spectrum of coumarin, and you smooth it out, so that you have a nice picture of what the sort of chord, so to speak, of coumarin is. And then you start cranking the computer to find other molecules, related or unrelated, that have the same vibrations. And we actually, in this case, I’m sorry to say, it happened -- it was serendipitous. Because I got a phone call from our chief chemist and he said, look, I’ve just found this such a beautiful reaction, that even if this compound doesn’t smell of coumarin, I want to do it, it’s just such a nifty, one step -- I mean, chemists have weird minds -- one step, 90 percent yield, you know, and you get this lovely crystalline compound. Let us try it. And I said, first of all, let me do the calculation on that compound, bottom right, which is related to coumarin, but has an extra pentagon inserted into the molecule. Calculate the vibrations, the purple spectrum is that new fellow, the white one is the old one. And the prediction is it should smell of coumarin. They made it ... and it smelled exactly like coumarin. And this is our new baby, called tonkene. You see, when you’re a scientist, you’re always selling ideas. And people are very resistant to ideas, and rightly so. Why should new ideas be accepted? But when you put a little 10-gram vial on the table in front of perfumers and it smells like coumarin, and it isn’t coumarin, and you’ve found it in three weeks, this focuses everybody’s mind wonderfully. (Laughter) (Applause) And people often ask me, is your theory accepted? And I said, well, by whom? I mean most, you know -- there’s three attitudes: You’re right, and I don’t know why, which is the most rational one at this point. You’re right, and I don’t care how you do it, in a sense; you bring me the molecules, you know. And: You’re completely wrong, and I’m sure you’re completely wrong. OK? Now, we’re dealing with people who only want results, and this is the commercial world. And they tell us that even if we do it by astrology, they’re happy. But we’re not actually doing it by astrology. But for the last three years, I’ve had what I consider to be the best job in the entire universe, which is to put my hobby -- which is, you know, fragrance and all the magnificent things -- plus a little bit of biophysics, a small amount of self-taught chemistry at the service of something that actually works. Thank you very much. (Applause)

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

I want to talk to you about something kind of big. We'll start here. 65 million years ago the dinosaurs had a bad day. (Laughter) A chunk of rock six miles across, moving something like 50 times the speed of a rifle bullet, slammed into the Earth. It released its energy all at once, and it was an explosion that was mind-numbing. If you took every nuclear weapon ever built at the height of the Cold War, lumped them together and blew them up at the same time, that would be one one-millionth of the energy released at that moment. The dinosaurs had a really bad day. Okay? Now, a six-mile-wide rock is very large. We all live here in Boulder. If you look out your window and you can see Long's Peak, you're probably familiar with it. Now, scoop up Long's Peak, and put it out in space. Take Meeker, Mt. Meeker. Lump that in there, and put that in space as well, and Mt. Everest, and K2, and the Indian peaks. Then you're starting to get an idea of how much rock we're talking about, okay? We know it was that big because of the impact it had and the crater it left. It hit in what we now know as Yucatan, the Gulf of Mexico. You can see here, there's the Yucatan Peninsula, if you recognize Cozumel off the east coast there. Here is how big of a crater was left. It was huge. To give you a sense of the scale, okay, there you go. The scale here is 50 miles on top, a hundred kilometers on the bottom. This thing was 300 kilometers across -- 200 miles -- an enormous crater that excavated out vast amounts of earth that splashed around the globe and set fires all over the planet, threw up enough dust to block out the sun. It wiped out 75 percent of all species on Earth. Now, not all asteroids are that big. Some of them are smaller. Here is one that came in over the United States in October of 1992. It came in on a Friday night. Why is that important? Because back then, video cameras were just starting to become popular, and people would bring them, parents would bring them, to their kids' football games to film their kids play football. And since this came in on a Friday, they were able to get this great footage of this thing breaking up as it came in over West Virgina, Maryland, Pennsylvania and New Jersey until it did that to a car in New York. (Laughter) Now, this is not a 200-mile-wide crater, but then again you can see the rock which is sitting right here, about the size of a football, that hit that car and did that damage. Now this thing was probably about the size of a school bus when it first came in. It broke up through atmospheric pressure, it crumbled, and then the pieces fell apart and did some damage. Now, you wouldn't want that falling on your foot or your head, because it would do that to it. That would be bad. But it won't wipe out, you know, all life on Earth, so that's fine. But it turns out, you don't need something six miles across to do a lot of damage. There is a median point between tiny rock and gigantic rock, and in fact, if any of you have ever been to near Winslow, Arizona, there is a crater in the desert there that is so iconic that it is actually called Meteor Crater. To give you a sense of scale, this is about a mile wide. If you look up at the top, that's a parking lot, and those are recreational vehicles right there. So it's about a mile across, 600 feet deep. The object that formed this was probably about 30 to 50 yards across, so roughly the size of Mackey Auditorium here. It came in at speeds that were tremendous, slammed into the ground, blew up, and exploded with the energy of roughly a 20-megaton nuclear bomb -- a very hefty bomb. This was 50,000 years ago, so it may have wiped out a few buffalo or antelope, or something like that out in the desert, but it probably would not have caused global devastation. It turns out that these things don't have to hit the ground to do a lot of damage. Now, in 1908, over Siberia, near the Tunguska region -- for those of you who are Dan Aykroyd fans and saw "Ghostbusters," when he talked about the greatest cross-dimensional rift since the Siberia blast of 1909, where he got the date wrong, but that's okay. (Laughter) It was 1908. That's fine. I can live with that. (Laughter) Another rock came into the Earth's atmosphere and this one blew up above the ground, several miles up above the surface of the Earth. The heat from the explosion set fire to the forest below it, and then the shock wave came down and knocked down trees for hundreds of square miles, okay? This did a huge amount of damage. And again, this was a rock probably roughly the size of this auditorium that we're sitting in. In Meteor Crater it was made of metal, and metal is much tougher, so it made it to the ground. The one over Tunguska was probably made of rock, and that's much more crumbly, so it blew up in the air. Either way, these are tremendous explosions, 20 megatons. Now, when these things blow up, they're not going to do global ecological damage. They're not going to do something like the dinosaur-killer did. They're just not big enough. But they will do global economic damage, because they don't have to hit, necessarily, to do this kind of damage. They don't have to do global devastation. If one of these things were to hit pretty much anywhere, it would cause a panic. But if it came over a city, an important city -- not that any city is more important than others, but some of them we depend on them more on the global economic basis -- that could do a huge amount of damage to us as a civilization. So, now that I've scared the crap out of you ... (Laughter) what can we do about this? All right? This is a potential threat. Let me note that we have not had a giant impact like the dinosaur-killer for 65 million years. They're very rare. The smaller ones happen more often, but probably on the order of a millennium, every few centuries or every few thousand years, but it's still something to be aware of. Well, what do we do about them? The first thing we have to do is find them. This is an image of an asteroid that passed us in 2009. It's right here. But you can see that it's extremely faint. I don't even know if you can see that in the back row. These are just stars. This is a rock that was about 30 yards across, so roughly the size of the ones that blew up over Tunguska and hit Arizona 50,000 years ago. These things are faint. They're hard to see, and the sky is really big. We have to find these things first. Well the good news is, we're looking for them. NASA has devoted money to this. The National Science Foundation, other countries are very interested in doing this. We're building telescopes that are looking for the threat. That's a great first step, but what's the second step? The second step is that we see one heading toward us, we have to stop it. What do we do? You've probably heard about the asteroid Apophis. If you haven't yet, you will. If you've heard about the Mayan 2012 apocalypse, you're going to hear about Apophis, because you're keyed in to all the doomsday networks anyway. Apophis is an asteroid that was discovered in 2004. It's roughly 250 yards across, so it's pretty big -- big size, you know, bigger than a football stadium -- and it's going to pass by the Earth in April of 2029. And it's going to pass us so close that it's actually going to come underneath our weather satellites. The Earth's gravity is going to bend the orbit of this thing so much that if it's just right, if it passes through this region of space, this kidney bean-shaped region called the keyhole, the Earth's gravity will bend it just enough that seven years later on April 13, which is a Friday, I'll note, in the year 2036 ... (Laughter) -- you can't plan that kind of stuff -- Apophis is going to hit us. And it's 250 meters across, so it would do unbelievable damage. Now the good news is that the odds of it actually passing through this keyhole and hitting us next go-around are one in a million, roughly -- very, very low odds, so I personally am not lying awake at night worrying about this at all. I don't think Apophis is a problem. In fact, Apophis is a blessing in disguise, because it woke us up to the dangers of these things. This thing was discovered just a few years ago and could hit us a few years from now. It won't, but it gives us a chance to study these kinds of asteroids. We didn't really necessarily understand these keyholes, and now we do and it turns out that's really important, because how do you stop an asteroid like this? Well, let me ask you, what happens if you're standing in the middle of the road and a car's headed for you? What do you do? You do this. Right? Move. The car goes past you. But we can't move the Earth, at least not easily, but we can move a small asteroid. And it turns out, we've even done it. In the year 2005, NASA launched a probe called Deep Impact, which slammed into -- slammed a piece of itself into the nucleus of a comet. Comets are very much like asteroids. The purpose wasn't to push it out of the way. The purpose was to make a crater to excavate the material and see what was underneath the surface of this comet, which we learned quite a bit about. We did move the comet a little tiny bit, not very much, but that wasn't the point. However, think about this. This thing is orbiting the sun at 10 miles per second, 20 miles per second. We shot a space probe at it and hit it. Okay? Imagine how hard that must be, and we did it. That means we can do it again. If we need, if we see an asteroid that's coming toward us, and it's headed right for us, and we have two years to go, boom! We hit it. You can try to -- you know, if you watch the movies, you might think about, why don't we use a nuclear weapon? It's like, well, you can try that, but the problem is timing. You shoot a nuclear weapon at this thing, you have to blow it up within a few milliseconds of tolerance or else you'll just miss it. And there are a lot of other problems with that. It's very hard to do. But just hitting something? That's pretty easy. I think even NASA can do that, and they proved that they can. (Laughter) The problem is, what happens if you hit this asteroid, you've changed the orbit, you measure the orbit and then you find out, oh, yeah, we just pushed it into a keyhole, and now it's going to hit us in three years. Well, my opinion is, fine. Okay? It's not hitting us in six months. That's good. Now we have three years to do something else. And you can hit it again. That's kind of ham-fisted. You might just push it into a third keyhole or whatever, so you don't do that. And this is the part, it's the part I just love. (Laughter) After the big macho "Rrrrrrr BAM! We're gonna hit this thing in the face," then we bring in the velvet gloves. (Laughter) There's a group of scientists and engineers and astronauts and they call themselves The B612 Foundation. For those of you who've read "The Little Prince," you understand that reference, I hope. The little prince who lived on an asteroid, it was called B612. These are smart guys -- men and women -- astronauts, like I said, engineers. Rusty Schweickart, who was an Apollo 9 astronaut, is on this. Dan Durda, my friend who made this image, works here at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, on Walnut Street. He created this image for this, and he's actually one of the astronomers who works for them. If we see an asteroid that's going to hit the Earth and we have enough time, we can hit it to move it into a better orbit. But then what we do is we launch a probe that has to weigh a ton or two. It doesn't have to be huge -- couple of tons, not that big -- and you park it near the asteroid. You don't land on it, because these things are tumbling end over end. It's very hard to land on them. Instead you get near it. The gravity of the asteroid pulls on the probe, and the probe has a couple of tons of mass. It has a little tiny bit of gravity, but it's enough that it can pull the asteroid, and you have your rockets set up, so you can -- oh, you can barely see it here, but there's rocket plumes -- and you basically, these guys are connected by their own gravity, and if you move the probe very slowly, very, very gently, you can very easily finesse that rock into a safe orbit. You can even put in orbit around the Earth where we could mine it, although that's a whole other thing. I won't go into that. (Laughter) But we'd be rich! (Laughter) So think about this, right? There are these giant rocks flying out there, and they're hitting us, and they're doing damage to us, but we've figured out how to do this, and all the pieces are in place to do this. We have astronomers in place with telescopes looking for them. We have smart people, very, very smart people, who are concerned about this and figuring out how to fix the problem, and we have the technology to do this. This probe actually can't use chemical rockets. Chemical rockets provide too much thrust, too much push. The probe would just shoot away. We invented something called an ion drive, which is a very, very, very low-thrust engine. It generates the force a piece of paper would have on your hand, incredibly light, but it can run for months and years, providing that very gentle push. If anybody here is a fan of the original "Star Trek," they ran across an alien ship that had an ion drive, and Spock said, "They're very technically sophisticated. They're a hundred years ahead of us with this drive." Yeah, we have an ion drive now. (Laughter) We don't have the Enterprise, but we've got an ion drive now. (Applause) Spock. (Laughter) So ... that's the difference, that's the difference between us and the dinosaurs. This happened to them. It doesn't have to happen to us. The difference between the dinosaurs and us is that we have a space program and we can vote, and so we can change our future. (Laughter) We have the ability to change our future. 65 million years from now, we don't have to have our bones collecting dust in a museum. Thank you very much. (Applause)

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

I want to start with a game. Okay? And to win this game, all you have to do is see the reality that's in front of you as it really is, all right? So we have two panels here, of colored dots. And one of those dots is the same in the two panels. And you have to tell me which one. Now, I narrowed it down to the gray one, the green one, and, say, the orange one. So by a show of hands, we'll start with the easiest one. Show of hands: how many people think it's the gray one? Really? Okay. How many people think it's the green one? And how many people think it's the orange one? Pretty even split. Let's find out what the reality is. Here is the orange one. (Laughter) Here is the green one. And here is the gray one. (Laughter) So for all of you who saw that, you're complete realists. All right? (Laughter) So this is pretty amazing, isn't it? Because nearly every living system has evolved the ability to detect light in one way or another. So for us, seeing color is one of the simplest things the brain does. And yet, even at this most fundamental level, context is everything. What I'm going to talk about is not that context is everything, but why context is everything. Because it's answering that question that tells us not only why we see what we do, but who we are as individuals, and who we are as a society. But first, we have to ask another question, which is, "What is color for?" And instead of telling you, I'll just show you. What you see here is a jungle scene, and you see the surfaces according to the amount of light that those surfaces reflect. Now, can any of you see the predator that's about to jump out at you? And if you haven't seen it yet, you're dead, right? (Laughter) Can anyone see it? Anyone? No? Now let's see the surfaces according to the quality of light that they reflect. And now you see it. So, color enables us to see the similarities and differences between surfaces, according to the full spectrum of light that they reflect. But what you've just done is in many respects mathematically impossible. Why? Because, as Berkeley tells us, we have no direct access to our physical world, other than through our senses. And the light that falls onto our eyes is determined by multiple things in the world, not only the color of objects, but also the color of their illumination, and the color of the space between us and those objects. You vary any one of those parameters, and you'll change the color of the light that falls onto your eye. This is a huge problem, because it means that the same image could have an infinite number of possible real-world sources. Let me show you what I mean. Imagine that this is the back of your eye, okay? And these are two projections from the world. They're identical in every single way. Identical in shape, size, spectral content. They are the same, as far as your eye is concerned. And yet they come from completely different sources. The one on the right comes from a yellow surface, in shadow, oriented facing the left, viewed through a pinkish medium. The one on the left comes from an orange surface, under direct light, facing to the right, viewed through sort of a bluish medium. Completely different meanings, giving rise to the exact same retinal information. And yet it's only the retinal information that we get. So how on Earth do we even see? So if you remember anything in this next 18 minutes, remember this: that the light that falls onto your eye, sensory information, is meaningless, because it could mean literally anything. And what's true for sensory information is true for information generally. There's no inherent meaning in information. It's what we do with that information that matters. So, how do we see? Well, we see by learning to see. The brain evolved the mechanisms for finding patterns, finding relationships in information, and associating those relationships with a behavioral meaning, a significance, by interacting with the world. We're very aware of this in the form of more cognitive attributes, like language. I'm going to give you some letter strings, and I want you to read them out for me, if you can. Audience: "Can you read this?" "You are not reading this." "What are you reading?" Beau Lotto: "What are you reading?" Half the letters are missing, right? There's no a priori reason why an "H" has to go between that "W" and "A." But you put one there. Why? Because in the statistics of your past experience, it would have been useful to do so. So you do so again. And yet you don't put a letter after that first "T." Why? Because it wouldn't have been useful in the past. So you don't do it again. So, let me show you how quickly our brains can redefine normality, even at the simplest thing the brain does, which is color. So if I could have the lights down up here. I want you to first notice that those two desert scenes are physically the same. One is simply the flipping of the other. Now I want you to look at that dot between the green and the red. And I want you to stare at that dot. Don't look anywhere else. We're going to look at it for about 30 seconds, which is a bit of a killer in an 18-minute talk. (Laughter) But I really want you to learn. And I'll tell you -- don't look anywhere else -- I'll tell you what's happening in your head. Your brain is learning, and it's learning that the right side of its visual field is under red illumination; the left side of its visual field is under green illumination. That's what it's learning. Okay? Now, when I tell you, I want you to look at the dot between the two desert scenes. So why don't you do that now? (Laughter) Can I have the lights up again? I take it from your response they don't look the same anymore, right? (Applause) Why? Because your brain is seeing that same information as if the right one is still under red light, and the left one is still under green light. That's your new normal. Okay? So, what does this mean for context? It means I can take two identical squares, put them in light and dark surrounds, and the one on the dark surround looks lighter than on the light surround. What's significant is not simply the light and dark surrounds that matter. It's what those light and dark surrounds meant for your behavior in the past. So I'll show you what I mean. Here we have that exact same illusion. We have two identical tiles on the left, one in a dark surround, one in a light surround. And the same thing over on the right. Now, I'll reveal those two scenes, but I'm not going to change anything within those boxes, except their meaning. And see what happens to your perception. Notice that on the left the two tiles look nearly completely opposite: one very white and one very dark, right? Whereas on the right, the two tiles look nearly the same. And yet there is still one on a dark surround, and one on a light surround. Why? Because if the tile in that shadow were in fact in shadow, and reflecting the same amount of light to your eye as the one outside the shadow, it would have to be more reflective -- just the laws of physics. So you see it that way. Whereas on the right, the information is consistent with those two tiles being under the same light. If they're under the same light reflecting the same amount of light to your eye, then they must be equally reflective. So you see it that way. Which means we can bring all this information together to create some incredibly strong illusions. This is one I made a few years ago. And you'll notice you see a dark brown tile at the top, and a bright orange tile at the side. That is your perceptual reality. The physical reality is that those two tiles are the same. Here you see four gray tiles on your left, seven gray tiles on the right. I'm not going to change those tiles at all, but I'm going to reveal the rest of the scene. And see what happens to your perception. The four blue tiles on the left are gray. The seven yellow tiles on the right are also gray. They are the same. Okay? Don't believe me? Let's watch it again. What's true for color is also true for complex perceptions of motion. So, here we have -- let's turn this around -- a diamond. And what I'm going to do is, I'm going to hold it here, and I'm going to spin it. And for all of you, you'll see it probably spinning this direction. Now I want you to keep looking at it. Move your eyes around, blink, maybe close one eye. And suddenly it will flip, and start spinning the opposite direction. Yes? Raise your hand if you got that. Yes? Keep blinking. Every time you blink, it will switch. So I can ask you, which direction is it rotating? How do you know? Your brain doesn't know, because both are equally likely. So depending on where it looks, it flips between the two possibilities. Are we the only ones that see illusions? The answer to this question is no. Even the beautiful bumblebee, with its mere one million brain cells, which is 250 times fewer cells than you have in one retina, sees illusions, does the most complicated things that even our most sophisticated computers can't do. So in my lab we work on bumblebees, because we can completely control their experience, and see how it alters the architecture of their brain. We do this in what we call the Bee Matrix. Here you have the hive. You can see the queen bee, the large bee in the middle. Those are her daughters, the eggs. They go back and forth between this hive and the arena, via this tube. You'll see one of the bees come out here. You see how she has a little number on her? There's another one coming out, she also has a number on her. Now, they're not born that way, right? We pull them out, put them in the fridge, and they fall asleep. Then you can superglue little numbers on them. (Laughter) And now, in this experiment they get a reward if they go to the blue flowers. They land on the flower, stick their tongue in there, called a proboscis, and drink sugar water. She's drinking a glass of water that's about that big to you and I, will do that about three times, then fly. And sometimes they learn not to go to the blue, but to go where the other bees go. So they copy each other. They can count to five. They can recognize faces. And here she comes down the ladder. And she'll come into the hive, find an empty honey pot, and throw up, and that's honey. (Laughter) Now remember, she's supposed to be going to the blue flowers, but what are these bees doing in the upper right corner? It looks like they're going to green flowers. Now, are they getting it wrong? And the answer to the question is no. Those are actually blue flowers. But those are blue flowers under green light. So they're using the relationships between the colors to solve the puzzle, which is exactly what we do. So, illusions are often used, especially in art, in the words of a more contemporary artist, "to demonstrate the fragility of our senses." Okay, this is complete rubbish. The senses aren't fragile. And if they were, we wouldn't be here. Instead, color tells us something completely different, that the brain didn't actually evolve to see the world the way it is. We can't. Instead, the brain evolved to see the world the way it was useful to see in the past. And how we see is by continually redefining normality. So, how can we take this incredible capacity of plasticity of the brain and get people to experience their world differently? Well, one of the ways we do it in my lab and studio is we translate the light into sound, and we enable people to hear their visual world. And they can navigate the world using their ears. Here's David on the right, and he's holding a camera. On the left is what his camera sees. And you'll see there's a faint line going across that image. That line is broken up into 32 squares. In each square, we calculate the average color. And then we just simply translate that into sound. And now he's going to turn around, close his eyes, and find a plate on the ground with his eyes closed. (Continuous sound) (Sound changes momentarily) (Sound changes momentarily) (Sound changes momentarily) (Sound changes momentarily) (Sound changes momentarily) Beau Lotto: He finds it. Amazing, right? So not only can we create a prosthetic for the visually impaired, but we can also investigate how people literally make sense of the world. But we can also do something else. We can also make music with color. So, working with kids, they created images, thinking about what might the images you see sound like if we could listen to them. And then we translated these images. And this is one of those images. And this is a six-year-old child composing a piece of music for a 32-piece orchestra. And this is what it sounds like. (Electronic representation of orchestral music) So, a six-year-old child. Okay? Now, what does all this mean? What this suggests is that no one is an outside observer of nature, okay? We're not defined by our central properties, by the bits that make us up. We're defined by our environment and our interaction with that environment, by our ecology. And that ecology is necessarily relative, historical and empirical. So, what I'd like to finish with is this over here. Because what I've been trying to do is really celebrate uncertainty. Because I think only through uncertainty is there potential for understanding. So, if some of you are still feeling a bit too certain, I'd like to do this one. So, if we have the lights down. And what we have here -- Can everyone see 25 purple surfaces on your left, and 25, call it yellowish, surfaces on your right? So now, what I want to do, I'm going to put the middle nine surfaces here under yellow illumination, by simply putting a filter behind them. Now you can see that changes the light that's coming through there, right? Because now the light is going through a yellowish filter and then a purplish filter. I'm going to do the opposite on the left here. I'm going to put the middle nine under a purplish light. Now, some of you will have noticed that the consequence is that the light coming through those middle nine on the right, or your left, is exactly the same as the light coming through the middle nine on your right. Agreed? Yes? Okay. So they are physically the same. Let's pull the covers off. Now remember -- you know that the middle nine are exactly the same. Do they look the same? No. The question is, "Is that an illusion?" And I'll leave you with that. So, thank you very much. (Laughter) (Applause)

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

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

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

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

It can be a very complicated thing, the ocean. And it can be a very complicated thing, what human health is. And bringing those two together might seem a very daunting task, but what I'm going to try to say is that even in that complexity, there's some simple themes that I think, if we understand, we can really move forward. And those simple themes aren't really themes about the complex science of what's going on, but things that we all pretty well know. And I'm going to start with this one: If momma ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. We know that, right? We've experienced that. And if we just take that and we build from there, then we can go to the next step, which is that if the ocean ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. That's the theme of my talk. And we're making the ocean pretty unhappy in a lot of different ways. This is a shot of Cannery Row in 1932. Cannery Row, at the time, had the biggest industrial canning operation on the west coast. We piled enormous amounts of pollution into the air and into the water. Rolf Bolin, who was a professor at the Hopkin's Marine Station where I work, wrote in the 1940s that "The fumes from the scum floating on the inlets of the bay were so bad they turned lead-based paints black." People working in these canneries could barely stay there all day because of the smell, but you know what they came out saying? They say, "You know what you smell? You smell money." That pollution was money to that community, and those people dealt with the pollution and absorbed it into their skin and into their bodies because they needed the money. We made the ocean unhappy; we made people very unhappy, and we made them unhealthy. The connection between ocean health and human health is actually based upon another couple simple adages, and I want to call that "pinch a minnow, hurt a whale." The pyramid of ocean life ... Now, when an ecologist looks at the ocean -- I have to tell you -- we look at the ocean in a very different way, and we see different things than when a regular person looks at the ocean because when an ecologist looks at the ocean, we see all those interconnections. We see the base of the food chain, the plankton, the small things, and we see how those animals are food to animals in the middle of the pyramid, and on so up this diagram. And that flow, that flow of life, from the very base up to the very top, is the flow that ecologists see. And that's what we're trying to preserve when we say, "Save the ocean. Heal the ocean." It's that pyramid. Now why does that matter for human health? Because when we jam things in the bottom of that pyramid that shouldn't be there, some very frightening things happen. Pollutants, some pollutants have been created by us: molecules like PCBs that can't be broken down by our bodies. And they go in the base of that pyramid, and they drift up; they're passed up that way, on to predators and on to the top predators, and in so doing, they accumulate. Now, to bring that home, I thought I'd invent a little game. We don't really have to play it; we can just think about it here. It's the Styrofoam and chocolate game. Imagine that when we got on this boat, we were all given two Styrofoam peanuts. Can't do much with them: Put them in your pocket. Suppose the rules are: every time you offer somebody a drink, you give them the drink, and you give them your Styrofoam peanuts too. What'll happen is that the Styrofoam peanuts will start moving through our society here, and they will accumulate in the drunkest, stingiest people. (Laughter) There's no mechanism in this game for them to go anywhere but into a bigger and bigger pile of indigestible Styrofoam peanuts. And that's exactly what happens with PDBs in this food pyramid: They accumulate into the top of it. Now suppose, instead of Styrofoam peanuts, we take these lovely little chocolates that we get and we had those instead. Well, some of us would be eating those chocolates instead of passing them around, and instead of accumulating, they will just pass into our group here and not accumulate in any one group because they're absorbed by us. And that's the difference between a PCB and, say, something natural like an omega-3, something we want out of the marine food chain. PCBs accumulate. We have great examples of that, unfortunately. PCBs accumulate in dolphins in Sarasota Bay, in Texas, in North Carolina. They get into the food chain. The dolphins eat the fish that have PCBs from the plankton, and those PCBs, being fat-soluble, accumulate in these dolphins. Now, a dolphin, mother dolphin, any dolphin -- there's only one way that a PCB can get out of a dolphin. And what's that? In mother's milk. Here's a diagram of the PCB load of dolphins in Sarasota Bay. Adult males: a huge load. Juveniles: a huge load. Females after their first calf is already weaned: a lower load. Those females, they're not trying to. Those females are passing the PCBs in the fat of their own mother's milk into their offspring, and their offspring don't survive. The death rate in these dolphins, for the first calf born of every female dolphin, is 60 to 80 percent. These mothers pump their first offspring full of this pollutant, and most of them die. Now, the mother then can go and reproduce, but what a terrible price to pay for the accumulation of this pollutant in these animals -- the death of the first-born calf. There's another top predator in the ocean, it turns out. That top predator, of course, is us. And we also are eating meat that comes from some of these same places. This is whale meat that I photographed in a grocery store in Tokyo -- or is it? In fact, what we did a few years ago was learn how to smuggle a molecular biology lab into Tokyo and use it to genetically test the DNA out of whale meat samples and identify what they really were. And some of those whale meat samples were whale meat. Some of them were illegal whale meat, by the way. That's another story. But some of them were not whale meat at all. Even though they were labeled whale meat, they were dolphin meat. Some of them were dolphin liver. Some of them were dolphin blubber. And those dolphin parts had a huge load of PCBs, dioxins and heavy metals. And that huge load was passing into the people that ate this meat. It turns out that a lot of dolphins are being sold as meat in the whale meat market around the world. That's a tragedy for those populations, but it's also a tragedy for the people eating them because they don't know that that's toxic meat. We had these data a few years ago. I remember sitting at my desk being about the only person in the world who knew that whale meat being sold in these markets was really dolphin meat, and it was toxic. It had two-to-three-to-400 times the toxic loads ever allowed by the EPA. And I remember there sitting at my desk thinking, "Well, I know this. This is a great scientific discovery," but it was so awful. And for the very first time in my scientific career, I broke scientific protocol, which is that you take the data and publish them in scientific journals and then begin to talk about them. We sent a very polite letter to the Minister of Health in Japan and simply pointed out that this is an intolerable situation, not for us, but for the people of Japan because mothers who may be breastfeeding, who may have young children, would be buying something that they thought was healthy, but it was really toxic. That led to a whole series of other campaigns in Japan, and I'm really proud to say that at this point, it's very difficult to buy anything in Japan that's labeled incorrectly, even though they're still selling whale meat, which I believe they shouldn't. But at least it's labeled correctly, and you're no longer going to be buying toxic dolphin meat instead. It isn't just there that this happens, but in a natural diet of some communities in the Canadian arctic and in the United States and in the European arctic, a natural diet of seals and whales leads to an accumulation of PCBs that have gathered up from all parts of the world and ended up in these women. These women have toxic breast milk. They cannot feed their offspring, their children, their breast milk because of the accumulation of these toxins in their food chain, in their part of the world's ocean pyramid. That means their immune systems are compromised. It means that their children's development can be compromised. And the world's attention on this over the last decade has reduced the problem for these women, not by changing the pyramid, but by changing what they particularly eat out of it. We've taken them out of their natural pyramid in order to solve this problem. That's a good thing for this particular acute problem, but it does nothing to solve the pyramid problem. There's other ways of breaking the pyramid. The pyramid, if we jam things in the bottom, can get backed up like a sewer line that's clogged. And if we jam nutrients, sewage, fertilizer in the base of that food pyramid, it can back up all through it. We end up with things we've heard about before: red tides, for example, which are blooms of toxic algae floating through the oceans causing neurological damage. We can also see blooms of bacteria, blooms of viruses in the ocean. These are two shots of a red tide coming on shore here and a bacteria in the genus vibrio, which includes the genus that has cholera in it. How many people have seen a "beach closed" sign? Why does that happen? It happens because we have jammed so much into the base of the natural ocean pyramid that these bacteria clog it up and overfill onto our beaches. Often what jams us up is sewage. Now how many of you have ever gone to a state park or a national park where you had a big sign at the front saying, "Closed because human sewage is so far over this park that you can't use it"? Not very often. We wouldn't tolerate that. We wouldn't tolerate our parks being swamped by human sewage, but beaches are closed a lot in our country. They're closed more and more and more all around the world for the same reason, and I believe we shouldn't tolerate that either. It's not just a question of cleanliness; it's also a question of how those organisms then turn into human disease. These vibrios, these bacteria, can actually infect people. They can go into your skin and create skin infections. This is a graph from NOAA's ocean and human health initiative, showing the rise of the infections by vibrio in people over the last few years. Surfers, for example, know this incredibly. And if you can see on some surfing sites, in fact, not only do you see what the waves are like or what the weather's like, but on some surf rider sites, you see a little flashing poo alert. That means that the beach might have great waves, but it's a dangerous place for surfers to be because they can carry with them, even after a great day of surfing, this legacy of an infection that might take a very long time to solve. Some of these infections are actually carrying antibiotic resistance genes now, and that makes them even more difficult. These same infections create harmful algal blooms. Those blooms are generating other kinds of chemicals. This is just a simple list of some of the types of poisons that come out of these harmful algal blooms: shellfish poisoning,fish ciguatera, diarrheic shellfish poisoning -- you don't want to know about that -- neurotoxic shellfish poisoning, paralytic shellfish poisoning. These are things that are getting into our food chain because of these blooms. Rita Calwell very famously traced a very interesting story of cholera into human communities, brought there, not by a normal human vector, but by a marine vector, this copepod. Copepods are small crustaceans. They're a tiny fraction of an inch long, and they can carry on their little legs some of the cholera bacteria that then leads to human disease. That has sparked cholera epidemics in ports along the world and has led to increased concentration on trying to make sure shipping doesn't move these vectors of cholera around the world. So what do you do? We have major problems in disrupted ecosystem flow that the pyramid may not be working so well, that the flow from the base up into it is being blocked and clogged. What do you do when you have this sort of disrupted flow? Well, there's a bunch of things you could do. You could call Joe the Plumber, for example. And he could come in and fix the flow. But in fact, if you look around the world, not only are there hope spots for where we may be able to fix problems, there have been places where problems have been fixed, where people have come to grips with these issues and begun to turn them around. Monterey is one of those. I started out showing how much we had distressed the Monterey Bay ecosystem with pollution and the canning industry and all of the attendant problems. In 1932, that's the picture. In 2009, the picture is dramatically different. The canneries are gone. The pollution has abated. But there's a greater sense here that what the individual communities need is working ecosystems. They need a functioning pyramid from the base all the way to the top. And that pyramid in Monterey, right now, because of the efforts of a lot of different people, is functioning better than it's ever functioned for the last 150 years. It didn't happen accidentally. It happened because many people put their time and effort and their pioneering spirit into this. On the left there, Julia Platt, the mayor of my little hometown in Pacific Grove. At 74 years old, became mayor because something had to be done to protect the ocean. In 1931, she produced California's first community-based marine protected area, right next to the biggest polluting cannery, because Julia knew that when the canneries eventually were gone, the ocean needed a place to grow from, that the ocean needed a place to spark a seed, and she wanted to provide that seed. Other people, like David Packard and Julie Packard, who were instrumental in producing the Monterey Bay aquarium to lock into people's notion that the ocean and the health of the ocean ecosystem were just as important to the economy of this area as eating the ecosystem would be. That change in thinking has led to a dramatic shift, not only in the fortunes of Monterey Bay, but other places around the world. Well, I want to leave you with the thought that what we're really trying to do here is protect this ocean pyramid, and that ocean pyramid connects to our own pyramid of life. It's an ocean planet, and we think of ourselves as a terrestrial species, but the pyramid of life in the ocean and our own lives on land are intricately connected. And it's only through having the ocean being healthy that we can remain healthy ourselves. Thank you very much. (Applause)

I want to talk to you about the future of medicine. But before I do that, I want to talk a little bit about the past. Now, throughout much of the recent history of medicine, we've thought about illness and treatment in terms of a profoundly simple model. In fact, the model is so simple that you could summarize it in six words: have disease, take pill, kill something. Now, the reason for the dominance of this model is of course the antibiotic revolution. Many of you might not know this, but we happen to be celebrating the hundredth year of the introduction of antibiotics into the United States. But what you do know is that that introduction was nothing short of transformative. Here you had a chemical, either from the natural world or artificially synthesized in the laboratory, and it would course through your body, it would find its target, lock into its target -- a microbe or some part of a microbe -- and then turn off a lock and a key with exquisite deftness, exquisite specificity. And you would end up taking a previously fatal, lethal disease -- a pneumonia, syphilis, tuberculosis -- and transforming that into a curable, or treatable illness. You have a pneumonia, you take penicillin, you kill the microbe and you cure the disease. So seductive was this idea, so potent the metaphor of lock and key and killing something, that it really swept through biology. It was a transformation like no other. And we've really spent the last 100 years trying to replicate that model over and over again in noninfectious diseases, in chronic diseases like diabetes and hypertension and heart disease. And it's worked, but it's only worked partly. Let me show you. You know, if you take the entire universe of all chemical reactions in the human body, every chemical reaction that your body is capable of, most people think that that number is on the order of a million. Let's call it a million. And now you ask the question, what number or fraction of reactions can actually be targeted by the entire pharmacopoeia, all of medicinal chemistry? That number is 250. The rest is chemical darkness. In other words, 0.025 percent of all chemical reactions in your body are actually targetable by this lock and key mechanism. You know, if you think about human physiology as a vast global telephone network with interacting nodes and interacting pieces, then all of our medicinal chemistry is operating on one tiny corner at the edge, the outer edge, of that network. It's like all of our pharmaceutical chemistry is a pole operator in Wichita, Kansas who is tinkering with about 10 or 15 telephone lines. So what do we do about this idea? What if we reorganized this approach? In fact, it turns out that the natural world gives us a sense of how one might think about illness in a radically different way, rather than disease, medicine, target. In fact, the natural world is organized hierarchically upwards, not downwards, but upwards, and we begin with a self-regulating, semi-autonomous unit called a cell. These self-regulating, semi-autonomous units give rise to self-regulating, semi-autonomous units called organs, and these organs coalesce to form things called humans, and these organisms ultimately live in environments, which are partly self-regulating and partly semi-autonomous. What's nice about this scheme, this hierarchical scheme building upwards rather than downwards, is that it allows us to think about illness as well in a somewhat different way. Take a disease like cancer. Since the 1950s, we've tried rather desperately to apply this lock and key model to cancer. We've tried to kill cells using a variety of chemotherapies or targeted therapies, and as most of us know, that's worked. It's worked for diseases like leukemia. It's worked for some forms of breast cancer, but eventually you run to the ceiling of that approach. And it's only in the last 10 years or so that we've begun to think about using the immune system, remembering that in fact the cancer cell doesn't grow in a vacuum. It actually grows in a human organism. And could you use the organismal capacity, the fact that human beings have an immune system, to attack cancer? In fact, it's led to the some of the most spectacular new medicines in cancer. And finally there's the level of the environment, isn't there? You know, we don't think of cancer as altering the environment. But let me give you an example of a profoundly carcinogenic environment. It's called a prison. You take loneliness, you take depression, you take confinement, and you add to that, rolled up in a little white sheet of paper, one of the most potent neurostimulants that we know, called nicotine, and you add to that one of the most potent addictive substances that you know, and you have a pro-carcinogenic environment. But you can have anti-carcinogenic environments too. There are attempts to create milieus, change the hormonal milieu for breast cancer, for instance. We're trying to change the metabolic milieu for other forms of cancer. Or take another disease, like depression. Again, working upwards, since the 1960s and 1970s, we've tried, again, desperately to turn off molecules that operate between nerve cells -- serotonin, dopamine -- and tried to cure depression that way, and that's worked, but then that reached the limit. And we now know that what you really probably need to do is to change the physiology of the organ, the brain, rewire it, remodel it, and that, of course, we know study upon study has shown that talk therapy does exactly that, and study upon study has shown that talk therapy combined with medicines, pills, really is much more effective than either one alone. Can we imagine a more immersive environment that will change depression? Can you lock out the signals that elicit depression? Again, moving upwards along this hierarchical chain of organization. What's really at stake perhaps here is not the medicine itself but a metaphor. Rather than killing something, in the case of the great chronic degenerative diseases -- kidney failure, diabetes, hypertension, osteoarthritis -- maybe what we really need to do is change the metaphor to growing something. And that's the key, perhaps, to reframing our thinking about medicine. Now, this idea of changing, of creating a perceptual shift, as it were, came home to me to roost in a very personal manner about 10 years ago. About 10 years ago -- I've been a runner most of my life -- I went for a run, a Saturday morning run, I came back and woke up and I basically couldn't move. My right knee was swollen up, and you could hear that ominous crunch of bone against bone. And one of the perks of being a physician is that you get to order your own MRIs. And I had an MRI the next week, and it looked like that. Essentially, the meniscus of cartilage that is between bone had been completely torn and the bone itself had been shattered. Now, if you're looking at me and feeling sorry, let me tell you a few facts. If I was to take an MRI of every person in this audience, 60 percent of you would show signs of bone degeneration and cartilage degeneration like this. 85 percent of all women by the age of 70 would show moderate to severe cartilage degeneration. 50 to 60 percent of the men in this audience would also have such signs. So this is a very common disease. Well, the second perk of being a physician is that you can get to experiment on your own ailments. So about 10 years ago we began, we brought this process into the laboratory, and we began to do simple experiments, mechanically trying to fix this degeneration. We tried to inject chemicals into the knee spaces of animals to try to reverse cartilage degeneration, and to put a short summary on a very long and painful process, essentially it came to naught. Nothing happened. And then about seven years ago, we had a research student from Australia. The nice thing about Australians is that they're habitually used to looking at the world upside down. (Laughter) And so Dan suggested to me, "You know, maybe it isn't a mechanical problem. Maybe it isn't a chemical problem. Maybe it's a stem cell problem." In other words, he had two hypotheses. Number one, there is such a thing as a skeletal stem cell -- a skeletal stem cell that builds up the entire vertebrate skeleton, bone, cartilage and the fibrous elements of skeleton, just like there's a stem cell in blood, just like there's a stem cell in the nervous system. And two, that maybe that, the degeneration or dysfunction of this stem cell is what's causing osteochondral arthritis, a very common ailment. So really the question was, were we looking for a pill when we should have really been looking for a cell. So we switched our models, and now we began to look for skeletal stem cells. And to cut again a long story short, about five years ago, we found these cells. They live inside the skeleton. Here's a schematic and then a real photograph of one of them. The white stuff is bone, and these red columns that you see and the yellow cells are cells that have arisen from one single skeletal stem cell -- columns of cartilage, columns of bone coming out of a single cell. These cells are fascinating. They have four properties. Number one is that they live where they're expected to live. They live just underneath the surface of the bone, underneath cartilage. You know, in biology, it's location, location, location. And they move into the appropriate areas and form bone and cartilage. That's one. Here's an interesting property. You can take them out of the vertebrate skeleton, you can culture them in petri dishes in the laboratory, and they are dying to form cartilage. Remember how we couldn't form cartilage for love or money? These cells are dying to form cartilage. They form their own furls of cartilage around themselves. They're also, number three, the most efficient repairers of fractures that we've ever encountered. This is a little bone, a mouse bone that we fractured and then let it heal by itself. These stem cells have come in and repaired, in yellow, the bone, in white, the cartilage, almost completely. So much so that if you label them with a fluorescent dye you can see them like some kind of peculiar cellular glue coming into the area of a fracture, fixing it locally and then stopping their work. Now, the fourth one is the most ominous, and that is that their numbers decline precipitously, precipitously, tenfold, fiftyfold, as you age. And so what had happened, really, is that we found ourselves in a perceptual shift. We had gone hunting for pills but we ended up finding theories. And in some ways we had hooked ourselves back onto this idea: cells, organisms, environments, because we were now thinking about bone stem cells, we were thinking about arthritis in terms of a cellular disease. And then the next question was, are there organs? Can you build this as an organ outside the body? Can you implant cartilage into areas of trauma? And perhaps most interestingly, can you ascend right up and create environments? You know, we know that exercise remodels bone, but come on, none of us is going to exercise. So could you imagine ways of passively loading and unloading bone so that you can recreate or regenerate degenerating cartilage? And perhaps more interesting, and more importantly, the question is, can you apply this model more globally outside medicine? What's at stake, as I said before, is not killing something, but growing something. And it raises a series of, I think, some of the most interesting questions about how we think about medicine in the future. Could your medicine be a cell and not a pill? How would we grow these cells? What we would we do to stop the malignant growth of these cells? We heard about the problems of unleashing growth. Could we implant suicide genes into these cells to stop them from growing? Could your medicine be an organ that's created outside the body and then implanted into the body? Could that stop some of the degeneration? What if the organ needed to have memory? In cases of diseases of the nervous system some of those organs had memory. How could we implant those memories back in? Could we store these organs? Would each organ have to be developed for an individual human being and put back? And perhaps most puzzlingly, could your medicine be an environment? Could you patent an environment? You know, in every culture, shamans have been using environments as medicines. Could we imagine that for our future? I've talked a lot about models. I began this talk with models. So let me end with some thoughts about model building. That's what we do as scientists. You know, when an architect builds a model, he or she is trying to show you a world in miniature. But when a scientist is building a model, he or she is trying to show you the world in metaphor. He or she is trying to create a new way of seeing. The former is a scale shift. The latter is a perceptual shift. Now, antibiotics created such a perceptual shift in our way of thinking about medicine that it really colored, distorted, very successfully, the way we've thought about medicine for the last hundred years. But we need new models to think about medicine in the future. That's what's at stake. You know, there's a popular trope out there that the reason we haven't had the transformative impact on the treatment of illness is because we don't have powerful-enough drugs, and that's partly true. But perhaps the real reason is that we don't have powerful-enough ways of thinking about medicines. It's certainly true that it would be lovely to have new medicines. But perhaps what's really at stake are three more intangible M's: mechanisms, models, metaphors. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: I really like this metaphor. How does it link in? There's a lot of talk in technologyland about the personalization of medicine, that we have all this data and that medical treatments of the future will be for you specifically, your genome, your current context. Does that apply to this model you've got here? Siddhartha Mukherjee: It's a very interesting question. We've thought about personalization of medicine very much in terms of genomics. That's because the gene is such a dominant metaphor, again, to use that same word, in medicine today, that we think the genome will drive the personalization of medicine. But of course the genome is just the bottom of a long chain of being, as it were. That chain of being, really the first organized unit of that, is the cell. So, if we are really going to deliver in medicine in this way, we have to think of personalizing cellular therapies, and then personalizing organ or organismal therapies, and ultimately personalizing immersion therapies for the environment. So I think at every stage, you know -- there's that metaphor, there's turtles all the way. Well, in this, there's personalization all the way. CA: So when you say medicine could be a cell and not a pill, you're talking about potentially your own cells. SM: Absolutely. CA: So converted to stem cells, perhaps tested against all kinds of drugs or something, and prepared. SM: And there's no perhaps. This is what we're doing. This is what's happening, and in fact, we're slowly moving, not away from genomics, but incorporating genomics into what we call multi-order, semi-autonomous, self-regulating systems, like cells, like organs, like environments. CA: Thank you so much. SM: Pleasure. Thanks.

There we were, souls and bodies packed into a Texas church on the last night of our lives. Packed into a room just like this, but with creaky wooden pews draped in worn-down red fabric, with an organ to my left and a choir at my back and a baptism pool built into the wall behind them. A room like this, nonetheless. With the same great feelings of suspense, the same deep hopes for salvation, the same sweat in the palms and the same people in the back not paying attention. (Laughter) This was December 31, 1999, the night of the Second Coming of Christ, and the end of the world as I knew it. I had turned 12 that year and had reached the age of accountability. And once I stopped complaining about how unfair it was that Jesus would return as soon as I had to be accountable for all that I had done, I figured I had better get my house in order very quickly. So I went to church as often as I could. I listened for silence as anxiously as one might listen for noise, trying to be sure that the Lord hadn't pulled a fast one on me and decided to come back early. And just in case he did, I built a backup plan, by reading the "Left Behind" books that were all the rage at the time. And I found in their pages that if I was not taken in the rapture at midnight, I had another shot. All I had to do was avoid taking the mark of the beast, fight off demons, plagues and the Antichrist himself. It would be hard -- (Laughter) but I knew I could do it. (Laughter) But planning time was over now. It was 11:50pm. We had 10 minutes left, and my pastor called us out of the pews and down to the altar because he wanted to be praying when midnight struck. So every faction of the congregation took its place. The choir stayed in the choir stand, the deacons and their wives -- or the Baptist Bourgeoisie as I like to call them -- (Laughter) took first position in front of the altar. You see, in America, even the Second Coming of Christ has a VIP section. (Laughter) (Applause) And right behind the Baptist Bourgeoisie were the elderly -- these men and women whose young backs had been bent under hot suns in the cotton fields of East Texas, and whose skin seemed to be burnt a creaseless noble brown, just like the clay of East Texas, and whose hopes and dreams for what life might become outside of East Texas had sometimes been bent and broken even further than their backs. Yes, these men and women were the stars of the show for me. They had waited their whole lives for this moment, just as their medieval predecessors had longed for the end of the world, and just as my grandmother waited for the Oprah Winfrey Show to come on Channel 8 every day at 4 o'clock. And as she made her way to the altar, I snuck right in behind her, because I knew for sure that my grandmother was going to heaven. And I thought that if I held on to her hand during this prayer, I might go right on with her. So I held on and I closed my eyes to listen, to wait. And the prayers got louder. And the shouts of response to the call of the prayer went up higher even still. And the organ rolled on in to add the the dirge. And the heat came on to add to the sweat. And my hand gripped firmer, so I wouldn't be the one left in the field. My eyes clenched tighter so I wouldn't see the wheat being separated from the chaff. And then a voice rang out above us: "Amen." It was over. I looked at the clock. It was after midnight. I looked at the elder believers whose savior had not come, who were too proud to show any signs of disappointment, who had believed too much and for too long to start doubting now. But I was upset on their behalf. They had been duped, hoodwinked, bamboozled, and I had gone right along with them. I had prayed their prayers, I had yielded not to temptation as best I could. I had dipped my head not once, but twice in that snot-inducing baptism pool. I had believed. Now what? I got home just in time to turn on the television and watch Peter Jennings announce the new millennium as it rolled in around the world. It struck me that it would have been strange anyway, for Jesus to come back again and again based on the different time zones. (Laughter) And this made me feel even more ridiculous -- hurt, really. But there on that night, I did not stop believing. I just believed a new thing: that it was possible not to believe. It was possible the answers I had were wrong, that the questions themselves were wrong. And now, where there was once a mountain of certitude, there was, running right down to its foundation, a spring of doubt, a spring that promised rivers. I can trace the whole drama of my life back to that night in that church when my savior did not come for me; when the thing I believed most certainly turned out to be, if not a lie, then not quite the truth. And even though most of you prepared for Y2K in a very different way, I'm convinced that you are here because some part of you has done the same thing that I have done since the dawn of this new century, since my mother left and my father stayed away and my Lord refused to come. And I held out my hand, reaching for something to believe in. I held on when I arrived at Yale at 18, with the faith that my journey from Oak Cliff, Texas was a chance to leave behind all the challenges I had known, the broken dreams and broken bodies I had seen. But when I found myself back home one winter break, with my face planted in the floor, my hands tied behind my back and a burglar's gun pressed to my head, I knew that even the best education couldn't save me. I held on when I showed up at Lehman Brothers as an intern in 2008. (Laughter) So hopeful -- (Laughter) that I called home to inform my family that we'd never be poor again. (Laughter) But as I witnessed this temple of finance come crashing down before my eyes, I knew that even the best job couldn't save me. I held on when I showed up in Washington DC as a young staffer, who had heard a voice call out from Illinois, saying, "It's been a long time coming, but in this election, change has come to America." But as the Congress ground to a halt and the country ripped at the seams and hope and change began to feel like a cruel joke, I knew that even the political second coming could not save me. I had knelt faithfully at the altar of the American Dream, praying to the gods of my time of success, and money, and power. But over and over again, midnight struck, and I opened my eyes to see that all of these gods were dead. And from that graveyard, I began the search once more, not because I was brave, but because I knew that I would either believe or I would die. So I took a pilgrimage to yet another mecca, Harvard Business School -- (Laughter) this time, knowing that I could not simply accept the salvation that it claimed to offer. No, I knew there'd be more work to do. The work began in the dark corner of a crowded party, in the late night of an early, miserable Cambridge winter, when three friends and I asked a question that young folks searching for something real have asked for a very long time: "What if we took a road trip?" (Laughter) We didn't know where'd we go or how we'd get there, but we knew we had to do it. Because all our lives we yearned, as Jack Kerouac wrote, to "sneak out into the night and disappear somewhere," and go find out what everybody was doing all over the country. So even though there were other voices who said that the risk was too great and the proof too thin, we went on anyhow. We went on 8,000 miles across America in the summer of 2013, through the cow pastures of Montana, through the desolation of Detroit, through the swamps of New Orleans, where we found and worked with men and women who were building small businesses that made purpose their bottom line. And having been trained at the West Point of capitalism, this struck us as a revolutionary idea. (Laughter) And this idea spread, growing into a nonprofit called MBAs Across America, a movement that landed me here on this stage today. It spread because we found a great hunger in our generation for purpose, for meaning. It spread because we found countless entrepreneurs in the nooks and crannies of America who were creating jobs and changing lives and who needed a little help. But if I'm being honest, it also spread because I fought to spread it. There was no length to which I would not go to preach this gospel, to get more people to believe that we could bind the wounds of a broken country, one social business at a time. But it was this journey of evangelism that led me to the rather different gospel that I've come to share with you today. It began one evening almost a year ago at the Museum of Natural History in New York City, at a gala for alumni of Harvard Business School. Under a full-size replica of a whale, I sat with the titans of our time as they celebrated their peers and their good deeds. There was pride in a room where net worth and assets under management surpassed half a trillion dollars. We looked over all that we had made, and it was good. (Laughter) But it just so happened, two days later, I had to travel up the road to Harlem, where I found myself sitting in an urban farm that had once been a vacant lot, listening to a man named Tony tell me of the kids that showed up there every day. All of them lived below the poverty line. Many of them carried all of their belongings in a backpack to avoid losing them in a homeless shelter. Some of them came to Tony's program, called Harlem Grown, to get the only meal they had each day. Tony told me that he started Harlem Grown with money from his pension, after 20 years as a cab driver. He told me that he didn't give himself a salary, because despite success, the program struggled for resources. He told me that he would take any help that he could get. And I was there as that help. But as I left Tony, I felt the sting and salt of tears welling up in my eyes. I felt the weight of revelation that I could sit in one room on one night, where a few hundred people had half a trillion dollars, and another room, two days later, just 50 blocks up the road, where a man was going without a salary to get a child her only meal of the day. And it wasn't the glaring inequality that made me want to cry, it wasn't the thought of hungry, homeless kids, it wasn't rage toward the one percent or pity toward the 99. No, I was disturbed because I had finally realized that I was the dialysis for a country that needed a kidney transplant. I realized that my story stood in for all those who were expected to pick themselves up by their bootstraps, even if they didn't have any boots; that my organization stood in for all the structural, systemic help that never went to Harlem or Appalachia or the Lower 9th Ward; that my voice stood in for all those voices that seemed too unlearned, too unwashed, too unaccommodated. And the shame of that, that shame washed over me like the shame of sitting in front of the television, watching Peter Jennings announce the new millennium again and again and again. I had been duped, hoodwinked, bamboozled. But this time, the false savior was me. You see, I've come a long way from that altar on the night I thought the world would end, from a world where people spoke in tongues and saw suffering as a necessary act of God and took a text to be infallible truth. Yes, I've come so far that I'm right back where I started. Because it simply is not true to say that we live in an age of disbelief -- no, we believe today just as much as any time that came before. Some of us may believe in the prophecy of Brené Brown or Tony Robbins. We may believe in the bible of The New Yorker or the Harvard Business Review. We may believe most deeply when we worship right here at the church of TED, but we desperately want to believe, we need to believe. We speak in the tongues of charismatic leaders that promise to solve all our problems. We see suffering as a necessary act of the capitalism that is our god, we take the text of technological progress to be infallible truth. And we hardly realize the human price we pay when we fail to question one brick, because we fear it might shake our whole foundation. But if you are disturbed by the unconscionable things that we have come to accept, then it must be questioning time. So I have not a gospel of disruption or innovation or a triple bottom line. I do not have a gospel of faith to share with you today, in fact. I have and I offer a gospel of doubt. The gospel of doubt does not ask that you stop believing, it asks that you believe a new thing: that it is possible not to believe. It is possible the answers we have are wrong, it is possible the questions themselves are wrong. Yes, the gospel of doubt means that it is possible that we, on this stage, in this room, are wrong. Because it raises the question, "Why?" With all the power that we hold in our hands, why are people still suffering so bad? This doubt leads me to share that we are putting my organization, MBAs Across America, out of business. We have shed our staff and closed our doors and we will share our model freely with anyone who sees their power to do this work without waiting for our permission. This doubt compels me to renounce the role of savior that some have placed on me, because our time is too short and our odds are too long to wait for second comings, when the truth is that there will be no miracles here. And this doubt, it fuels me, it gives me hope that when our troubles overwhelm us, when the paths laid out for us seem to lead to our demise, when our healers bring no comfort to our wounds, it will not be our blind faith -- no, it will be our humble doubt that shines a little light into the darkness of our lives and of our world and lets us raise our voice to whisper or to shout or to say simply, very simply, "There must be another way." Thank you. (Applause)

We live in in a remarkable time, the age of genomics. Your genome is the entire sequence of your DNA. Your sequence and mine are slightly different. That's why we look different. I've got brown eyes; you might have blue or gray. But it's not just skin-deep. The headlines tell us that genes can give us scary diseases, maybe even shape our personality, or give us mental disorders. Our genes seem to have awesome power over our destinies. And yet, I would like to think that I am more than my genes. What do you guys think? Are you more than your genes? (Audience: Yes.) Yes? I think some people agree with me. I think we should make a statement. I think we should say it all together. All right: "I'm more than my genes" -- all together. Everybody: I am more than my genes. (Cheering) Sebastian Seung: What am I? (Laughter) I am my connectome. Now, since you guys are really great, maybe you can humor me and say this all together too. (Laughter) Right. All together now. Everybody: I am my connectome. SS: That sounded great. You know, you guys are so great, you don't even know what a connectome is, and you're willing to play along with me. I could just go home now. Well, so far only one connectome is known, that of this tiny worm. Its modest nervous system consists of just 300 neurons. And in the 1970s and '80s, a team of scientists mapped all 7,000 connections between the neurons. In this diagram, every node is a neuron, and every line is a connection. This is the connectome of the worm C. elegans. Your connectome is far more complex than this because your brain contains 100 billion neurons and 10,000 times as many connections. There's a diagram like this for your brain, but there's no way it would fit on this slide. Your connectome contains one million times more connections than your genome has letters. That's a lot of information. What's in that information? We don't know for sure, but there are theories. Since the 19th century, neuroscientists have speculated that maybe your memories -- the information that makes you, you -- maybe your memories are stored in the connections between your brain's neurons. And perhaps other aspects of your personal identity -- maybe your personality and your intellect -- maybe they're also encoded in the connections between your neurons. And so now you can see why I proposed this hypothesis: I am my connectome. I didn't ask you to chant it because it's true; I just want you to remember it. And in fact, we don't know if this hypothesis is correct, because we have never had technologies powerful enough to test it. Finding that worm connectome took over a dozen years of tedious labor. And to find the connectomes of brains more like our own, we need more sophisticated technologies, that are automated, that will speed up the process of finding connectomes. And in the next few minutes, I'll tell you about some of these technologies, which are currently under development in my lab and the labs of my collaborators. Now you've probably seen pictures of neurons before. You can recognize them instantly by their fantastic shapes. They extend long and delicate branches, and in short, they look like trees. But this is just a single neuron. In order to find connectomes, we have to see all the neurons at the same time. So let's meet Bobby Kasthuri, who works in the laboratory of Jeff Lichtman at Harvard University. Bobby is holding fantastically thin slices of a mouse brain. And we're zooming in by a factor of 100,000 times to obtain the resolution, so that we can see the branches of neurons all at the same time. Except, you still may not really recognize them, and that's because we have to work in three dimensions. If we take many images of many slices of the brain and stack them up, we get a three-dimensional image. And still, you may not see the branches. So we start at the top, and we color in the cross-section of one branch in red, and we do that for the next slice and for the next slice. And we keep on doing that, slice after slice. If we continue through the entire stack, we can reconstruct the three-dimensional shape of a small fragment of a branch of a neuron. And we can do that for another neuron in green. And you can see that the green neuron touches the red neuron at two locations, and these are what are called synapses. Let's zoom in on one synapse, and keep your eyes on the interior of the green neuron. You should see small circles -- these are called vesicles. They contain a molecule know as a neurotransmitter. And so when the green neuron wants to communicate, it wants to send a message to the red neuron, it spits out neurotransmitter. At the synapse, the two neurons are said to be connected like two friends talking on the telephone. So you see how to find a synapse. How can we find an entire connectome? Well, we take this three-dimensional stack of images and treat it as a gigantic three-dimensional coloring book. We color every neuron in, in a different color, and then we look through all of the images, find the synapses and note the colors of the two neurons involved in each synapse. If we can do that throughout all the images, we could find a connectome. Now, at this point, you've learned the basics of neurons and synapses. And so I think we're ready to tackle one of the most important questions in neuroscience: how are the brains of men and women different? (Laughter) According to this self-help book, guys brains are like waffles; they keep their lives compartmentalized in boxes. Girls' brains are like spaghetti; everything in their life is connected to everything else. (Laughter) You guys are laughing, but you know, this book changed my life. (Laughter) But seriously, what's wrong with this? You already know enough to tell me -- what's wrong with this statement? It doesn't matter whether you're a guy or girl, everyone's brains are like spaghetti. Or maybe really, really fine capellini with branches. Just as one strand of spaghetti contacts many other strands on your plate, one neuron touches many other neurons through their entangled branches. One neuron can be connected to so many other neurons, because there can be synapses at these points of contact. By now, you might have sort of lost perspective on how large this cube of brain tissue actually is. And so let's do a series of comparisons to show you. I assure you, this is very tiny. It's just six microns on a side. So, here's how it stacks up against an entire neuron. And you can tell that, really, only the smallest fragments of branches are contained inside this cube. And a neuron, well, that's smaller than brain. And that's just a mouse brain -- it's a lot smaller than a human brain. So when show my friends this, sometimes they've told me, "You know, Sebastian, you should just give up. Neuroscience is hopeless." Because if you look at a brain with your naked eye, you don't really see how complex it is, but when you use a microscope, finally the hidden complexity is revealed. In the 17th century, the mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal, wrote of his dread of the infinite, his feeling of insignificance at contemplating the vast reaches of outer space. And, as a scientist, I'm not supposed to talk about my feelings -- too much information, professor. (Laughter) But may I? (Laughter) (Applause) I feel curiosity, and I feel wonder, but at times I have also felt despair. Why did I choose to study this organ that is so awesome in its complexity that it might well be infinite? It's absurd. How could we even dare to think that we might ever understand this? And yet, I persist in this quixotic endeavor. And indeed, these days I harbor new hopes. Someday, a fleet of microscopes will capture every neuron and every synapse in a vast database of images. And some day, artificially intelligent supercomputers will analyze the images without human assistance to summarize them in a connectome. I do not know, but I hope that I will live to see that day, because finding an entire human connectome is one of the greatest technological challenges of all time. It will take the work of generations to succeed. At the present time, my collaborators and I, what we're aiming for is much more modest -- just to find partial connectomes of tiny chunks of mouse and human brain. But even that will be enough for the first tests of this hypothesis that I am my connectome. For now, let me try to convince you of the plausibility of this hypothesis, that it's actually worth taking seriously. As you grow during childhood and age during adulthood, your personal identity changes slowly. Likewise, every connectome changes over time. What kinds of changes happen? Well, neurons, like trees, can grow new branches, and they can lose old ones. Synapses can be created, and they can be eliminated. And synapses can grow larger, and they can grow smaller. Second question: what causes these changes? Well, it's true. To some extent, they are programmed by your genes. But that's not the whole story, because there are signals, electrical signals, that travel along the branches of neurons and chemical signals that jump across from branch to branch. These signals are called neural activity. And there's a lot of evidence that neural activity is encoding our thoughts, feelings and perceptions, our mental experiences. And there's a lot of evidence that neural activity can cause your connections to change. And if you put those two facts together, it means that your experiences can change your connectome. And that's why every connectome is unique, even those of genetically identical twins. The connectome is where nature meets nurture. And it might true that just the mere act of thinking can change your connectome -- an idea that you may find empowering. What's in this picture? A cool and refreshing stream of water, you say. What else is in this picture? Do not forget that groove in the Earth called the stream bed. Without it, the water would not know in which direction to flow. And with the stream, I would like to propose a metaphor for the relationship between neural activity and connectivity. Neural activity is constantly changing. It's like the water of the stream; it never sits still. The connections of the brain's neural network determines the pathways along which neural activity flows. And so the connectome is like bed of the stream; but the metaphor is richer than that, because it's true that the stream bed guides the flow of the water, but over long timescales, the water also reshapes the bed of the stream. And as I told you just now, neural activity can change the connectome. And if you'll allow me to ascend to metaphorical heights, I will remind you that neural activity is the physical basis -- or so neuroscientists think -- of thoughts, feelings and perceptions. And so we might even speak of the stream of consciousness. Neural activity is its water, and the connectome is its bed. So let's return from the heights of metaphor and return to science. Suppose our technologies for finding connectomes actually work. How will we go about testing the hypothesis "I am my connectome?" Well, I propose a direct test. Let us attempt to read out memories from connectomes. Consider the memory of long temporal sequences of movements, like a pianist playing a Beethoven sonata. According to a theory that dates back to the 19th century, such memories are stored as chains of synaptic connections inside your brain. Because, if the first neurons in the chain are activated, through their synapses they send messages to the second neurons, which are activated, and so on down the line, like a chain of falling dominoes. And this sequence of neural activation is hypothesized to be the neural basis of those sequence of movements. So one way of trying to test the theory is to look for such chains inside connectomes. But it won't be easy, because they're not going to look like this. They're going to be scrambled up. So we'll have to use our computers to try to unscramble the chain. And if we can do that, the sequence of the neurons we recover from that unscrambling will be a prediction of the pattern of neural activity that is replayed in the brain during memory recall. And if that were successful, that would be the first example of reading a memory from a connectome. (Laughter) What a mess -- have you ever tried to wire up a system as complex as this? I hope not. But if you have, you know it's very easy to make a mistake. The branches of neurons are like the wires of the brain. Can anyone guess: what's the total length of wires in your brain? I'll give you a hint. It's a big number. (Laughter) I estimate, millions of miles, all packed in your skull. And if you appreciate that number, you can easily see there is huge potential for mis-wiring of the brain. And indeed, the popular press loves headlines like, "Anorexic brains are wired differently," or "Autistic brains are wired differently." These are plausible claims, but in truth, we can't see the brain's wiring clearly enough to tell if these are really true. And so the technologies for seeing connectomes will allow us to finally read mis-wiring of the brain, to see mental disorders in connectomes. Sometimes the best way to test a hypothesis is to consider its most extreme implication. Philosophers know this game very well. If you believe that I am my connectome, I think you must also accept the idea that death is the destruction of your connectome. I mention this because there are prophets today who claim that technology will fundamentally alter the human condition and perhaps even transform the human species. One of their most cherished dreams is to cheat death by that practice known as cryonics. If you pay 100,000 dollars, you can arrange to have your body frozen after death and stored in liquid nitrogen in one of these tanks in an Arizona warehouse, awaiting a future civilization that is advanced to resurrect you. Should we ridicule the modern seekers of immortality, calling them fools? Or will they someday chuckle over our graves? I don't know -- I prefer to test their beliefs, scientifically. I propose that we attempt to find a connectome of a frozen brain. We know that damage to the brain occurs after death and during freezing. The question is: has that damage erased the connectome? If it has, there is no way that any future civilization will be able to recover the memories of these frozen brains. Resurrection might succeed for the body, but not for the mind. On the other hand, if the connectome is still intact, we cannot ridicule the claims of cryonics so easily. I've described a quest that begins in the world of the very small, and propels us to the world of the far future. Connectomes will mark a turning point in human history. As we evolved from our ape-like ancestors on the African savanna, what distinguished us was our larger brains. We have used our brains to fashion ever more amazing technologies. Eventually, these technologies will become so powerful that we will use them to know ourselves by deconstructing and reconstructing our own brains. I believe that this voyage of self-discovery is not just for scientists, but for all of us. And I'm grateful for the opportunity to share this voyage with you today. Thank you. (Applause)

Billie Jean King: Hi, everyone! (Applause) Thanks, Pat. Thank you! Getting me all wound up, now! (Laughter) Pat Mitchell: Good! You know, when I was watching the video again of the match, you must have felt like the fate of the world's women was on every stroke you took. Were you feeling that? BJK: First of all, Bobby Riggs -- he was the former number one player, he wasn't just some hacker, by the way. He was one of my heroes and I admired him. And that's the reason I beat him, actually, because I respected him. (Laughter) It's true -- my mom and especially my dad always said: "Respect your opponent, and never underestimate them, ever." And he was correct. He was absolutely correct. But I knew it was about social change. And I was really nervous whenever we announced it, and I felt like the whole world was on my shoulders. And I thought, "If I lose, it's going to put women back 50 years, at least." Title IX had just been passed the year before -- June 23, 1972. And women's professional tennis -- there were nine of us who signed a one-dollar contract in 1970 -- now remember, the match is in '73. So we were only in our third year of having a tour where we could actually play, have a place to compete and make a living. So there were nine of us that signed that one-dollar contract. And our dream was for any girl, born any place in the world -- if she was good enough -- there would be a place for her to compete and for us to make a living. Because before 1968, we made 14 dollars a day, and we were under the control of organizations. So we really wanted to break away from that. But we knew it wasn't really about our generation so much; we knew it was about the future generations. We do stand on the shoulders of the people that came before us, there is no question. But every generation has the chance to make it better. That was really on my mind. I really wanted to start matching the hearts and minds to Title IX. Title IX, in case anybody doesn't know, which a lot of people probably don't, said that any federal funds given to a high school, college or university, either public or private, had to -- finally -- give equal monies to boys and girls. And that changed everything. (Applause) So you can have a law, but it's changing the hearts and minds to match up with it. That's when it really rocks, totally. So that was on my mind. I wanted to start that change in the hearts and minds. But two things came out of that match. For women: self-confidence, empowerment. They actually had enough nerve to ask for a raise. Some women have waited 10, 15 years to ask. I said, "More importantly, did you get it?" (Laughter) And they did! And for the men? A lot of the men today don't realize it, but if you're in your 50s, 60s or whatever, late 40s, you're the first generation of men of the Women's Movement -- whether you like it or not! (Laughter) (Applause) And for the men, what happened for the men, they'd come up to me -- and most times, the men are the ones who have tears in their eyes, it's very interesting. They go, "Billie, I was very young when I saw that match, and now I have a daughter. And I am so happy I saw that as a young man." And one of those young men, at 12 years old, was President Obama. And he actually told me that when I met him, he said: "You don't realize it, but I saw that match at 12. And now I have two daughters, and it has made a difference in how I raise them." So both men and women got a lot out of it, but different things. PM: And now there are generations -- at least one or two -- who have experienced the equality that Title IX and other fights along the way made possible. And for women, there are generations who have also experienced teamwork. They got to play team sports in a way they hadn't before. So you had a legacy already built in terms of being an athlete, a legacy of the work you did to lobby for equal pay for women athletes and the Women's Sports Foundation. What now are you looking to accomplish with The Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative? BJK: I think it goes back to an epiphany I had at 12. At 11, I wanted to be the number one tennis player in the world, and a friend had asked me to play and I said, "What's that?" Tennis was not in my family -- basketball was, other sports. Fast forward to 12 years old, (Laughter) and I'm finally starting to play in tournaments where you get a ranking at the end of the year. So I was daydreaming at the Los Angeles Tennis Club, and I started thinking about my sport and how tiny it was, but also that everybody who played wore white shoes, white clothes, played with white balls -- everybody who played was white. And I said to myself, at 12 years old, "Where is everyone else?" And that just kept sticking in my brain. And that moment, I promised myself I'd fight for equal rights and opportunities for boys and girls, men and women, the rest of my life. And that tennis, if I was fortunate enough to become number one -- and I knew, being a girl, it would be harder to have influence, already at that age -- that I had this platform. And tennis is global. And I thought, "You know what? I've been given an opportunity that very few people have had." I didn't know if I was going to make it -- this was only 12. I sure wanted it, but making it is a whole other discussion. I just remember I promised myself, and I really try to keep my word. That's who I truly am, just fighting for people. And, unfortunately, women have had less. And we are considered less. And so my attentions, where did they have to go? It was just ... you have to. And learn to stick up for yourself, hear your own voice. You hear the same words keep coming out all the time, and I got really lucky because I had an education. And I think if you can see it you can be it, you know? If you can see it, you can be it. You look at Pat, you look at other leaders, you look at these speakers, look at yourself, because everyone -- everyone -- can do something extraordinary. Every single person. PM: And your story, Billie, has inspired so many women everywhere. Now with the Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative, you're taking on an even bigger cause. Because one thing we hear a lot about is women taking their voice, working to find their way into leadership positions. But what you're talking about is even bigger than that. It's inclusive leadership. And this is a generation that has grown up thinking more inclusively -- BJK: Isn't it great? Look at the technology! It's amazing how it connects us all! It's about connection. It's simply amazing what's possible because of it. But the Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative is really about the workforce mostly, and trying to change it, so people can actually go to work and be their authentic selves. Because most of us have two jobs: One, to fit in -- I'll give you a perfect example. An African American woman gets up an hour earlier to go to work, straightens her hair in the bathroom, goes to the bathroom probably four, five, six times a day to keep straightening her hair, to keep making sure she fits in. So she's working two jobs. She's got this other job, whatever that may be, but she's also trying to fit in. Or this poor man who kept his diploma -- he went to University of Michigan, but he never would talk about his poverty as a youngster, ever -- just would not mention it. So he made sure they saw he was well-educated. And then you see a gay guy who has an NFL -- which means American football for all of you out there, it's a big deal, it's very macho -- and he talked about football all the time, because he was gay and he didn't want anybody to know. It just goes on and on. So my wish for everyone is to be able to be their authentic self 24/7, that would be the ultimate. And we catch ourselves -- I mean, I catch myself to this day. Even being gay I catch myself, you know, like, (Gasp) a little uncomfortable, a little surge in my gut, feeling not totally comfortable in my own skin. So, I think you have to ask yourself -- I want people to be themselves, whatever that is, just let it be. PM: And the first research the Leadership Initiative did showed that, that these examples you just used -- that many of us have the problem of being authentic. But what you've just looked at is this millennial generation, who have benefited from all these equal opportunities -- which may not be equal but exist everywhere -- BJK: First of all, I'm really lucky. Partnership with Teneo, a strategic company that's amazing. That's really the reason I'm able to do this. I've had two times in my life where I've actually had men really behind me with power. And that was in the old days with Philip Morris with Virginia Slims, and this is the second time in my entire life. And then Deloitte. The one thing I wanted was data -- facts. So Deloitte sent out a survey, and over 4,000 people now have answered, and we're continuing in the workplace. And what do the millennials feel? Well, they feel a lot, but what they're so fantastic about is -- you know, our generation was like, "Oh, we're going to get representation." So if you walk into a room, you see everybody represented. That's not good enough anymore, which is so good! So the millennials are fantastic; they want connection, engagement. They just want you to tell us what you're feeling, what you're thinking, and get into the solution. They're problem-solvers, and of course, you've got the information at your fingertips, compared to when I was growing up. PM: What did the research show you about millennials? Are they going to make a difference? Are they going to create a world where there is really an inclusive work force? BJK: Well, in 2025, 75 percent of the global workforce is going to be millennials. I think they are going to help solve problems. I think they have the wherewithal to do it. I know they care a lot. They have big ideas and they can make big things happen. I want to stay in the now with the young people, I don't want to get behind. (Laughter) PM: I don't think there's any chance! But what you found out in the research about millennials is not really the experience that a lot of people have with millennials. BJK: No, well, if we want to talk -- OK, I've been doing my little mini-survey. I've been talking to the Boomers, who are their bosses, and I go, "What do you think about the millennials?" And I'm pretty excited, like it's good, and they get this face -- (Laughter) "Oh, you mean the 'Me' generation?" (Laughter) I say, "Do you really think so? Because I do think they care about the environment and all these things." And they go, "Oh, Billie, they cannot focus." (Laughter) They actually have proven that the average focus for an 18-year-old is 37 seconds. (Laughter) They can't focus. And they don't really care. I just heard a story the other night: a woman owns a gallery and she has these workers. She gets a text from one of the workers, like an intern, she's just starting -- she goes, "Oh, by the way, I'm going to be late because I'm at the hairdresser's." (Laughter) So she arrives, and this boss says, "What's going on?" And she says, "Oh, I was late, sorry, how's it going?" She says, "Well, guess what? I'd like you leave, you're finished." She goes, "OK." (Laughter) No problem! PM: Now Billie, that story -- I know, but that's what scares the boomers -- I'm just telling you -- so I think it's good for us to share. (Laughter) No, it is good for us to share, because we're our authentic selves and what we're really feeling, so we've got to take it both ways, you know? But I have great faith because -- if you've been in sports like I have -- every generation gets better. It's a fact. With the Women's Sports Foundation being the advocates for Title IX still, because we're trying to keep protecting the law, because it's in a tenuous position always, so we really are concerned, and we do a lot of research. That's very important to us. And I want to hear from people. But we really have to protect what Title IX stands for worldwide. And you heard President Carter talk about how Title IX is protected. And do you know that every single lawsuit that girls, at least in sports, have gone up against -- whatever institutions -- has won? Title IX is there to protect us. And it is amazing. But we still have to get the hearts and minds -- the hearts and minds to match the legislation is huge. PM: So what gets you up every morning? What keeps you sustaining your work, sustaining the fight for equality, extending it, always exploring new areas, trying to find new ways ... ? BJK: Well, I always drove my parents crazy because I was always the curious one. I'm highly motivated. My younger brother was a Major League Baseball player. My poor parents did not care if we were any good. (Laughter) And we drove them crazy because we pushed, we pushed because we wanted to be the best. And I think it's because of what I'm hearing today in TED talks. I think to listen to these different women, to listen to different people, to listen to President Carter -- 90 years old, by the way, and he we was throwing these figures out that I would never -- I'd have to go, "Excuse me, wait a minute, I need to get a list out of these figures." He was rattling off -- I mean, that's amazing, I'm sorry. PM: He's an amazing man. (Applause) BJK: And then you're going to have President Mary Robinson, who's a former president -- Thank you, Irish! 62 percent! LGBTQ! Yes! (Applause) Congress is voting in June on same-sex marriage, so these are things that for some people are very hard to hear. But always remember, every one of us is an individual, a human being with a beating heart, who cares and wants to live their authentic life. OK? You don't have to agree with somebody, but everyone has the opportunity. I think we all have an obligation to continue to keep moving the needle forward, always. And these people have been so inspiring. Everyone matters. And every one of you is an influencer. You out there listening, out there in the world, plus the people here -- every single person's an influencer. Never, ever forget that. OK? So don't ever give up on yourself. PM: Billie, you have been an inspiration for us. BJK: Thanks, Pat! (Applause) Thanks, TED! (Applause) Thanks a lot!

I want to talk today about -- I've been asked to take the long view, and I'm going to tell you what I think are the three biggest problems for humanity from this long point of view. Some of these have already been touched upon by other speakers, which is encouraging. It seems that there's not just one person who thinks that these problems are important. The first is -- death is a big problem. If you look at the statistics, the odds are not very favorable to us. So far, most people who have lived have also died. Roughly 90 percent of everybody who has been alive has died by now. So the annual death rate adds up to 150,000 -- sorry, the daily death rate -- 150,000 people per day, which is a huge number by any standard. The annual death rate, then, becomes 56 million. If we just look at the single, biggest cause of death -- aging -- it accounts for roughly two-thirds of all human people who die. That adds up to an annual death toll of greater than the population of Canada. Sometimes, we don't see a problem because either it's too familiar or it's too big. Can't see it because it's too big. I think death might be both too familiar and too big for most people to see it as a problem. Once you think about it, you see this is not statistical points; these are -- let's see, how far have I talked? I've talked for three minutes. So that would be, roughly, 324 people have died since I've begun speaking. People like -- it's roughly the population in this room has just died. Now, the human cost of that is obvious, once you start to think about it -- the suffering, the loss -- it's also, economically, enormously wasteful. I just look at the information, and knowledge, and experience that is lost due to natural causes of death in general, and aging, in particular. Suppose we approximated one person with one book? Now, of course, this is an underestimation. A person's lifetime of learning and experience is a lot more than you could put into a single book. But let's suppose we did this. 52 million people die of natural causes each year corresponds, then, to 52 million volumes destroyed. Library of Congress holds 18 million volumes. We are upset about the burning of the Library of Alexandria. It's one of the great cultural tragedies that we remember, even today. But this is the equivalent of three Libraries of Congress -- burnt down, forever lost -- each year. So that's the first big problem. And I wish Godspeed to Aubrey de Grey, and other people like him, to try to do something about this as soon as possible. Existential risk -- the second big problem. Existential risk is a threat to human survival, or to the long-term potential of our species. Now, why do I say that this is a big problem? Well, let's first look at the probability -- and this is very, very difficult to estimate -- but there have been only four studies on this in recent years, which is surprising. You would think that it would be of some interest to try to find out more about this given that the stakes are so big, but it's a very neglected area. But there have been four studies -- one by John Lesley, wrote a book on this. He estimated a probability that we will fail to survive the current century: 50 percent. Similarly, the Astronomer Royal, whom we heard speak yesterday, also has a 50 percent probability estimate. Another author doesn't give any numerical estimate, but says the probability is significant that it will fail. I wrote a long paper on this. I said assigning a less than 20 percent probability would be a mistake in light of the current evidence we have. Now, the exact figures here, we should take with a big grain of salt, but there seems to be a consensus that the risk is substantial. Everybody who has looked at this and studied it agrees. Now, if we think about what just reducing the probability of human extinction by just one percentage point -- not very much -- so that's equivalent to 60 million lives saved, if we just count the currently living people, the current generation. Now one percent of six billion people is equivalent to 60 million. So that's a large number. If we were to take into account future generations that will never come into existence if we blow ourselves up, then the figure becomes astronomical. If we could eventually colonize a chunk of the universe -- the Virgo supercluster -- maybe it will take us 100 million years to get there, but if we go extinct we never will. Then, even a one percentage point reduction in the extinction risk could be equivalent to this astronomical number -- 10 to the power of 32. So if you take into account future generations as much as our own, every other moral imperative of philanthropic cost just becomes irrelevant. The only thing you should focus on would be to reduce existential risk because even the tiniest decrease in existential risk would just overwhelm any other benefit you could hope to achieve. And even if you just look at the current people, and ignore the potential that would be lost if we went extinct, it should still have a high priority. Now, let me spend the rest of my time on the third big problem, because it's more subtle and perhaps difficult to grasp. Think about some time in your life -- some people might never have experienced it -- but some people, there are just those moments that you have experienced where life was fantastic. It might have been at the moment of some great, creative inspiration you might have had when you just entered this flow stage. Or when you understood something you had never done before. Or perhaps in the ecstasy of romantic love. Or an aesthetic experience -- a sunset or a great piece of art. Every once in a while we have these moments, and we realize just how good life can be when it's at its best. And you wonder, why can't it be like that all the time? You just want to cling onto this. And then, of course, it drifts back into ordinary life and the memory fades. And it's really difficult to recall, in a normal frame of mind, just how good life can be at its best. Or how bad it can be at its worst. The third big problem is that life isn't usually as wonderful as it could be. I think that's a big, big problem. It's easy to say what we don't want. Here are a number of things that we don't want -- illness, involuntary death, unnecessary suffering, cruelty, stunted growth, memory loss, ignorance, absence of creativity. Suppose we fixed these things -- we did something about all of these. We were very successful. We got rid of all of these things. We might end up with something like this, which is -- I mean, it's a heck of a lot better than that. But is this really the best we can dream of? Is this the best we can do? Or is it possible to find something a little bit more inspiring to work towards? And if we think about this, I think it's very clear that there are ways in which we could change things, not just by eliminating negatives, but adding positives. On my wish list, at least, would be: much longer, healthier lives, greater subjective well-being, enhanced cognitive capacities, more knowledge and understanding, unlimited opportunity for personal growth beyond our current biological limits, better relationships, an unbounded potential for spiritual, moral and intellectual development. If we want to achieve this, what, in the world, would have to change? And this is the answer -- we would have to change. Not just the world around us, but we, ourselves. Not just the way we think about the world, but the way we are -- our very biology. Human nature would have to change. Now, when we think about changing human nature, the first thing that comes to mind are these human modification technologies -- growth hormone therapy, cosmetic surgery, stimulants like Ritalin, Adderall, anti-depressants, anabolic steroids, artificial hearts. It's a pretty pathetic list. They do great things for a few people who suffer from some specific condition, but for most people, they don't really transform what it is to be human. And they also all seem a little bit -- most people have this instinct that, well, sure, there needs to be anti-depressants for the really depressed people. But there's a kind of queasiness that these are unnatural in some way. It's worth recalling that there are a lot of other modification technologies and enhancement technologies that we use. We have skin enhancements, clothing. As far as I can see, all of you are users of this enhancement technology in this room, so that's a great thing. Mood modifiers have been used from time immemorial -- caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, immune system enhancement, vision enhancement, anesthetics -- we take that very much for granted, but just think about how great progress that is -- like, having an operation before anesthetics was not fun. Contraceptives, cosmetics and brain reprogramming techniques -- that sounds ominous, but the distinction between what is a technology -- a gadget would be the archetype -- and other ways of changing and rewriting human nature is quite subtle. So if you think about what it means to learn arithmetic or to learn to read, you're actually, literally rewriting your own brain. You're changing the microstructure of your brain as you go along. So in a broad sense, we don't need to think about technology as only little gadgets, like these things here, but even institutions and techniques, psychological methods and so forth. Forms of organization can have a profound impact on human nature. Looking ahead, there is a range of technologies that are almost certain to be developed sooner or later. We are very ignorant about what the time scale for these things are, but they all are consistent with everything we know about physical laws, laws of chemistry, etc. It's possible to assume, setting aside a possibility of catastrophe, that sooner or later we will develop all of these. And even just a couple of these would be enough to transform the human condition. So let's look at some of the dimensions of human nature that seem to leave room for improvement. Health span is a big and urgent thing, because if you're not alive, then all the other things will be to little avail. Intellectual capacity -- let's take that box, which falls into a lot of different sub-categories: memory, concentration, mental energy, intelligence, empathy. These are really great things. Part of the reason why we value these traits is that they make us better at competing with other people -- they're positional goods. But part of the reason -- and that's the reason why we have ethical ground for pursuing these -- is that they're also intrinsically valuable. It's just better to be able to understand more of the world around you and the people that you are communicating with, and to remember what you have learned. Modalities and special faculties. Now, the human mind is not a single unitary information processor, but it has a lot of different, special, evolved modules that do specific things for us. If you think about what we normally take as giving life a lot of its meaning -- music, humor, eroticism, spirituality, aesthetics, nurturing and caring, gossip, chatting with people -- all of these, very likely, are enabled by a special circuitry that we humans have, but that you could have another intelligent life form that lacks these. We're just lucky that we have the requisite neural machinery to process music and to appreciate it and enjoy it. All of these would enable, in principle -- be amenable to enhancement. Some people have a better musical ability and ability to appreciate music than others have. It's also interesting to think about what other things are -- so if these all enabled great values, why should we think that evolution has happened to provide us with all the modalities we would need to engage with other values that there might be? Imagine a species that just didn't have this neural machinery for processing music. And they would just stare at us with bafflement when we spend time listening to a beautiful performance, like the one we just heard -- because of people making stupid movements, and they would be really irritated and wouldn't see what we were up to. But maybe they have another faculty, something else that would seem equally irrational to us, but they actually tap into some great possible value there. But we are just literally deaf to that kind of value. So we could think of adding on different, new sensory capacities and mental faculties. Bodily functionality and morphology and affective self-control. Greater subjective well-being. Be able to switch between relaxation and activity -- being able to go slow when you need to do that, and to speed up. Able to switch back and forth more easily would be a neat thing to be able to do -- easier to achieve the flow state, when you're totally immersed in something you are doing. Conscientiousness and sympathy. The ability to -- it's another interesting application that would have large social ramification, perhaps. If you could actually choose to preserve your romantic attachments to one person, undiminished through time, so that wouldn't have to -- love would never have to fade if you didn't want it to. That's probably not all that difficult. It might just be a simple hormone or something that could do this. It's been done in voles. You can engineer a prairie vole to become monogamous when it's naturally polygamous. It's just a single gene. Might be more complicated in humans, but perhaps not that much. This is the last picture that I want to -- now we've got to use the laser pointer. A possible mode of being here would be a way of life -- a way of being, experiencing, thinking, seeing, interacting with the world. Down here in this little corner, here, we have the little sub-space of this larger space that is accessible to human beings -- beings with our biological capacities. It's a part of the space that's accessible to animals; since we are animals, we are a subset of that. And then you can imagine some enhancements of human capacities. There would be different modes of being you could experience if you were able to stay alive for, say, 200 years. Then you could live sorts of lives and accumulate wisdoms that are just not possible for humans as we currently are. So then, you move off to this larger sphere of "human +," and you could continue that process and eventually explore a lot of this larger space of possible modes of being. Now, why is that a good thing to do? Well, we know already that in this little human circle there, there are these enormously wonderful and worthwhile modes of being -- human life at its best is wonderful. We have no reason to believe that within this much, much larger space there would not also be extremely worthwhile modes of being, perhaps ones that would be way beyond our wildest ability even to imagine or dream about. And so, to fix this third problem, I think we need -- slowly, carefully, with ethical wisdom and constraint -- develop the means that enable us to go out in this larger space and explore it and find the great values that might hide there. Thanks.

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

Humans have long held a fascination for the human brain. We chart it, we've described it, we've drawn it, we've mapped it. Now just like the physical maps of our world that have been highly influenced by technology -- think Google Maps, think GPS -- the same thing is happening for brain mapping through transformation. So let's take a look at the brain. Most people, when they first look at a fresh human brain, they say, "It doesn't look what you're typically looking at when someone shows you a brain." Typically, what you're looking at is a fixed brain. It's gray. And this outer layer, this is the vasculature, which is incredible, around a human brain. This is the blood vessels. 20 percent of the oxygen coming from your lungs, 20 percent of the blood pumped from your heart, is servicing this one organ. That's basically, if you hold two fists together, it's just slightly larger than the two fists. Scientists, sort of at the end of the 20th century, learned that they could track blood flow to map non-invasively where activity was going on in the human brain. So for example, they can see in the back part of the brain, which is just turning around there. There's the cerebellum; that's keeping you upright right now. It's keeping me standing. It's involved in coordinated movement. On the side here, this is temporal cortex. This is the area where primary auditory processing -- so you're hearing my words, you're sending it up into higher language processing centers. Towards the front of the brain is the place in which all of the more complex thought, decision making -- it's the last to mature in late adulthood. This is where all your decision-making processes are going on. It's the place where you're deciding right now you probably aren't going to order the steak for dinner. So if you take a deeper look at the brain, one of the things, if you look at it in cross-section, what you can see is that you can't really see a whole lot of structure there. But there's actually a lot of structure there. It's cells and it's wires all wired together. So about a hundred years ago, some scientists invented a stain that would stain cells. And that's shown here in the the very light blue. You can see areas where neuronal cell bodies are being stained. And what you can see is it's very non-uniform. You see a lot more structure there. So the outer part of that brain is the neocortex. It's one continuous processing unit, if you will. But you can also see things underneath there as well. And all of these blank areas are the areas in which the wires are running through. They're probably less cell dense. So there's about 86 billion neurons in our brain. And as you can see, they're very non-uniformly distributed. And how they're distributed really contributes to their underlying function. And of course, as I mentioned before, since we can now start to map brain function, we can start to tie these into the individual cells. So let's take a deeper look. Let's look at neurons. So as I mentioned, there are 86 billion neurons. There are also these smaller cells as you'll see. These are support cells -- astrocytes glia. And the nerves themselves are the ones who are receiving input. They're storing it, they're processing it. Each neuron is connected via synapses to up to 10,000 other neurons in your brain. And each neuron itself is largely unique. The unique character of both individual neurons and neurons within a collection of the brain are driven by fundamental properties of their underlying biochemistry. These are proteins. They're proteins that are controlling things like ion channel movement. They're controlling who nervous system cells partner up with. And they're controlling basically everything that the nervous system has to do. So if we zoom in to an even deeper level, all of those proteins are encoded by our genomes. We each have 23 pairs of chromosomes. We get one from mom, one from dad. And on these chromosomes are roughly 25,000 genes. They're encoded in the DNA. And the nature of a given cell driving its underlying biochemistry is dictated by which of these 25,000 genes are turned on and at what level they're turned on. And so our project is seeking to look at this readout, understanding which of these 25,000 genes is turned on. So in order to undertake such a project, we obviously need brains. So we sent our lab technician out. We were seeking normal human brains. What we actually start with is a medical examiner's office. This a place where the dead are brought in. We are seeking normal human brains. There's a lot of criteria by which we're selecting these brains. We want to make sure that we have normal humans between the ages of 20 to 60, they died a somewhat natural death with no injury to the brain, no history of psychiatric disease, no drugs on board -- we do a toxicology workup. And we're very careful about the brains that we do take. We're also selecting for brains in which we can get the tissue, we can get consent to take the tissue within 24 hours of time of death. Because what we're trying to measure, the RNA -- which is the readout from our genes -- is very labile, and so we have to move very quickly. One side note on the collection of brains: because of the way that we collect, and because we require consent, we actually have a lot more male brains than female brains. Males are much more likely to die an accidental death in the prime of their life. And men are much more likely to have their significant other, spouse, give consent than the other way around. (Laughter) So the first thing that we do at the site of collection is we collect what's called an MR. This is magnetic resonance imaging -- MRI. It's a standard template by which we're going to hang the rest of this data. So we collect this MR. And you can think of this as our satellite view for our map. The next thing we do is we collect what's called a diffusion tensor imaging. This maps the large cabling in the brain. And again, you can think of this as almost mapping our interstate highways, if you will. The brain is removed from the skull, and then it's sliced into one-centimeter slices. And those are frozen solid, and they're shipped to Seattle. And in Seattle, we take these -- this is a whole human hemisphere -- and we put them into what's basically a glorified meat slicer. There's a blade here that's going to cut across a section of the tissue and transfer it to a microscope slide. We're going to then apply one of those stains to it, and we scan it. And then what we get is our first mapping. So this is where experts come in and they make basic anatomic assignments. You could consider this state boundaries, if you will, those pretty broad outlines. From this, we're able to then fragment that brain into further pieces, which then we can put on a smaller cryostat. And this is just showing this here -- this frozen tissue, and it's being cut. This is 20 microns thin, so this is about a baby hair's width. And remember, it's frozen. And so you can see here, old-fashioned technology of the paintbrush being applied. We take a microscope slide. Then we very carefully melt onto the slide. This will then go onto a robot that's going to apply one of those stains to it. And our anatomists are going to go in and take a deeper look at this. So again this is what they can see under the microscope. You can see collections and configurations of large and small cells in clusters and various places. And from there it's routine. They understand where to make these assignments. And they can make basically what's a reference atlas. This is a more detailed map. Our scientists then use this to go back to another piece of that tissue and do what's called laser scanning microdissection. So the technician takes the instructions. They scribe along a place there. And then the laser actually cuts. You can see that blue dot there cutting. And that tissue falls off. You can see on the microscope slide here, that's what's happening in real time. There's a container underneath that's collecting that tissue. We take that tissue, we purify the RNA out of it using some basic technology, and then we put a florescent tag on it. We take that tagged material and we put it on to something called a microarray. Now this may look like a bunch of dots to you, but each one of these individual dots is actually a unique piece of the human genome that we spotted down on glass. This has roughly 60,000 elements on it, so we repeatedly measure various genes of the 25,000 genes in the genome. And when we take a sample and we hybridize it to it, we get a unique fingerprint, if you will, quantitatively of what genes are turned on in that sample. Now we do this over and over again, this process for any given brain. We're taking over a thousand samples for each brain. This area shown here is an area called the hippocampus. It's involved in learning and memory. And it contributes to about 70 samples of those thousand samples. So each sample gets us about 50,000 data points with repeat measurements, a thousand samples. So roughly, we have 50 million data points for a given human brain. We've done right now two human brains-worth of data. We've put all of that together into one thing, and I'll show you what that synthesis looks like. It's basically a large data set of information that's all freely available to any scientist around the world. They don't even have to log in to come use this tool, mine this data, find interesting things out with this. So here's the modalities that we put together. You'll start to recognize these things from what we've collected before. Here's the MR. It provides the framework. There's an operator side on the right that allows you to turn, it allows you to zoom in, it allows you to highlight individual structures. But most importantly, we're now mapping into this anatomic framework, which is a common framework for people to understand where genes are turned on. So the red levels are where a gene is turned on to a great degree. Green is the sort of cool areas where it's not turned on. And each gene gives us a fingerprint. And remember that we've assayed all the 25,000 genes in the genome and have all of that data available. So what can scientists learn about this data? We're just starting to look at this data ourselves. There's some basic things that you would want to understand. Two great examples are drugs, Prozac and Wellbutrin. These are commonly prescribed antidepressants. Now remember, we're assaying genes. Genes send the instructions to make proteins. Proteins are targets for drugs. So drugs bind to proteins and either turn them off, etc. So if you want to understand the action of drugs, you want to understand how they're acting in the ways you want them to, and also in the ways you don't want them to. In the side effect profile, etc., you want to see where those genes are turned on. And for the first time, we can actually do that. We can do that in multiple individuals that we've assayed too. So now we can look throughout the brain. We can see this unique fingerprint. And we get confirmation. We get confirmation that, indeed, the gene is turned on -- for something like Prozac, in serotonergic structures, things that are already known be affected -- but we also get to see the whole thing. We also get to see areas that no one has ever looked at before, and we see these genes turned on there. It's as interesting a side effect as it could be. One other thing you can do with such a thing is you can, because it's a pattern matching exercise, because there's unique fingerprint, we can actually scan through the entire genome and find other proteins that show a similar fingerprint. So if you're in drug discovery, for example, you can go through an entire listing of what the genome has on offer to find perhaps better drug targets and optimize. Most of you are probably familiar with genome-wide association studies in the form of people covering in the news saying, "Scientists have recently discovered the gene or genes which affect X." And so these kinds of studies are routinely published by scientists and they're great. They analyze large populations. They look at their entire genomes, and they try to find hot spots of activity that are linked causally to genes. But what you get out of such an exercise is simply a list of genes. It tells you the what, but it doesn't tell you the where. And so it's very important for those researchers that we've created this resource. Now they can come in and they can start to get clues about activity. They can start to look at common pathways -- other things that they simply haven't been able to do before. So I think this audience in particular can understand the importance of individuality. And I think every human, we all have different genetic backgrounds, we all have lived separate lives. But the fact is our genomes are greater than 99 percent similar. We're similar at the genetic level. And what we're finding is actually, even at the brain biochemical level, we are quite similar. And so this shows it's not 99 percent, but it's roughly 90 percent correspondence at a reasonable cutoff, so everything in the cloud is roughly correlated. And then we find some outliers, some things that lie beyond the cloud. And those genes are interesting, but they're very subtle. So I think it's an important message to take home today that even though we celebrate all of our differences, we are quite similar even at the brain level. Now what do those differences look like? This is an example of a study that we did to follow up and see what exactly those differences were -- and they're quite subtle. These are things where genes are turned on in an individual cell type. These are two genes that we found as good examples. One is called RELN -- it's involved in early developmental cues. DISC1 is a gene that's deleted in schizophrenia. These aren't schizophrenic individuals, but they do show some population variation. And so what you're looking at here in donor one and donor four, which are the exceptions to the other two, that genes are being turned on in a very specific subset of cells. It's this dark purple precipitate within the cell that's telling us a gene is turned on there. Whether or not that's due to an individual's genetic background or their experiences, we don't know. Those kinds of studies require much larger populations. So I'm going to leave you with a final note about the complexity of the brain and how much more we have to go. I think these resources are incredibly valuable. They give researchers a handle on where to go. But we only looked at a handful of individuals at this point. We're certainly going to be looking at more. I'll just close by saying that the tools are there, and this is truly an unexplored, undiscovered continent. This is the new frontier, if you will. And so for those who are undaunted, but humbled by the complexity of the brain, the future awaits. Thanks. (Applause)

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

So my freshman year of college I signed up for an internship in the housing unit at Greater Boston Legal Services. Showed up the first day ready to make coffee and photocopies, but was paired with this righteous, deeply inspired attorney named Jeff Purcell, who thrust me onto the front lines from the very first day. And over the course of nine months I had the chance to have dozens of conversations with low-income families in Boston who would come in presenting with housing issues, but always had an underlying health issue. So I had a client who came in, about to be evicted because he hasn't paid his rent. But he hasn't paid his rent, of course, because he's paying for his HIV medication and just can't afford both. We had moms who would come in, daughter has asthma, wakes up covered in cockroaches every morning. And one of our litigation strategies was actually to send me into the home of these clients with these large glass bottles. And I would collect the cockroaches, hot glue-gun them to this poster board that we'd bring to court for our cases. And we always won because the judges were just so grossed out. Far more effective, I have to say, than anything I later learned in law school. But over the course of these nine months, I grew frustrated with feeling like we were intervening too far downstream in the lives of our clients -- that by the time they came to us, they were already in crisis. And at the end of my freshman year of college, I read an article about the work that Dr. Barry Zuckerman was doing as Chair of Pediatrics at Boston Medical Center. And his first hire was a legal services attorney to represent the patients. So I called Barry, and with his blessing, in October 1995 walked into the waiting room of the pediatrics clinic at Boston Medical Center. I'll never forget, the TVs played this endless reel of cartoons. And the exhaustion of mothers who had taken two, three, sometimes four buses to bring their child to the doctor was just palpable. The doctors, it seemed, never really had enough time for all the patients, try as they might. And over the course of six months, I would corner them in the hallway and ask them a sort of naive but fundamental question: "If you had unlimited resources, what's the one thing you would give your patients?" And I heard the same story again and again, a story we've heard hundreds of times since then. They said, "Every day we have patients that come into the clinic -- child has an ear infection, I prescribe antibiotics. But the real issue is there's no food at home. The real issue is that child is living with 12 other people in a two-bedroom apartment. And I don't even ask about those issues because there's nothing I can do. I have 13 minutes with each patient. Patients are piling up in the clinic waiting room. I have no idea where the nearest food pantry is. And I don't even have any help." In that clinic, even today, there are two social workers for 24,000 pediatric patients, which is better than a lot of the clinics out there. So Health Leads was born of these conversations -- a simple model where doctors and nurses can prescribe nutritious food, heat in the winter and other basic resources for their patients the same way they prescribe medication. Patients then take their prescriptions to our desk in the clinic waiting room where we have a core of well-trained college student advocates who work side by side with these families to connect them out to the existing landscape of community resources. So we began with a card table in the clinic waiting room -- totally lemonade stand style. But today we have a thousand college student advocates who are working to connect nearly 9,000 patients and their families with the resources that they need to be healthy. So 18 months ago I got this email that changed my life. And the email was from Dr. Jack Geiger, who had written to congratulate me on Health Leads and to share, as he said, a bit of historical context. In 1965 Dr. Geiger founded one of the first two community health centers in this country, in a brutally poor area in the Mississippi Delta. And so many of his patients came in presenting with malnutrition that be began prescribing food for them. And they would take these prescriptions to the local supermarket, which would fill them and then charge the pharmacy budget of the clinic. And when the Office of Economic Opportunity in Washington, D.C. -- which was funding Geiger's clinic -- found out about this, they were furious. And they sent this bureaucrat down to tell Geiger that he was expected to use their dollars for medical care -- to which Geiger famously and logically responded, "The last time I checked my textbooks, the specific therapy for malnutrition was food." (Laughter) So when I got this email from Dr. Geiger, I knew I was supposed to be proud to be part of this history. But the truth is I was devastated. Here we are, 45 years after Geiger has prescribed food for his patients, and I have doctors telling me, "On those issues, we practice a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy." Forty-five years after Geiger, Health Leads has to reinvent the prescription for basic resources. So I have spent hours upon hours trying to make sense of this weird Groundhog Day. How is it that if for decades we had a pretty straightforward tool for keeping patients, and especially low-income patients, healthy, that we didn't use it? If we know what it takes to have a healthcare system rather than a sick-care system, why don't we just do it? These questions, in my mind, are not hard because the answers are complicated, they are hard because they require that we be honest with ourselves. My belief is that it's almost too painful to articulate our aspirations for our healthcare system, or even admit that we have any at all. Because if we did, they would be so removed from our current reality. But that doesn't change my belief that all of us, deep inside, here in this room and across this country, share a similar set of desires. That if we are honest with ourselves and listen quietly, that we all harbor one fiercely held aspiration for our healthcare: that it keep us healthy. This aspiration that our healthcare keep us healthy is an enormously powerful one. And the way I think about this is that healthcare is like any other system. It's just a set of choices that people make. What if we decided to make a different set of choices? What if we decided to take all the parts of healthcare that have drifted away from us and stand firm and say, "No. These things are ours. They will be used for our purposes. They will be used to realize our aspiration"? What if everything we needed to realize our aspiration for healthcare was right there in front of us just waiting to be claimed? So that's where Health Leads began. We started with the prescription pad -- a very ordinary piece of paper -- and we asked, not what do patients need to get healthy -- antibiotics, an inhaler, medication -- but what do patients need to be healthy, to not get sick in the first place? And we chose to use the prescription for that purpose. So just a few miles from here at Children's National Medical Center, when patients come into the doctor's office, they're asked a few questions. They're asked, "Are you running out of food at the end of the month? Do you have safe housing?" And when the doctor begins the visit, she knows height, weight, is there food at home, is the family living in a shelter. And that not only leads to a better set of clinical choices, but the doctor can also prescribe those resources for the patient, using Health Leads like any other sub-specialty referral. The problem is, once you get a taste of what it's like to realize your aspiration for healthcare, you want more. So we thought, if we can get individual doctors to prescribe these basic resources for their patients, could we get an entire healthcare system to shift its presumption? And we gave it a shot. So now at Harlem Hospital Center when patients come in with an elevated body mass index, the electronic medical record automatically generates a prescription for Health Leads. And our volunteers can then work with them to connect patients to healthy food and excercise programs in their communities. We've created a presumption that if you're a patient at that hospital with an elevated BMI, the four walls of the doctor's office probably aren't going to give you everything you need to be healthy. You need more. So on the one hand, this is just a basic recoding of the electronic medical record. And on the other hand, it's a radical transformation of the electronic medical record from a static repository of diagnostic information to a health promotion tool. In the private sector, when you squeeze that kind of additional value out of a fixed-cost investment, it's called a billion-dollar company. But in my world, it's called reduced obesity and diabetes. It's called healthcare -- a system where doctors can prescribe solutions to improve health, not just manage disease. Same thing in the clinic waiting room. So every day in this country three million patients pass through about 150,000 clinic waiting rooms in this country. And what do they do when they're there? They sit, they watch the goldfish in the fish tank, they read extremely old copies of Good Housekeeping magazine. But mostly we all just sit there forever, waiting. How did we get here where we devote hundreds of acres and thousands of hours to waiting? What if we had a waiting room where you don't just sit when you're sick, but where you go to get healthy. If airports can become shopping malls and McDonald's can become playgrounds, surely we can reinvent the clinic waiting room. And that's what Health Leads has tried to do, to reclaim that real estate and that time and to use it as a gateway to connect patients to the resources they need to be healthy. So it's a brutal winter in the Northeast, your kid has asthma, your heat just got turned off, and of course you're in the waiting room of the ER, because the cold air triggered your child's asthma. But what if instead of waiting for hours anxiously, the waiting room became the place where Health Leads turned your heat back on? And of course all of this requires a broader workforce. But if we're creative, we already have that too. We know that our doctors and nurses and even social workers aren't enough, that the ticking minutes of health care are too constraining. Health just takes more time. It requires a non-clinical army of community health workers and case managers and many others. What if a small part of that next healthcare workforce were the 11 million college students in this country? Unencumbered by clinical responsibilities, unwilling to take no for an answer from those bureaucracies that tend to crush patients, and with an unparalleled ability for information retrieval honed through years of using Google. Now lest you think it improbable that a college volunteer can make this kind of commitment, I have two words for you: March Madness. The average NCAA Division I men's basketball player dedicates 39 hours a week to his sport. Now we may think that's good or bad, but in either case it's real. And Health Leads is based on the presumption that for too long we have asked too little of our college students when it comes to real impact in vulnerable communities. College sports teams say, "We're going to take dozens of hours at some field across campus at some ungodly hour of the morning and we're going to measure your performance, and your team's performance, and if you don't measure up or you don't show up, we're going to cut you off the team. But we'll make huge investments in your training and development, and we'll give you an extraordinary community of peers." And people line up out the door just for the chance to be part of it. So our feeling is, if it's good enough for the rugby team, it's good enough for health and poverty. Health Leads too recruits competitively, trains intensively, coaches professionally, demands significant time, builds a cohesive team and measures results -- a kind of Teach for America for healthcare. Now in the top 10 cities in the U.S. with the largest number of Medicaid patients, each of those has at least 20,000 college students. New York alone has half a million college students. And this isn't just a sort of short-term workforce to connect patients to basic resources, it's a next generation healthcare leadership pipeline who've spent two, three, four years in the clinic waiting room talking to patients about their most basic health needs. And they leave with the conviction, the ability and the efficacy to realize our most basic aspirations for health care. And the thing is, there's thousands of these folks already out there. So Mia Lozada is Chief Resident of Internal Medicine at UCSF Medical Center, but for three years as an undergraduate she was a Health Leads volunteer in the clinic waiting room at Boston Medical Center. Mia says, "When my classmates write a prescription, they think their work is done. When I write a prescription, I think, can the family read the prescription? Do they have transportation to the pharmacy? Do they have food to take with the prescription? Do they have insurance to fill the prescription? Those are the questions I learned at Health Leads, not in medical school." Now none of these solutions -- the prescription pad, the electronic medical record, the waiting room, the army of college students -- are perfect. But they are ours for the taking -- simple examples of the vast under-utilized healthcare resources that, if we reclaimed and redeployed, could realize our most basic aspiration of healthcare. So I had been at Legal Services for about nine months when this idea of Health Leads started percolating in my mind. And I knew I had to tell Jeff Purcell, my attorney, that I needed to leave. And I was so nervous, because I thought he was going to be disappointed in me for abandoning our clients for some crazy idea. And I sat down with him and I said, "Jeff, I have this idea that we could mobilize college students to address patients' most basic health needs." And I'll be honest, all I wanted was for him to not be angry at me. But he said this, "Rebecca, when you have a vision, you have an obligation to realize that vision. You must pursue that vision." And I have to say, I was like "Whoa. That's a lot of pressure." I just wanted a blessing, I didn't want some kind of mandate. But the truth is I've spent every waking minute nearly since then chasing that vision. I believe that we all have a vision for healthcare in this country. I believe that at the end of the day when we measure our healthcare, it will not be by the diseases cured, but by the diseases prevented. It will not be by the excellence of our technologies or the sophistication of our specialists, but by how rarely we needed them. And most of all, I believe that when we measure healthcare, it will be, not by what the system was, but by what we chose it to be. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

So I'm a woman with chronic schizophrenia. I've spent hundreds of days in psychiatric hospitals. I might have ended up spending most of my life on the back ward of a hospital, but that isn't how my life turned out. In fact, I've managed to stay clear of hospitals for almost three decades, perhaps my proudest accomplishment. That's not to say that I've remained clear of all psychiatric struggles. After I graduated from the Yale Law School and got my first law job, my New Haven analyst, Dr. White, announced to me that he was going to close his practice in three months, several years before I had planned to leave New Haven. White had been enormously helpful to me, and the thought of his leaving shattered me. My best friend Steve, sensing that something was terribly wrong, flew out to New Haven to be with me. Now I'm going to quote from some of my writings: "I opened the door to my studio apartment. Steve would later tell me that, for all the times he had seen me psychotic, nothing could have prepared him for what he saw that day. For a week or more, I had barely eaten. I was gaunt. I walked as though my legs were wooden. My face looked and felt like a mask. I had closed all the curtains in the apartment, so in the middle of the day the apartment was in near total darkness. The air was fetid, the room a shambles. Steve, both a lawyer and a psychologist, has treated many patients with severe mental illness, and to this day he'll say I was as bad as any he had ever seen. 'Hi,' I said, and then I returned to the couch, where I sat in silence for several moments. 'Thank you for coming, Steve. Crumbling world, word, voice. Tell the clocks to stop. Time is. Time has come.' 'White is leaving,' Steve said somberly. 'I'm being pushed into a grave. The situation is grave,' I moan. 'Gravity is pulling me down. I'm scared. Tell them to get away.'" As a young woman, I was in a psychiatric hospital on three different occasions for lengthy periods. My doctors diagnosed me with chronic schizophrenia, and gave me a prognosis of "grave." That is, at best, I was expected to live in a board and care, and work at menial jobs. Fortunately, I did not actually enact that grave prognosis. Instead, I'm a chaired Professor of Law, Psychology and Psychiatry at the USC Gould School of Law, I have many close friends and I have a beloved husband, Will, who's here with us today. (Applause) Thank you. He's definitely the star of my show. I'd like to share with you how that happened, and also describe my experience of being psychotic. I hasten to add that it's my experience, because everyone becomes psychotic in his or her own way. Let's start with the definition of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a brain disease. Its defining feature is psychosis, or being out of touch with reality. Delusions and hallucinations are hallmarks of the illness. Delusions are fixed and false beliefs that aren't responsive to evidence, and hallucinations are false sensory experiences. For example, when I'm psychotic I often have the delusion that I've killed hundreds of thousands of people with my thoughts. I sometimes have the idea that nuclear explosions are about to be set off in my brain. Occasionally, I have hallucinations, like one time I turned around and saw a man with a raised knife. Imagine having a nightmare while you're awake. Often, speech and thinking become disorganized to the point of incoherence. Loose associations involves putting together words that may sound a lot alike but don't make sense, and if the words get jumbled up enough, it's called "word salad." Contrary to what many people think, schizophrenia is not the same as multiple personality disorder or split personality. The schizophrenic mind is not split, but shattered. Everyone has seen a street person, unkempt, probably ill-fed, standing outside of an office building muttering to himself or shouting. This person is likely to have some form of schizophrenia. But schizophrenia presents itself across a wide array of socioeconomic status, and there are people with the illness who are full-time professionals with major responsibilities. Several years ago, I decided to write down my experiences and my personal journey, and I want to share some more of that story with you today to convey the inside view. So the following episode happened the seventh week of my first semester of my first year at Yale Law School. Quoting from my writings: "My two classmates, Rebel and Val, and I had made the date to meet in the law school library on Friday night to work on our memo assignment together. But we didn't get far before I was talking in ways that made no sense. 'Memos are visitations,' I informed them. 'They make certain points. The point is on your head. Pat used to say that. Have you killed you anyone?' Rebel and Val looked at me as if they or I had been splashed in the face with cold water. 'What are you talking about, Elyn?' 'Oh, you know, the usual. Who's what, what's who, heaven and hell. Let's go out on the roof. It's a flat surface. It's safe.' Rebel and Val followed and they asked what had gotten into me. 'This is the real me,' I announced, waving my arms above my head. And then, late on a Friday night, on the roof of the Yale Law School, I began to sing, and not quietly either. 'Come to the Florida sunshine bush. Do you want to dance?' 'Are you on drugs?' one asked. 'Are you high?' 'High? Me? No way, no drugs. Come to the Florida sunshine bush, where there are lemons, where they make demons.' 'You're frightening me,' one of them said, and Rebel and Val headed back into the library. I shrugged and followed them. Back inside, I asked my classmates if they were having the same experience of words jumping around our cases as I was. 'I think someone's infiltrated my copies of the cases,' I said. 'We've got to case the joint. I don't believe in joints, but they do hold your body together.'" -- It's an example of loose associations. -- "Eventually I made my way back to my dorm room, and once there, I couldn't settle down. My head was too full of noise, too full of orange trees and law memos I could not write and mass murders I knew I would be responsible for. Sitting on my bed, I rocked back and forth, moaning in fear and isolation." This episode led to my first hospitalization in America. I had two earlier in England. Continuing with the writings: "The next morning I went to my professor's office to ask for an extension on the memo assignment, and I began gibbering unintelligably as I had the night before, and he eventually brought me to the emergency room. Once there, someone I'll just call 'The Doctor' and his whole team of goons swooped down, lifted me high into the air, and slammed me down on a metal bed with such force that I saw stars. Then they strapped my legs and arms to the metal bed with thick leather straps. A sound came out of my mouth that I'd never heard before: half groan, half scream, barely human and pure terror. Then the sound came again, forced from somewhere deep inside my belly and scraping my throat raw." This incident resulted in my involuntary hospitalization. One of the reasons the doctors gave for hospitalizing me against my will was that I was "gravely disabled." To support this view, they wrote in my chart that I was unable to do my Yale Law School homework. I wondered what that meant about much of the rest of New Haven. (Laughter) During the next year, I would spend five months in a psychiatric hospital. At times, I spent up to 20 hours in mechanical restraints, arms tied, arms and legs tied down, arms and legs tied down with a net tied tightly across my chest. I never struck anyone. I never harmed anyone. I never made any direct threats. If you've never been restrained yourself, you may have a benign image of the experience. There's nothing benign about it. Every week in the United States, it's been estimated that one to three people die in restraints. They strangle, they aspirate their vomit, they suffocate, they have a heart attack. It's unclear whether using mechanical restraints is actually saving lives or costing lives. While I was preparing to write my student note for the Yale Law Journal on mechanical restraints, I consulted an eminent law professor who was also a psychiatrist, and said surely he would agree that restraints must be degrading, painful and frightening. He looked at me in a knowing way, and said, "Elyn, you don't really understand: These people are psychotic. They're different from me and you. They wouldn't experience restraints as we would." I didn't have the courage to tell him in that moment that, no, we're not that different from him. We don't like to be strapped down to a bed and left to suffer for hours any more than he would. In fact, until very recently, and I'm sure some people still hold it as a view, that restraints help psychiatric patients feel safe. I've never met a psychiatric patient who agreed with that view. Today, I'd like to say I'm very pro-psychiatry but very anti-force. I don't think force is effective as treatment, and I think using force is a terrible thing to do to another person with a terrible illness. Eventually, I came to Los Angeles to teach at the University of Southern California Law School. For years, I had resisted medication, making many, many efforts to get off. I felt that if I could manage without medication, I could prove that, after all, I wasn't really mentally ill, it was some terrible mistake. My motto was the less medicine, the less defective. My L.A. analyst, Dr. Kaplan, was urging me just to stay on medication and get on with my life, but I decided I wanted to make one last college try to get off. Quoting from the text: "I started the reduction of my meds, and within a short time I began feeling the effects. After returning from a trip to Oxford, I marched into Kaplan's office, headed straight for the corner, crouched down, covered my face, and began shaking. All around me I sensed evil beings poised with daggers. They'd slice me up in thin slices or make me swallow hot coals. Kaplan would later describe me as 'writhing in agony.' Even in this state, what he accurately described as acutely and forwardly psychotic, I refused to take more medication. The mission is not yet complete. Immediately after the appointment with Kaplan, I went to see Dr. Marder, a schizophrenia expert who was following me for medication side effects. He was under the impression that I had a mild psychotic illness. Once in his office, I sat on his couch, folded over, and began muttering. 'Head explosions and people trying to kill. Is it okay if I totally trash your office?' 'You need to leave if you think you're going to do that,' said Marder. 'Okay. Small. Fire on ice. Tell them not to kill me. Tell them not to kill me. What have I done wrong? Hundreds of thousands with thoughts, interdiction.' 'Elyn, do you feel like you're dangerous to yourself or others? I think you need to be in the hospital. I could get you admitted right away, and the whole thing could be very discrete.' 'Ha, ha, ha. You're offering to put me in hospitals? Hospitals are bad, they're mad, they're sad. One must stay away. I'm God, or I used to be.'" At that point in the text, where I said "I'm God, or I used to be," my husband made a marginal note. He said, "Did you quit or were you fired?" (Laughter) "'I give life and I take it away. Forgive me, for I know not what I do.' Eventually, I broke down in front of friends, and everybody convinced me to take more medication. I could no longer deny the truth, and I could not change it. The wall that kept me, Elyn, Professor Saks, separate from that insane woman hospitalized years past, lay smashed and in ruins." Everything about this illness says I shouldn't be here, but I am. And I am, I think, for three reasons: First, I've had excellent treatment. Four- to five-day-a-week psychoanalytic psychotherapy for decades and continuing, and excellent psychopharmacology. Second, I have many close family members and friends who know me and know my illness. These relationships have given my life a meaning and a depth, and they also helped me navigate my life in the face of symptoms. Third, I work at an enormously supportive workplace at USC Law School. This is a place that not only accommodates my needs but actually embraces them. It's also a very intellectually stimulating place, and occupying my mind with complex problems has been my best and most powerful and most reliable defense against my mental illness. Even with all that — excellent treatment, wonderful family and friends, supportive work environment — I did not make my illness public until relatively late in life, and that's because the stigma against mental illness is so powerful that I didn't feel safe with people knowing. If you hear nothing else today, please hear this: There are not "schizophrenics." There are people with schizophrenia, and these people may be your spouse, they may be your child, they may be your neighbor, they may be your friend, they may be your coworker. So let me share some final thoughts. We need to invest more resources into research and treatment of mental illness. The better we understand these illnesses, the better the treatments we can provide, and the better the treatments we can provide, the more we can offer people care, and not have to use force. Also, we must stop criminalizing mental illness. It's a national tragedy and scandal that the L.A. County Jail is the biggest psychiatric facility in the United States. American prisons and jails are filled with people who suffer from severe mental illness, and many of them are there because they never received adequate treatment. I could have easily ended up there or on the streets myself. A message to the entertainment industry and to the press: On the whole, you've done a wonderful job fighting stigma and prejudice of many kinds. Please, continue to let us see characters in your movies, your plays, your columns, who suffer with severe mental illness. Portray them sympathetically, and portray them in all the richness and depth of their experience as people and not as diagnoses. Recently, a friend posed a question: If there were a pill I could take that would instantly cure me, would I take it? The poet Rainer Maria Rilke was offered psychoanalysis. He declined, saying, "Don't take my devils away, because my angels may flee too." My psychosis, on the other hand, is a waking nightmare in which my devils are so terrifying that all my angels have already fled. So would I take the pill? In an instant. That said, I don't wish to be seen as regretting the life I could have had if I'd not been mentally ill, nor am I asking anyone for their pity. What I rather wish to say is that the humanity we all share is more important than the mental illness we may not. What those of us who suffer with mental illness want is what everybody wants: in the words of Sigmund Freud, "to work and to love." Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. You're very kind. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

I want to talk about penguins today. But first, I want to start by saying that we need a new operating system, for the oceans and for the Earth. When I came to the Galapagos 40 years ago, there were 3,000 people that lived in the Galapagos. Now there are over 30,000. There were two Jeeps on Santa Cruz. Now, there are around a thousand trucks and buses and cars there. So the fundamental problems that we face are overconsumption and too many people. It's the same problems in the Galapagos, except, obviously, it's worse here, in some ways, than other places. Because we've only doubled the population of the Earth since the 1960s -- a little more than doubled -- but we have 6.7 billion people in the world, and we all like to consume. And one of the major problems that we have is our operating system is not giving us the proper feedback. We're not paying the true environmental costs of our actions. And when I came at age 22 to live on Fernandina, let me just say, that I had never camped before. I had never lived alone for any period of time, and I'd never slept with sea lions snoring next to me all night. But moreover, I'd never lived on an uninhabited island. Punta Espinosa is where I lived for over a year, and we call it uninhabited because there are no people there. But it's alive with life; it's hardly uninhabited. So a lot has happened in the last 40 years, and what I learned when I came to the Galapagos is the importance of wild places, wild things, certainly wildlife, and the amazing qualities that penguins have. Penguins are real athletes: They can swim 173 kilometers in a day. They can swim at the same speed day and night -- that's faster than any Olympic swimmer. I mean, they can do like seven kilometers an hour and sustain it. But what is really amazing, because of this deepness here, Emperor penguins can go down more than 500 meters and they can hold their breath for 23 minutes. Magellanic penguins, the ones that I work on, they can dive to about 90 meters and they can stay down for about 4.6 minutes. Humans, without fins: 90 meters, 3.5 minutes. And I doubt anybody in this room could really hold their breath for 3.5 minutes. You have to train to be able to do that. So penguins are amazing athletes. The other thing is, I've never met anybody that really doesn't say that they like penguins. They're comical, they walk upright, and, of course, they're diligent. And, more importantly, they're well-dressed. So they have all the criteria that people normally like. But scientifically, they're amazing because they're sentinels. They tell us about our world in a lot of different ways, and particularly the ocean. This is a picture of a Galapagos penguin that's on the front of a little zodiac here in the Galapagos. And that's what I came to study. I thought I was going to study the social behavior of Galapagos penguins, but you already know penguins are rare. These are the rarest penguins in the world. Why I thought I was going to be able to do that, I don't know. But the population has changed dramatically since I was first here. When I counted penguins for the first time and tried to do a census, we just counted all the individual beaks that we could around all these islands. We counted around 2,000, so I don't know how many penguins there really are, but I know I can count 2,000. If you go and do it now, the national parks count about 500. So we have a quarter of the penguins that we did 40 years ago. And this is true of most of our living systems. We have less than we had before, and most of them are in fairly steep decline. And I want to just show you a little bit about why. (Braying) That's a penguin braying to tell you that it's important to pay attention to penguins. Most important of all, I didn't know what that was the first time I heard it. And you can imagine sleeping on Fernandina your first night there and you hear this lonesome, plaintful call. I fell in love with penguins, and it certainly has changed the rest of my life. What I found out I was studying is really the difference in how the Galapagos changes, the most extreme variation. You've heard about these El Ninos, but this is the extreme that penguins all over the world have to adapt to. This is a cold-water event called La Nina. Where it's blue and it's green, it means the water is really cold. And so you can see this current coming up -- in this case, the Humboldt Current -- that comes all the way out to the Galapagos Islands, and this deep undersea current, the Cromwell Current, that upwells around the Galapagos. That brings all the nutrients: When this is cold in the Galapagos, it's rich, and there's plenty of food for everyone. When we have extreme El Nino events, you see all this red, and you see no green out here around the Galapagos. That means that there's no upwelling, and there's basically no food. So it's a real desert for not only for the penguins and the sea lions and the marine iguanas ... things die when there's no food. But we didn't even know that that affected the Galapagos when I went to study penguins. And you can imagine being on an island hoping you're going to see penguins, and you're in the middle of an El Nino event and there are no penguins. They're not breeding; they're not even around. I studied marine iguanas at that point. But this is a global phenomenon, we know that. And if you look along the coast of Argentina, where I work now, at a place called Punta Tombo -- the largest Magellanic penguin colony in the world down here about 44 degrees south latitude -- you see that there's great variation here. Some years, the cold water goes all the way up to Brazil, and other years, in these La Nina years, it doesn't. So the oceans don't always act together; they act differently, but that is the kind of variation that penguins have to live with, and it's not easy. So when I went to study the Magellanic penguins, I didn't have any problems. There were plenty of them. This is a picture at Punta Tombo in February showing all the penguins along the beach. I went there because the Japanese wanted to start harvesting them and turning them into high fashion golf gloves, protein and oil. Fortunately, nobody has harvested any penguins and we're getting over 100,000 tourists a year to see them. But the population is declining and it's declined fairly substantially, about 21 percent since 1987, when I started these surveys, in terms of number of active nests. Here, you can see where Punta Tombo is, and they breed in incredibly dense colonies. We know this because of long-term science, because we have long-term studies there. And science is important in informing decision makers, and also in changing how we do and knowing the direction of change that we're going in. And so we have this penguin project. The Wildlife Conservation Society has funded me along with a lot of individuals over the last 27 years to be able to produce these kinds of maps. And also, we know that it's not only Galapagos penguins that are in trouble, but Magellanics and many other species of penguins. And so we have started a global penguin society to try to focus on the real plight of penguins. This is one of the plights of penguins: oil pollution. Penguins don't like oil and they don't like to swim through oil. The nice thing is, if you look down here in Argentina, there's no surface oil pollution from this composite map. But, in fact, when we went to Argentina, penguins were often found totally covered in oil. So they were just minding their own business. They ended up swimming through ballast water that had oil in it. Because when tankers carry oil they have to have ballast at some point, so when they're empty, they have the ballast water in there. When they come back, they actually dump this oily ballast water into the ocean. Why do they do that? Because it's cheaper, because they don't pay the real environmental costs. We usually don't, and we want to start getting the accounting system right so we can pay the real cost. At first, the Argentine government said, "No, there's no way. You can't find oiled penguins in Argentina. We have laws, and we can't have illegal dumping; it's against the law." So we ended up spending nine years convincing the government that there were lots of oiled penguins. In some years, like this year, we found more than 80 percent of the adult penguins dead on the beach were covered in oil. These little blue dots are the fledglings -- we do this survey every March -- which means that they're only in the environment from January until March, so maybe three months at the most that they could get covered in oil. And you can see, in some years over 60 percent of the fledglings were oiled. Eventually, the government listened and, amazingly, they changed their laws. They moved the tanker lanes 40 kilometers farther off shore, and people are not doing as much illegal dumping. So what we're seeing now is very few penguins are oiled. Why are there even these penguins oiled? Because we've solved the problem in Chubut province, which is like a state in Argentina where Punta Tombo is -- so that's about 1,000 kilometers of coastline -- but we haven't solved the problem in northern Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. So now I want to show you that penguins are affected. I'm just going to talk about two things. This is climate change. Now this has really been a fun study because I put satellite tags on the back of these Magellanic penguins. Try to convince donors to give you a couple thousand dollars to glue a satellite tag on the back of penguins. But we've been doing this now for more than a decade to learn where they go. We thought we needed a marine protected area of about 30 kilometers, and then we put a satellite tag on the back of a penguin. And what the penguins show us -- and these are all the little dots from where the penguins' positions were for penguins in incubation in 2003 -- and what you see is some of these individuals are going 800 kilometers away from their nests. So that means as their mate is sitting on the nest incubating the eggs, the other one is out there foraging, and the longer they have to stay gone, the worse condition the mate is in when the mate comes back. And, of course, all of this then leads to a vicious cycle and you can't raise a lot of chicks. Here you see in 2003 -- these are all the dots of where the penguins are -- they were raising a little over a half of a chick. Here, you can see in 2006, they raised almost three quarters of a chick per nest, and you can see that they're closer to Punta Tombo; they're not going as far away. This past year, in 2009, you can see that they're now raising about a fourth of a chick, and some of these individuals are going more than 900 kilometers away from their nests. So it's kind of like you having a job in Chicago, and then you get transferred to St. Louis, and your mate is not happy about this because you've got to pay airfare, because you're gone longer. The same thing's true for penguins as well. And they're going about, on average now, 40 kilometers farther than they did a decade ago. We need to be able to get information out to the general public. And so we started a publication with the Society for Conservation that we think presents cutting-edge science in a new, novel way, because we have reporters that are good writers that actually can distill the information and make it accessible to the general public. So if you're interested in cutting-edge science and smarter conservation, you should join with our 11 partners -- some of them here in this room, like the Nature Conservancy -- and look at this magazine because we need to get information out about conservation to the general public. Lastly I want to say that all of you, probably, have had some relationship at some time in your life with a dog, a cat, some sort of pet, and you recognized that those are individuals. And some of you consider them almost part of your family. If you had a relationship with a penguin, you'd see it in the same sort of way. They're amazing creatures that really change how you view the world because they're not that different from us: They're trying to make a living, they're trying to raise their offspring, they're trying to get on and survive in the world. This is Turbo the Penguin. Turbo's never been fed. He met us and got his name because he started standing under my diesel truck: a turbo truck, so we named him Turbo. Turbo has taken to knocking on the door with his beak, we let him in and he comes in here. And I just wanted to show you what happened one day when Turbo brought in a friend. So this is Turbo. He's coming up to one of my graduate students and flipper patting, which he would do to a female penguin. And you can see, he's not trying to bite. This guy has never been in before and he's trying to figure out, "What is going on? What is this guy doing? This is really pretty weird." And you'll see soon that my graduate student ... and you see, Turbo's pretty intent on his flipper patting. And now he's looking at the other guy, saying, "You are really weird." And now look at this: not friendly. So penguins really differ in their personalities just like our dogs and our cats. We're also trying to collect our information and become more technologically literate. So we're trying to put that in computers in the field. And penguins are always involved in helping us or not helping us in one way or another. This is a radio frequency ID system. You put a little piece of rice in the foot of a penguin that has a barcode, so it tells you who it is. It walks over the pad, and you know who it is. Okay, so here are a few penguins coming in. See, this one's coming back to its nest. They're all coming in at this time, walking across there, just kind of leisurely coming in. Here's a female that's in a hurry. She's got food. She's really rushing back, because it's hot, to try to feed her chicks. And then there's another fellow that will leisurely come by. Look how fat he is. He's walking back to feed his chicks. Then I realize that they're playing king of the box. This is my box up here, and this is the system that works. You can see this penguin, he goes over, he looks at those wires, does not like that wire. He unplugs the wire; we have no data. (Laughter) So, they really are pretty amazing creatures. OK. Most important thing is: Only you can change yourself, and only you can change the world and make it better, for people as well as penguins. So, thank you very much. (Applause)

So anyway, who am I? I usually say to people, when they say, "What do you do?" I say, "I do hardware," because it sort of conveniently encompasses everything I do. And I recently said that to a venture capitalist casually at some Valley event, to which he replied, "How quaint." (Laughter) And I sort of really was dumbstruck. And I really should have said something smart. And now I've had a little bit of time to think about it, I would have said, "Well, you know, if we look at the next 100 years and we've seen all these problems in the last few days, most of the big issues -- clean water, clean energy -- and they're interchangeable in some respects -- and cleaner, more functional materials -- they all look to me to be hardware problems. This doesn't mean we should ignore software, or information, or computation." And that's in fact probably what I'm going to try and tell you about. So, this talk is going to be about how do we make things and what are the new ways that we're going to make things in the future. Now, TED sends you a lot of spam if you're a speaker about "do this, do that" and you fill out all these forms, and you don't actually know how they're going to describe you, and it flashed across my desk that they were going to introduce me as a futurist. And I've always been nervous about the term "futurist," because you seem doomed to failure because you can't really predict it. And I was laughing about this with the very smart colleagues I have, and said, "You know, well, if I have to talk about the future, what is it?" And George Homsey, a great guy, said, "Oh, the future is amazing. It is so much stranger than you think. We're going to reprogram the bacteria in your gut, and we're going to make your poo smell like peppermint." (Laughter) So, you may think that's sort of really crazy, but there are some pretty amazing things that are happening that make this possible. So, this isn't my work, but it's work of good friends of mine at MIT. This is called the registry of standard biological parts. This is headed by Drew Endy and Tom Knight and a few other very, very bright individuals. Basically, what they're doing is looking at biology as a programmable system. Literally, think of proteins as subroutines that you can string together to execute a program. Now, this is actually becoming such an interesting idea. This is a state diagram. That's an extremely simple computer. This one is a two-bit counter. So that's essentially the computational equivalent of two light switches. And this is being built by a group of students at Zurich for a design competition in biology. And from the results of the same competition last year, a University of Texas team of students programmed bacteria so that they can detect light and switch on and off. So this is interesting in the sense that you can now do "if-then-for" statements in materials, in structure. This is a pretty interesting trend, because we used to live in a world where everyone's said glibly, "Form follows function," but I think I've sort of grown up in a world -- you listened to Neil Gershenfeld yesterday; I was in a lab associated with his -- where it's really a world where information defines form and function. I spent six years thinking about that, but to show you the power of art over science -- this is actually one of the cartoons I write. These are called "HowToons." I work with a fabulous illustrator called Nick Dragotta. Took me six years at MIT, and about that many pages to describe what I was doing, and it took him one page. And so this is our muse Tucker. He's an interesting little kid -- and his sister, Celine -- and what he's doing here is observing the self-assembly of his Cheerios in his cereal bowl. And in fact you can program the self-assembly of things, so he starts chocolate-dipping edges, changing the hydrophobicity and the hydrophylicity. In theory, if you program those sufficiently, you should be able to do something pretty interesting and make a very complex structure. In this case, he's done self-replication of a complex 3D structure. And that's what I thought about for a long time, because this is how we currently make things. This is a silicon wafer, and essentially that's just a whole bunch of layers of two-dimensional stuff, sort of layered up. The feature side is -- you know, people will say, [unclear] down around about 65 nanometers now. On the right, that's a radiolara. That's a unicellular organism ubiquitous in the oceans. And that has feature sizes down to about 20 nanometers, and it's a complex 3D structure. We could do a lot more with computers and things generally if we knew how to build things this way. The secret to biology is, it builds computation into the way it makes things. So this little thing here, polymerase, is essentially a supercomputer designed for replicating DNA. And the ribosome here is another little computer that helps in the translation of the proteins. I thought about this in the sense that it's great to build in biological materials, but can we do similar things? Can we get self-replicating-type behavior? Can we get complex 3D structure automatically assembling in inorganic systems? Because there are some advantages to inorganic systems, like higher speed semiconductors, etc. So, this is some of my work on how do you do an autonomously self-replicating system. And this is sort of Babbage's revenge. These are little mechanical computers. These are five-state state machines. So, that's about three light switches lined up. In a neutral state, they won't bind at all. Now, if I make a string of these, a bit string, they will be able to replicate. So we start with white, blue, blue, white. That encodes; that will now copy. From one comes two, and then from two comes three. And so you've got this sort of replicating system. It was work actually by Lionel Penrose, father of Roger Penrose, the tiles guy. He did a lot of this work in the '60s, and so a lot of this logic theory lay fallow as we went down the digital computer revolution, but it's now coming back. So now I'm going to show you the hands-free, autonomous self-replication. So we've tracked in the video the input string, which was green, green, yellow, yellow, green. We set them off on this air hockey table. You know, high science uses air hockey tables -- (Laughter) -- and if you watch this thing long enough you get dizzy, but what you're actually seeing is copies of that original string emerging from the parts bin that you have here. So we've got autonomous replication of bit strings. So, why would you want to replicate bit strings? Well, it turns out biology has this other very interesting meme, that you can take a linear string, which is a convenient thing to copy, and you can fold that into an arbitrarily complex 3D structure. So I was trying to, you know, take the engineer's version: Can we build a mechanical system in inorganic materials that will do the same thing? So what I'm showing you here is that we can make a 2D shape -- the B -- assemble from a string of components that follow extremely simple rules. And the whole point of going with the extremely simple rules here, and the incredibly simple state machines in the previous design, was that you don't need digital logic to do computation. And that way you can scale things much smaller than microchips. So you can literally use these as the tiny components in the assembly process. So, Neil Gershenfeld showed you this video on Wednesday, I believe, but I'll show you again. This is literally the colored sequence of those tiles. Each different color has a different magnetic polarity, and the sequence is uniquely specifying the structure that is coming out. Now, hopefully, those of you who know anything about graph theory can look at that, and that will satisfy you that that can also do arbitrary 3D structure, and in fact, you know, I can now take a dog, carve it up and then reassemble it so it's a linear string that will fold from a sequence. And now I can actually define that three-dimensional object as a sequence of bits. So, you know, it's a pretty interesting world when you start looking at the world a little bit differently. And the universe is now a compiler. And so I'm thinking about, you know, what are the programs for programming the physical universe? And how do we think about materials and structure, sort of as an information and computation problem? Not just where you attach a micro-controller to the end point, but that the structure and the mechanisms are the logic, are the computers. Having totally absorbed this philosophy, I started looking at a lot of problems a little differently. With the universe as a computer, you can look at this droplet of water as having performed the computations. You set a couple of boundary conditions, like gravity, the surface tension, density, etc., and then you press "execute," and magically, the universe produces you a perfect ball lens. So, this actually applied to the problem of -- so there's a half a billion to a billion people in the world don't have access to cheap eyeglasses. So can you make a machine that could make any prescription lens very quickly on site? This is a machine where you literally define a boundary condition. If it's circular, you make a spherical lens. If it's elliptical, you can make an astigmatic lens. You then put a membrane on that and you apply pressure -- so that's part of the extra program. And literally with only those two inputs -- so, the shape of your boundary condition and the pressure -- you can define an infinite number of lenses that cover the range of human refractive error, from minus 12 to plus eight diopters, up to four diopters of cylinder. And then literally, you now pour on a monomer. You know, I'll do a Julia Childs here. This is three minutes of UV light. And you reverse the pressure on your membrane once you've cooked it. Pop it out. I've seen this video, but I still don't know if it's going to end right. (Laughter) So you reverse this. This is a very old movie, so with the new prototypes, actually both surfaces are flexible, but this will show you the point. Now you've finished the lens, you literally pop it out. That's next year's Yves Klein, you know, eyeglasses shape. And you can see that that has a mild prescription of about minus two diopters. And as I rotate it against this side shot, you'll see that that has cylinder, and that was programmed in -- literally into the physics of the system. So, this sort of thinking about structure as computation and structure as information leads to other things, like this. This is something that my people at SQUID Labs are working on at the moment, called "electronic rope." So literally, you think about a rope. It has very complex structure in the weave. And under no load, it's one structure. Under a different load, it's a different structure. And you can actually exploit that by putting in a very small number of conducting fibers to actually make it a sensor. So this is now a rope that knows the load on the rope at any particular point in the rope. Just by thinking about the physics of the world, materials as the computer, you can start to do things like this. I'm going to segue a little here. I guess I'm just going to casually tell you the types of things that I think about with this. One thing I'm really interested about this right now is, how, if you're really taking this view of the universe as a computer, how do we make things in a very general sense, and how might we share the way we make things in a general sense the same way you share open source hardware? And a lot of talks here have espoused the benefits of having lots of people look at problems, share the information and work on those things together. So, a convenient thing about being a human is you move in linear time, and unless Lisa Randall changes that, we'll continue to move in linear time. So that means anything you do, or anything you make, you produce a sequence of steps -- and I think Lego in the '70s nailed this, and they did it most elegantly. But they can show you how to build things in sequence. So, I'm thinking about, how can we generalize the way we make all sorts of things, so you end up with this sort of guy, right? And I think this applies across a very broad -- sort of, a lot of concepts. You know, Cameron Sinclair yesterday said, "How do I get everyone to collaborate on design globally to do housing for humanity?" And if you've seen Amy Smith, she talks about how you get students at MIT to work with communities in Haiti. And I think we have to sort of redefine and rethink how we define structure and materials and assembly things, so that we can really share the information on how you do those things in a more profound way and build on each other's source code for structure. I don't know exactly how to do this yet, but, you know, it's something being actively thought about. So, you know, that leads to questions like, is this a compiler? Is this a sub-routine? Interesting things like that. Maybe I'm getting a little too abstract, but you know, this is the sort of -- returning to our comic characters -- this is sort of the universe, or a different universe view, that I think is going to be very prevalent in the future -- from biotech to materials assembly. It was great to hear Bill Joy. They're starting to invest in materials science, but these are the new things in materials science. How do we put real information and real structure into new ideas, and see the world in a different way? And it's not going to be binary code that defines the computers of the universe -- it's sort of an analog computer. But it's definitely an interesting new worldview. I've gone too far. So that sounds like it's it. I've probably got a couple of minutes of questions, or I can show -- I think they also said that I do extreme stuff in the introduction, so I may have to explain that. So maybe I'll do that with this short video. So this is actually a 3,000-square-foot kite, which also happens to be a minimal energy surface. So returning to the droplet, again, thinking about the universe in a new way. This is a kite designed by a guy called Dave Kulp. And why do you want a 3,000-square-foot kite? So that's a kite the size of your house. And so you want that to tow boats very fast. So I've been working on this a little, also, with a couple of other guys. But, you know, this is another way to look at the -- if you abstract again, this is a structure that is defined by the physics of the universe. You could just hang it as a bed sheet, but again, the computation of all the physics gives you the aerodynamic shape. And so you can actually sort of almost double your boat speed with systems like that. So that's sort of another interesting aspect of the future. (Applause)

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

So let me ask for a show of hands. How many people here are over the age of 48? Well, there do seem to be a few. Well, congratulations, because if you look at this particular slide of U.S. life expectancy, you are now in excess of the average life span of somebody who was born in 1900. But look what happened in the course of that century. If you follow that curve, you'll see that it starts way down there. There's that dip there for the 1918 flu. And here we are at 2010, average life expectancy of a child born today, age 79, and we are not done yet. Now, that's the good news. But there's still a lot of work to do. So, for instance, if you ask, how many diseases do we now know the exact molecular basis? Turns out it's about 4,000, which is pretty amazing, because most of those molecular discoveries have just happened in the last little while. It's exciting to see that in terms of what we've learned, but how many of those 4,000 diseases now have treatments available? Only about 250. So we have this huge challenge, this huge gap. You would think this wouldn't be too hard, that we would simply have the ability to take this fundamental information that we're learning about how it is that basic biology teaches us about the causes of disease and build a bridge across this yawning gap between what we've learned about basic science and its application, a bridge that would look maybe something like this, where you'd have to put together a nice shiny way to get from one side to the other. Well, wouldn't it be nice if it was that easy? Unfortunately, it's not. In reality, trying to go from fundamental knowledge to its application is more like this. There are no shiny bridges. You sort of place your bets. Maybe you've got a swimmer and a rowboat and a sailboat and a tugboat and you set them off on their way, and the rains come and the lightning flashes, and oh my gosh, there are sharks in the water and the swimmer gets into trouble, and, uh oh, the swimmer drowned and the sailboat capsized, and that tugboat, well, it hit the rocks, and maybe if you're lucky, somebody gets across. Well, what does this really look like? Well, what is it to make a therapeutic, anyway? What's a drug? A drug is made up of a small molecule of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and a few other atoms all cobbled together in a shape, and it's those shapes that determine whether, in fact, that particular drug is going to hit its target. Is it going to land where it's supposed to? So look at this picture here -- a lot of shapes dancing around for you. Now what you need to do, if you're trying to develop a new treatment for autism or Alzheimer's disease or cancer is to find the right shape in that mix that will ultimately provide benefit and will be safe. And when you look at what happens to that pipeline, you start out maybe with thousands, tens of thousands of compounds. You weed down through various steps that cause many of these to fail. Ultimately, maybe you can run a clinical trial with four or five of these, and if all goes well, 14 years after you started, you will get one approval. And it will cost you upwards of a billion dollars for that one success. So we have to look at this pipeline the way an engineer would, and say, "How can we do better?" And that's the main theme of what I want to say to you this morning. How can we make this go faster? How can we make it more successful? Well, let me tell you about a few examples where this has actually worked. One that has just happened in the last few months is the successful approval of a drug for cystic fibrosis. But it's taken a long time to get there. Cystic fibrosis had its molecular cause discovered in 1989 by my group working with another group in Toronto, discovering what the mutation was in a particular gene on chromosome 7. That picture you see there? Here it is. That's the same kid. That's Danny Bessette, 23 years later, because this is the year, and it's also the year where Danny got married, where we have, for the first time, the approval by the FDA of a drug that precisely targets the defect in cystic fibrosis based upon all this molecular understanding. That's the good news. The bad news is, this drug doesn't actually treat all cases of cystic fibrosis, and it won't work for Danny, and we're still waiting for that next generation to help him. But it took 23 years to get this far. That's too long. How do we go faster? Well, one way to go faster is to take advantage of technology, and a very important technology that we depend on for all of this is the human genome, the ability to be able to look at a chromosome, to unzip it, to pull out all the DNA, and to be able to then read out the letters in that DNA code, the A's, C's, G's and T's that are our instruction book and the instruction book for all living things, and the cost of doing this, which used to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, has in the course of the last 10 years fallen faster than Moore's Law, down to the point where it is less than 10,000 dollars today to have your genome sequenced, or mine, and we're headed for the $1,000 genome fairly soon. Well, that's exciting. How does that play out in terms of application to a disease? I want to tell you about another disorder. This one is a disorder which is quite rare. It's called Hutchinson-Gilford progeria, and it is the most dramatic form of premature aging. Only about one in every four million kids has this disease, and in a simple way, what happens is, because of a mutation in a particular gene, a protein is made that's toxic to the cell and it causes these individuals to age at about seven times the normal rate. Let me show you a video of what that does to the cell. The normal cell, if you looked at it under the microscope, would have a nucleus sitting in the middle of the cell, which is nice and round and smooth in its boundaries and it looks kind of like that. A progeria cell, on the other hand, because of this toxic protein called progerin, has these lumps and bumps in it. So what we would like to do after discovering this back in 2003 is to come up with a way to try to correct that. Well again, by knowing something about the molecular pathways, it was possible to pick one of those many, many compounds that might have been useful and try it out. In an experiment done in cell culture and shown here in a cartoon, if you take that particular compound and you add it to that cell that has progeria, and you watch to see what happened, in just 72 hours, that cell becomes, for all purposes that we can determine, almost like a normal cell. Well that was exciting, but would it actually work in a real human being? This has led, in the space of only four years from the time the gene was discovered to the start of a clinical trial, to a test of that very compound. And the kids that you see here all volunteered to be part of this, 28 of them, and you can see as soon as the picture comes up that they are in fact a remarkable group of young people all afflicted by this disease, all looking quite similar to each other. And instead of telling you more about it, I'm going to invite one of them, Sam Berns from Boston, who's here this morning, to come up on the stage and tell us about his experience as a child affected with progeria. Sam is 15 years old. His parents, Scott Berns and Leslie Gordon, both physicians, are here with us this morning as well. Sam, please have a seat. (Applause) So Sam, why don't you tell these folks what it's like being affected with this condition called progeria? Sam Burns: Well, progeria limits me in some ways. I cannot play sports or do physical activities, but I have been able to take interest in things that progeria, luckily, does not limit. But when there is something that I really do want to do that progeria gets in the way of, like marching band or umpiring, we always find a way to do it, and that just shows that progeria isn't in control of my life. (Applause) Francis Collins: So what would you like to say to researchers here in the auditorium and others listening to this? What would you say to them both about research on progeria and maybe about other conditions as well? SB: Well, research on progeria has come so far in less than 15 years, and that just shows the drive that researchers can have to get this far, and it really means a lot to myself and other kids with progeria, and it shows that if that drive exists, anybody can cure any disease, and hopefully progeria can be cured in the near future, and so we can eliminate those 4,000 diseases that Francis was talking about. FC: Excellent. So Sam took the day off from school today to be here, and he is — (Applause) -- He is, by the way, a straight-A+ student in the ninth grade in his school in Boston. Please join me in thanking and welcoming Sam. SB: Thank you very much. FC: Well done. Well done, buddy. (Applause) So I just want to say a couple more things about that particular story, and then try to generalize how could we have stories of success all over the place for these diseases, as Sam says, these 4,000 that are waiting for answers. You might have noticed that the drug that is now in clinical trial for progeria is not a drug that was designed for that. It's such a rare disease, it would be hard for a company to justify spending hundreds of millions of dollars to generate a drug. This is a drug that was developed for cancer. Turned out, it didn't work very well for cancer, but it has exactly the right properties, the right shape, to work for progeria, and that's what's happened. Wouldn't it be great if we could do that more systematically? Could we, in fact, encourage all the companies that are out there that have drugs in their freezers that are known to be safe in humans but have never actually succeeded in terms of being effective for the treatments they were tried for? Now we're learning about all these new molecular pathways -- some of those could be repositioned or repurposed, or whatever word you want to use, for new applications, basically teaching old drugs new tricks. That could be a phenomenal, valuable activity. We have many discussions now between NIH and companies about doing this that are looking very promising. And you could expect quite a lot to come from this. There are quite a number of success stories one can point to about how this has led to major advances. The first drug for HIV/AIDS was not developed for HIV/AIDS. It was developed for cancer. It was AZT. It didn't work very well for cancer, but became the first successful antiretroviral, and you can see from the table there are others as well. So how do we actually make that a more generalizable effort? Well, we have to come up with a partnership between academia, government, the private sector, and patient organizations to make that so. At NIH, we have started this new National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. It just started last December, and this is one of its goals. Let me tell you another thing we could do. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to a test a drug to see if it's effective and safe without having to put patients at risk, because that first time you're never quite sure? How do we know, for instance, whether drugs are safe before we give them to people? We test them on animals. And it's not all that reliable, and it's costly, and it's time-consuming. Suppose we could do this instead on human cells. You probably know, if you've been paying attention to some of the science literature that you can now take a skin cell and encourage it to become a liver cell or a heart cell or a kidney cell or a brain cell for any of us. So what if you used those cells as your test for whether a drug is going to work and whether it's going to be safe? Here you see a picture of a lung on a chip. This is something created by the Wyss Institute in Boston, and what they have done here, if we can run the little video, is to take cells from an individual, turn them into the kinds of cells that are present in the lung, and determine what would happen if you added to this various drug compounds to see if they are toxic or safe. You can see this chip even breathes. It has an air channel. It has a blood channel. And it has cells in between that allow you to see what happens when you add a compound. Are those cells happy or not? You can do this same kind of chip technology for kidneys, for hearts, for muscles, all the places where you want to see whether a drug is going to be a problem, for the liver. And ultimately, because you can do this for the individual, we could even see this moving to the point where the ability to develop and test medicines will be you on a chip, what we're trying to say here is the individualizing of the process of developing drugs and testing their safety. So let me sum up. We are in a remarkable moment here. For me, at NIH now for almost 20 years, there has never been a time where there was more excitement about the potential that lies in front of us. We have made all these discoveries pouring out of laboratories across the world. What do we need to capitalize on this? First of all, we need resources. This is research that's high-risk, sometimes high-cost. The payoff is enormous, both in terms of health and in terms of economic growth. We need to support that. Second, we need new kinds of partnerships between academia and government and the private sector and patient organizations, just like the one I've been describing here, in terms of the way in which we could go after repurposing new compounds. And third, and maybe most important, we need talent. We need the best and the brightest from many different disciplines to come and join this effort -- all ages, all different groups -- because this is the time, folks. This is the 21st-century biology that you've been waiting for, and we have the chance to take that and turn it into something which will, in fact, knock out disease. That's my goal. I hope that's your goal. I think it'll be the goal of the poets and the muppets and the surfers and the bankers and all the other people who join this stage and think about what we're trying to do here and why it matters. It matters for now. It matters as soon as possible. If you don't believe me, just ask Sam. Thank you all very much. (Applause)

These are grim economic times, fellow TEDsters, grim economic times indeed. And so, I would like to cheer you up with one of the great, albeit largely unknown, commercial success stories of the past 20 years. Comparable, in its own very peculiar way, to the achievements of Microsoft or Google. And it's an industry which has bucked the current recession with equanimity. I refer to organized crime. Now organized crime has been around for a very long time, I hear you say, and these would be wise words, indeed. But in the last two decades, it has experienced an unprecedented expansion, now accounting for roughly 15 percent of the world's GDP. I like to call it the Global Shadow Economy, or McMafia, for short. So what triggered this extraordinary growth in cross-border crime? Well, of course, there is globalization, technology, communications, all that stuff, which we'll talk about a little bit later. But first, I would like to take you back to this event: the collapse of communism. All across Eastern Europe, a most momentous episode in our post-war history. Now it's time for full disclosure. This event meant a great deal to me personally. I had started smuggling books across the Iron Curtain to Democratic opposition groups in Eastern Europe, like Solidarity in Poland, when I was in my teens. I then started writing about Eastern Europe, and eventually I became the BBC's chief correspondent for the region, which is what I was doing in 1989. And so when 425 million people finally won the right to choose their own governments, I was ecstatic, but I was also a touch worried about some of the nastier things lurking behind the wall. It wasn't long, for example, before ethnic nationalism reared its bloody head in Yugoslavia. And amongst the chaos, amidst the euphoria, it took me a little while to understand that some of the people who had wielded power before 1989, in Eastern Europe, continued to do so after the revolutions there. Obviously there were characters like this. But there were also some more unexpected people who played a critical role in what was going on in Eastern Europe. Like this character. Remember these guys? They used to win the gold medals in weightlifting and wrestling, every four years in the Olympics, and they were the great celebrities of communism, with a fabulous lifestyle to go with it. They used to get great apartments in the center of town, casual sex on tap, and they could travel to the West very freely, which was a great luxury at the time. It may come as a surprise, but they played a critical role in the emergence of the market economy in Eastern Europe. Or as I like to call them, they are the midwives of capitalism. Here are some of those same weightlifters after their 1989 makeover. Now in Bulgaria -- this photograph was taken in Bulgaria -- when communism collapsed all over Eastern Europe, it wasn't just communism; it was the state that collapsed as well. That means your police force wasn't working. The court system wasn't functioning properly. So what was a business man in the brave new world of East European capitalism going to do to make sure that his contracts would be honored? Well, he would turn to people who were called, rather prosaically by sociologists, privatized law enforcement agencies. We prefer to know them as the mafia. And in Bulgaria, the mafia was soon joined with 14,000 people who were sacked from their jobs in the security services between 1989 and 1991. Now, when your state is collapsing, your economy is heading south at a rate of knots, the last people you want coming on to the labor market are 14,000 men and women whose chief skills are surveillance, are smuggling, building underground networks and killing people. But that's what happened all over Eastern Europe. Now, when I was working in the 1990s, I spent most of the time covering the appalling conflict in Yugoslavia. And I couldn't help notice that the people who were perpetrating the appalling atrocities, the paramilitary organizations, were actually the same people running the organized criminal syndicates. And I came to think that behind the violence lay a sinister criminal enterprise. And so I resolved to travel around the world examining this global criminal underworld by talking to policemen, by talking to victims, by talking to consumers of illicit goods and services. But above all else, by talking to the gangsters themselves. And the Balkans was a fabulous place to start. Why? Well of course there was the issue of law and order collapsing, but also, as they say in the retail trade, it's location, location, location. And what I noticed at the beginning of my research that the Balkans had turned into a vast transit zone for illicit goods and services coming from all over the world. Heroin, cocaine, women being trafficked into prostitution and precious minerals. And where were they heading? The European Union, which by now was beginning to reap the benefits of globalization, transforming it into the most affluent consumer market in history, eventually comprising some 500 million people. And a significant minority of those 500 million people like to spend some of their leisure time and spare cash sleeping with prostitutes, sticking 50 Euro notes up their nose and employing illegal migrant laborers. Now, organized crime in a globalizing world operates in the same way as any other business. It has zones of production, like Afghanistan and Columbia. It has zones of distribution, like Mexico and the Balkans. And then, of course, it has zones of consumption, like the European Union, Japan and of course, the United States. The zones of production and distribution tend to lie in the developing world, and they are often threatened by appalling violence and bloodshed. Take Mexico, for example. Six thousand people killed there in the last 18 months as a direct consequence of the cocaine trade. But what about the Democratic Republic of Congo? Since 1998, five million people have died there. It's not a conflict you read about much in the newspapers, but it's the biggest conflict on this planet since the Second World War. And why is it? Because mafias from all around the world cooperate with local paramilitaries in order to seize the supplies of the rich mineral resources of the region. In the year 2000, 80 percent of the world's coltan was sourced to the killing fields of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Now, coltan you will find in almost every mobile phone, in almost every laptop and games console. The Congolese war lords were selling this stuff to the mafia in exchange for weapons, and the mafia would then sell it on to Western markets. And it is this Western desire to consume that is the primary driver of international organized crime. Now, let me show you some of my friends in action, caught conveniently on film by the Italian police, and smuggling duty-not-paid cigarettes. Now, cigarettes out the factory gate are very cheap. The European Union then imposes the highest taxes on them in the world. So if you can smuggle them into the E.U., there are very handsome profits to be made, and I want to show you this to demonstrate the type of resources available to these groups. This boat is worth one million Euros when it's new. And it's the fastest thing on European waters. From 1994, for seven years, 20 of these boats made the trip across the Adriatic, from Montenegro to Italy, every single night. And as a consequence of this trade, Britain alone lost eight billion dollars in revenue. And instead that money went to underwrite the wars in Yugoslavia and line the pockets of unscrupulous individuals. Now Italian police, when this trade started, had just two boats which could go at the same speed. And this is very important, because the only way you can catch these guys is if they run out of gas. Sometimes the gangsters would bring with them women being trafficked into prostitution, and if the police intervened, they would hurl the women into the sea so that the police had to go and save them from drowning, rather than chasing the bad guys. So I have shown you this to demonstrate how many boats, how many vessels it takes to catch one of these guys. And the answer is six vessels. And remember, 20 of these speed boats were coming across the Adriatic every single night. So what were these guys doing with all the money they were making? Well, this is where we come to globalization, because that was not just the deregulation of global trade. It was the liberalization of international financial markets. And boy, did that make it easy for the money launderers. The last two decades have been the champagne era for dirty lucre. In the 1990s, we saw financial centers around the world competing for their business, and there was simply no effective mechanism to prevent money laundering. And a lot of licit banks were also happy to accept deposits from very dubious sources without questions being asked. But at the heart of this, is the offshore banking network. Now these things are an essential part of the money laundering parade, and if you want to do something about illegal tax evasion and transnational organized crime, money laundering, you have to get rid of them. On a positive note, we at last have someone in the White House who has consistently spoken out against these corrosive entities. And if anyone is concerned about what I believe is the necessity for new legislation, regulation, effective regulation, I say, let's take a look at Bernie Madoff, who is now going to be spending the rest of his life in jail. Bernie Madoff stole 65 billion dollars. That puts him up there on the Olympus of gangsters with the Colombian cartels and the major Russian crime syndicates, but he did this for decades in the very heart of Wall Street, and no regulator picked up on it. So how many other Madoffs are there on Wall Street or in the city of London, fleecing ordinary folk and money laundering? Well I can tell you, it's quite a few of them. Let me go on to the 101 of international organized crime now. And that is narcotics. Our second marijuana farm photograph for the morning. This one, however, is in central British Columbia where I photographed it. It's one of the tens of thousands of mom-and-pop grow-ops in B.C. which ensure that over five percent of the province's GDP is accounted for by this trade. Now, I was taken by inspector Brian Cantera, of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, to a cavernous warehouse east of Vancouver to see some of the goods which are regularly confiscated by the RCMP from the smugglers who are sending it, of course, down south to the United States where there is an insatiable market for B.C. Bud, as it's called, in part because it's marketed as organic, which of course goes down very well in California. (Laughter) (Applause) Now, even by the police's admission, this makes not a dent in the profits, really, of the major exporters. Since the beginning of globalization, the global narcotics market has expanded enormously. There has, however, been no concomitant increase in the resources available to police forces. This, however, may all be about to change, because something very strange is going on. The United Nations recognized earlier this -- it was last month actually -- that Canada has become a key area of distribution and production of ecstasy and other synthetic drugs. Interestingly, the market share of heroin and cocaine is going down, because the pills are getting ever better at reproducing their highs. Now that is a game changer, because it shifts production away from the developing world and into the Western world. When that happens, it is a trend which is set to overwhelm our policing capacity in the West. The drugs policy which we've had in place for 40 years is long overdue for a very serious rethink, in my opinion. Now, the recession. Well, organized crime has already adapted very well to the recession. Not surprising, the most opportunistic industry in the whole world. And it has no rules to its regulatory system. Except, of course, it has two business risks: arrest by law enforcement, which is, frankly, the least of their worries, and competition from other groups, i.e. a bullet in the back of the head. What they've done is they've shifted their operations. People don't smoke as much dope, or visit prostitutes quite so frequently during a recession. And so instead, they have invaded financial and corporate crime in a big way, but above all, two sectors, and that is counterfeit goods and cybercrime. And it's been terribly successful. I would like to introduce you to Mr. Pringle. Or perhaps I should say, more accurately, Señor Pringle. I was introduced to this bit of kit by a Brazilian cybercriminal. We sat in a car on the Avenue Paulista in São Paulo, together. Hooked it up to my laptop, and within about five minutes he had penetrated the computer security system of a major Brazilian bank. It's really not that difficult. And it's actually much easier because the fascinating thing about cybercrime is that it's not so much the technology. The key to cybercrime is what we call social engineering. Or to use the technical term for it, there's one born every minute. You would not believe how easy it is to persuade people to do things with their computers which are objectively not in their interest. And it was very soon when the cybercriminals learned that the quickest way to do this, of course, the quickest way to a person's wallet is through the promise of sex and love. I expect some of you remember the ILOVEYOU virus, one of the very great worldwide viruses that came. I was very fortunate when the ILOVEYOU virus came out, because the first person I received it from was an ex-girlfriend of mine. Now, she harbored all sorts of sentiments and emotions towards me at the time, but love was not amongst them. (Laughter) And so as soon as I saw this drop into my inbox, I dispatched it hastily to the recycle bin and spared myself a very nasty infection. So, cybercrime, do watch out for it. One thing that we do know that the Internet is doing is the Internet is assisting these guys. These are mosquitos who carry the malarial parasite which infests our blood when the mosy has had a free meal at our expense. Now, Artesunate is a very effective drug at destroying the parasite in the early days of infection. But over the past year or so, researchers in Cambodia have discovered that what's happening is the malarial parasite is developing a resistance. And they fear that the reason why it's developing a resistance is because Cambodians can't afford the drugs on the commercial market, and so they buy it from the Internet. And these pills contain only low doses of the active ingredient. Which is why the parasite is beginning to develop a resistance. The reason I say this is because we have to know that organized crime impacts all sorts of areas of our lives. You don't have to sleep with prostitutes or take drugs in order to have a relationship with organized crime. They affect our bank accounts. They affect our communications, our pension funds. They even affect the food that we eat and our governments. This is no longer an issue of Sicilians from Palermo and New York. There is no romance involved with gangsters in the 21st Century. This is a mighty industry, and it creates instability and violence wherever it goes. It is a major economic force and we need to take it very, very seriously. It's been a privilege talking to you. Thank you very much. (Applause)

The two most likely largest inventions of our generation are the Internet and the mobile phone. They've changed the world. However, largely to our surprise, they also turned out to be the perfect tools for the surveillance state. It turned out that the capability to collect data, information and connections about basically any of us and all of us is exactly what we've been hearing throughout of the summer through revelations and leaks about Western intelligence agencies, mostly U.S. intelligence agencies, watching over the rest of the world. We've heard about these starting with the revelations from June 6. Edward Snowden started leaking information, top secret classified information, from the U.S. intelligence agencies, and we started learning about things like PRISM and XKeyscore and others. And these are examples of the kinds of programs U.S. intelligence agencies are running right now, against the whole rest of the world. And if you look back about the forecasts on surveillance by George Orwell, well it turns out that George Orwell was an optimist. (Laughter) We are right now seeing a much larger scale of tracking of individual citizens than he could have ever imagined. And this here is the infamous NSA data center in Utah. Due to be opened very soon, it will be both a supercomputing center and a data storage center. You could basically imagine it has a large hall filled with hard drives storing data they are collecting. And it's a pretty big building. How big? Well, I can give you the numbers -- 140,000 square meters -- but that doesn't really tell you very much. Maybe it's better to imagine it as a comparison. You think about the largest IKEA store you've ever been in. This is five times larger. How many hard drives can you fit in an IKEA store? Right? It's pretty big. We estimate that just the electricity bill for running this data center is going to be in the tens of millions of dollars a year. And this kind of wholesale surveillance means that they can collect our data and keep it basically forever, keep it for extended periods of time, keep it for years, keep it for decades. And this opens up completely new kinds of risks to us all. And what this is is that it is wholesale blanket surveillance on everyone. Well, not exactly everyone, because the U.S. intelligence only has a legal right to monitor foreigners. They can monitor foreigners when foreigners' data connections end up in the United States or pass through the United States. And monitoring foreigners doesn't sound too bad until you realize that I'm a foreigner and you're a foreigner. In fact, 96 percent of the planet are foreigners. (Laughter) Right? So it is wholesale blanket surveillance of all of us, all of us who use telecommunications and the Internet. But don't get me wrong: There are actually types of surveillance that are okay. I love freedom, but even I agree that some surveillance is fine. If the law enforcement is trying to find a murderer, or they're trying to catch a drug lord or trying to prevent a school shooting, and they have leads and they have suspects, then it's perfectly fine for them to tap the suspect's phone, and to intercept his Internet communications. I'm not arguing that at all, but that's not what programs like PRISM are about. They are not about doing surveillance on people that they have reason to suspect of some wrongdoings. They're about doing surveillance on people they know are innocent. So the four main arguments supporting surveillance like this, well, the first of all is that whenever you start discussing about these revelations, there will be naysayers trying to minimize the importance of these revelations, saying that we knew all this already, we knew it was happening, there's nothing new here. And that's not true. Don't let anybody tell you that we knew this already, because we did not know this already. Our worst fears might have been something like this, but we didn't know this was happening. Now we know for a fact it's happening. We didn't know about this. We didn't know about PRISM. We didn't know about XKeyscore. We didn't know about Cybertrans. We didn't know about DoubleArrow. We did not know about Skywriter -- all these different programs run by U.S. intelligence agencies. But now we do. And we did not know that U.S. intelligence agencies go to extremes such as infiltrating standardization bodies to sabotage encryption algorithms on purpose. And what that means is that you take something which is secure, an encryption algorithm which is so secure that if you use that algorithm to encrypt one file, nobody can decrypt that file. Even if they take every single computer on the planet just to decrypt that one file, it's going to take millions of years. So that's basically perfectly safe, uncrackable. You take something which is that good and then you weaken it on purpose, making all of us less secure as an end result. A real-world equivalent would be that intelligence agencies would force some secret pin code into every single house alarm so they could get into every single house because, you know, bad people might have house alarms, but it will also make all of us less secure as an end result. Backdooring encryption algorithms just boggles the mind. But of course, these intelligence agencies are doing their job. This is what they have been told to do: do signals intelligence, monitor telecommunications, monitor Internet traffic. That's what they're trying to do, and since most, a very big part of the Internet traffic today is encrypted, they're trying to find ways around the encryption. One way is to sabotage encryption algorithms, which is a great example about how U.S. intelligence agencies are running loose. They are completely out of control, and they should be brought back under control. So what do we actually know about the leaks? Everything is based on the files leaked by Mr. Snowden. The very first PRISM slides from the beginning of June detail a collection program where the data is collected from service providers, and they actually go and name the service providers they have access to. They even have a specific date on when the collection of data began for each of the service providers. So for example, they name the collection from Microsoft started on September 11, 2007, for Yahoo on the March 12, 2008, and then others: Google, Facebook, Skype, Apple and so on. And every single one of these companies denies. They all say that this simply isn't true, that they are not giving backdoor access to their data. Yet we have these files. So is one of the parties lying, or is there some other alternative explanation? And one explanation would be that these parties, these service providers, are not cooperating. Instead, they've been hacked. That would explain it. They aren't cooperating. They've been hacked. In this case, they've been hacked by their own government. That might sound outlandish, but we already have cases where this has happened, for example, the case of the Flame malware which we strongly believe was authored by the U.S. government, and which, to spread, subverted the security of the Windows Update network, meaning here, the company was hacked by their own government. And there's more evidence supporting this theory as well. Der Spiegel, from Germany, leaked more information about the operations run by the elite hacker units operating inside these intelligence agencies. Inside NSA, the unit is called TAO, Tailored Access Operations, and inside GCHQ, which is the U.K. equivalent, it's called NAC, Network Analysis Centre. And these recent leaks of these three slides detail an operation run by this GCHQ intelligence agency from the United Kingdom targeting a telecom here in Belgium. And what this really means is that an E.U. country's intelligence agency is breaching the security of a telecom of a fellow E.U. country on purpose, and they discuss it in their slides completely casually, business as usual. Here's the primary target, here's the secondary target, here's the teaming. They probably have a team building on Thursday evening in a pub. They even use cheesy PowerPoint clip art like, you know, "Success," when they gain access to services like this. What the hell? And then there's the argument that okay, yes, this might be going on, but then again, other countries are doing it as well. All countries spy. And maybe that's true. Many countries spy, not all of them, but let's take an example. Let's take, for example, Sweden. I'm speaking of Sweden because Sweden has a little bit of a similar law to the United States. When your data traffic goes through Sweden, their intelligence agency has a legal right by the law to intercept that traffic. All right, how many Swedish decisionmakers and politicians and business leaders use, every day, U.S.-based services, like, you know, run Windows or OSX, or use Facebook or LinkedIn, or store their data in clouds like iCloud or Skydrive or DropBox, or maybe use online services like Amazon web services or sales support? And the answer is, every single Swedish business leader does that every single day. And then we turn it around. How many American leaders use Swedish webmails and cloud services? And the answer is zero. So this is not balanced. It's not balanced by any means, not even close. And when we do have the occasional European success story, even those, then, typically end up being sold to the United States. Like, Skype used to be secure. It used to be end-to-end encrypted. Then it was sold to the United States. Today, it no longer is secure. So once again, we take something which is secure and then we make it less secure on purpose, making all of us less secure as an outcome. And then the argument that the United States is only fighting terrorists. It's the war on terror. You shouldn't worry about it. Well, it's not the war on terror. Yes, part of it is war on terror, and yes, there are terrorists, and they do kill and maim, and we should fight them, but we know through these leaks that they have used the same techniques to listen to phone calls of European leaders, to tap the email of residents of Mexico and Brazil, to read email traffic inside the United Nations Headquarters and E.U. Parliament, and I don't think they are trying to find terrorists from inside the E.U. Parliament, right? It's not the war on terror. Part of it might be, and there are terrorists, but are we really thinking about terrorists as such an existential threat that we are willing to do anything at all to fight them? Are the Americans ready to throw away the Constituion and throw it in the trash just because there are terrorists? And the same thing with the Bill of Rights and all the amendments and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the E.U. conventions on human rights and fundamental freedoms and the press freedom? Do we really think terrorism is such an existential threat, we are ready to do anything at all? But people are scared about terrorists, and then they think that maybe that surveillance is okay because they have nothing to hide. Feel free to survey me if that helps. And whoever tells you that they have nothing to hide simply hasn't thought about this long enough. (Applause) Because we have this thing called privacy, and if you really think that you have nothing to hide, please make sure that's the first thing you tell me, because then I know that I should not trust you with any secrets, because obviously you can't keep a secret. But people are brutally honest with the Internet, and when these leaks started, many people were asking me about this. And I have nothing to hide. I'm not doing anything bad or anything illegal. Yet, I have nothing that I would in particular like to share with an intelligence agency, especially a foreign intelligence agency. And if we indeed need a Big Brother, I would much rather have a domestic Big Brother than a foreign Big Brother. And when the leaks started, the very first thing I tweeted about this was a comment about how, when you've been using search engines, you've been potentially leaking all that to U.S. intelligence. And two minutes later, I got a reply by somebody called Kimberly from the United States challenging me, like, why am I worried about this? What am I sending to worry about this? Am I sending naked pictures or something? And my answer to Kimberly was that what I'm sending is none of your business, and it should be none of your government's business either. Because that's what it's about. It's about privacy. Privacy is nonnegotiable. It should be built in to all the systems we use. (Applause) And one thing we should all understand is that we are brutally honest with search engines. You show me your search history, and I'll find something incriminating or something embarrassing there in five minutes. We are more honest with search engines than we are with our families. Search engines know more about you than your family members know about you. And this is all the kind of information we are giving away, we are giving away to the United States. And surveillance changes history. We know this through examples of corrupt presidents like Nixon. Imagine if he would have had the kind of surveillance tools that are available today. And let me actually quote the president of Brazil, Ms. Dilma Rousseff. She was one of the targets of NSA surveillance. Her email was read, and she spoke at the United Nations Headquarters, and she said, "If there is no right to privacy, there can be no true freedom of expression and opinion, and therefore, there can be no effective democracy." That's what it's about. Privacy is the building block of our democracies. And to quote a fellow security researcher, Marcus Ranum, he said that the United States is right now treating the Internet as it would be treating one of its colonies. So we are back to the age of colonization, and we, the foreign users of the Internet, we should think about Americans as our masters. So Mr. Snowden, he's been blamed for many things. Some are blaming him for causing problems for the U.S. cloud industry and software companies with these revelations -- and blaming Snowden for causing problems for the U.S. cloud industry would be the equivalent of blaming Al Gore for causing global warming. (Laughter) (Applause) So, what is there to be done? Should we worry. No, we shouldn't worry. We should be angry, because this is wrong, and it's rude, and it should not be done. But that's not going to really change the situation. What's going to change the situation for the rest of the world is to try to steer away from systems built in the United States. And that's much easier said than done. How do you do that? A single country, any single country in Europe cannot replace and build replacements for the U.S.-made operating systems and cloud services. But maybe you don't have to do it alone. Maybe you can do it together with other countries. The solution is open source. By building together open, free, secure systems, we can go around such surveillance, and then one country doesn't have to solve the problem by itself. It only has to solve one little problem. And to quote a fellow security researcher, Haroon Meer, one country only has to make a small wave, but those small waves together become a tide, and the tide will lift all the boats up at the same time, and the tide we will build with secure, free, open-source systems, will become the tide that will lift all of us up and above the surveillance state. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Once upon a time, there was a place called Lesterland. Now Lesterland looks a lot like the United States. Like the United States, it has about 311 million people, and of that 311 million people, it turns out 144,000 are called Lester. If Matt's in the audience, I just borrowed that, I'll return it in a second, this character from your series. So 144,000 are called Lester, which means about .05 percent is named Lester. Now, Lesters in Lesterland have this extraordinary power. There are two elections every election cycle in Lesterland. One is called the general election. The other is called the Lester election. And in the general election, it's the citizens who get to vote, but in the Lester election, it's the Lesters who get to vote. And here's the trick. In order to run in the general election, you must do extremely well in the Lester election. You don't necessarily have to win, but you must do extremely well. Now, what can we say about democracy in Lesterland? What we can say, number one, as the Supreme Court said in Citizens United, that people have the ultimate influence over elected officials, because, after all, there is a general election, but only after the Lesters have had their way with the candidates who wish to run in the general election. And number two, obviously, this dependence upon the Lesters is going to produce a subtle, understated, we could say camouflaged, bending to keep the Lesters happy. Okay, so we have a democracy, no doubt, but it's dependent upon the Lesters and dependent upon the people. It has competing dependencies, we could say conflicting dependencies, depending upon who the Lesters are. Okay. That's Lesterland. Now there are three things I want you to see now that I've described Lesterland. Number one, the United States is Lesterland. The United States is Lesterland. The United States also looks like this, also has two elections, one we called the general election, the second we should call the money election. In the general election, it's the citizens who get to vote, if you're over 18, in some states if you have an ID. In the money election, it's the funders who get to vote, the funders who get to vote, and just like in Lesterland, the trick is, to run in the general election, you must do extremely well in the money election. You don't necessarily have to win. There is Jerry Brown. But you must do extremely well. And here's the key: There are just as few relevant funders in USA-land as there are Lesters in Lesterland. Now you say, really? Really .05 percent? Well, here are the numbers from 2010: .26 percent of America gave 200 dollars or more to any federal candidate, .05 percent gave the maximum amount to any federal candidate, .01 percent -- the one percent of the one percent -- gave 10,000 dollars or more to federal candidates, and in this election cycle, my favorite statistic is .000042 percent — for those of you doing the numbers, you know that's 132 Americans — gave 60 percent of the Super PAC money spent in the cycle we have just seen ending. So I'm just a lawyer, I look at this range of numbers, and I say it's fair for me to say it's .05 percent who are our relevant funders in America. In this sense, the funders are our Lesters. Now, what can we say about this democracy in USA-land? Well, as the Supreme Court said in Citizens United, we could say, of course the people have the ultimate influence over the elected officials. We have a general election, but only after the funders have had their way with the candidates who wish to run in that general election. And number two, obviously, this dependence upon the funders produces a subtle, understated, camouflaged bending to keep the funders happy. Candidates for Congress and members of Congress spend between 30 and 70 percent of their time raising money to get back to Congress or to get their party back into power, and the question we need to ask is, what does it do to them, these humans, as they spend their time behind the telephone, calling people they've never met, but calling the tiniest slice of the one percent? As anyone would, as they do this, they develop a sixth sense, a constant awareness about how what they do might affect their ability to raise money. They become, in the words of "The X-Files," shape-shifters, as they constantly adjust their views in light of what they know will help them to raise money, not on issues one to 10, but on issues 11 to 1,000. Leslie Byrne, a Democrat from Virginia, describes that when she went to Congress, she was told by a colleague, "Always lean to the green." Then to clarify, she went on, "He was not an environmentalist." (Laughter) So here too we have a democracy, a democracy dependent upon the funders and dependent upon the people, competing dependencies, possibly conflicting dependencies depending upon who the funders are. Okay, the United States is Lesterland, point number one. Here's point number two. The United States is worse than Lesterland, worse than Lesterland because you can imagine in Lesterland if we Lesters got a letter from the government that said, "Hey, you get to pick who gets to run in the general election," we would think maybe of a kind of aristocracy of Lesters. You know, there are Lesters from every part of social society. There are rich Lesters, poor Lesters, black Lesters, white Lesters, not many women Lesters, but put that to the side for one second. We have Lesters from everywhere. We could think, "What could we do to make Lesterland better?" It's at least possible the Lesters would act for the good of Lesterland. But in our land, in this land, in USA-land, there are certainly some sweet Lesters out there, many of them in this room here today, but the vast majority of Lesters act for the Lesters, because the shifting coalitions that are comprising the .05 percent are not comprising it for the public interest. It's for their private interest. In this sense, the USA is worse than Lesterland. And finally, point number three: Whatever one wants to say about Lesterland, against the background of its history, its traditions, in our land, in USA-land, Lesterland is a corruption, a corruption. Now, by corruption I don't mean brown paper bag cash secreted among members of Congress. I don't mean Rod Blagojevich sense of corruption. I don't mean any criminal act. The corruption I'm talking about is perfectly legal. It's a corruption relative to the framers' baseline for this republic. The framers gave us what they called a republic, but by a republic they meant a representative democracy, and by a representative democracy, they meant a government, as Madison put it in Federalist 52, that would have a branch that would be dependent upon the people alone. So here's the model of government. They have the people and the government with this exclusive dependency, but the problem here is that Congress has evolved a different dependence, no longer a dependence upon the people alone, increasingly a dependence upon the funders. Now this is a dependence too, but it's different and conflicting from a dependence upon the people alone so long as the funders are not the people. This is a corruption. Now, there's good news and bad news about this corruption. One bit of good news is that it's bipartisan, equal-opportunity corruption. It blocks the left on a whole range of issues that we on the left really care about. It blocks the right too, as it makes principled arguments of the right increasingly impossible. So the right wants smaller government. When Al Gore was Vice President, his team had an idea for deregulating a significant portion of the telecommunications industry. The chief policy man took this idea to Capitol Hill, and as he reported back to me, the response was, "Hell no! If we deregulate these guys, how are we going to raise money from them?" This is a system that's designed to save the status quo, including the status quo of big and invasive government. It works against the left and the right, and that, you might say, is good news. But here's the bad news. It's a pathological, democracy-destroying corruption, because in any system where the members are dependent upon the tiniest fraction of us for their election, that means the tiniest number of us, the tiniest, tiniest number of us, can block reform. I know that should have been, like, a rock or something. I can only find cheese. I'm sorry. So there it is. Block reform. Because there is an economy here, an economy of influence, an economy with lobbyists at the center which feeds on polarization. It feeds on dysfunction. The worse that it is for us, the better that it is for this fundraising. Henry David Thoreau: "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." This is the root. Okay, now, every single one of you knows this. You couldn't be here if you didn't know this, yet you ignore it. You ignore it. This is an impossible problem. You focus on the possible problems, like eradicating polio from the world, or taking an image of every single street across the globe, or building the first real universal translator, or building a fusion factory in your garage. These are the manageable problems, so you ignore — (Laughter) (Applause) — so you ignore this corruption. But we cannot ignore this corruption anymore. (Applause) We need a government that works. And not works for the left or the right, but works for the left and the right, the citizens of the left and right, because there is no sensible reform possible until we end this corruption. So I want you to take hold, to grab the issue you care the most about. Climate change is mine, but it might be financial reform or a simpler tax system or inequality. Grab that issue, sit it down in front of you, look straight in its eyes, and tell it there is no Christmas this year. There will never be a Christmas. We will never get your issue solved until we fix this issue first. So it's not that mine is the most important issue. It's not. Yours is the most important issue, but mine is the first issue, the issue we have to solve before we get to fix the issues you care about. No sensible reform, and we cannot afford a world, a future, with no sensible reform. Okay. So how do we do it? Turns out, the analytics here are easy, simple. If the problem is members spending an extraordinary amount of time fundraising from the tiniest slice of America, the solution is to have them spend less time fundraising but fundraise from a wider slice of Americans, to spread it out, to spread the funder influence so that we restore the idea of dependence upon the people alone. And to do this does not require a constitutional amendment, changing the First Amendment. To do this would require a single statute, a statute establishing what we think of as small dollar funded elections, a statute of citizen-funded campaigns, and there's any number of these proposals out there: Fair Elections Now Act, the American Anti-Corruption Act, an idea in my book that I call the Grant and Franklin Project to give vouchers to people to fund elections, an idea of John Sarbanes called the Grassroots Democracy Act. Each of these would fix this corruption by spreading out the influence of funders to all of us. The analytics are easy here. It's the politics that's hard, indeed impossibly hard, because this reform would shrink K Street, and Capitol Hill, as Congressman Jim Cooper, a Democrat from Tennessee, put it, has become a farm league for K Street, a farm league for K Street. Members and staffers and bureaucrats have an increasingly common business model in their head, a business model focused on their life after government, their life as lobbyists. Fifty percent of the Senate between 1998 and 2004 left to become lobbyists, 42 percent of the House. Those numbers have only gone up, and as United Republic calculated last April, the average increase in salary for those who they tracked was 1,452 percent. So it's fair to ask, how is it possible for them to change this? Now I get this skepticism. I get this cynicism. I get this sense of impossibility. But I don't buy it. This is a solvable issue. If you think about the issues our parents tried to solve in the 20th century, issues like racism, or sexism, or the issue that we've been fighting in this century, homophobia, those are hard issues. You don't wake up one day no longer a racist. It takes generations to tear that intuition, that DNA, out of the soul of a people. But this is a problem of just incentives, just incentives. Change the incentives, and the behavior changes, and the states that have adopted small dollar funded systems have seen overnight a change in the practice. When Connecticut adopted this system, in the very first year, 78 percent of elected representatives gave up large contributions and took small contributions only. It's solvable, not by being a Democrat, not by being a Republican. It's solvable by being citizens, by being citizens, by being TEDizens. Because if you want to kickstart reform, look, I could kickstart reform at half the price of fixing energy policy, I could give you back a republic. Okay. But even if you're not yet with me, even if you believe this is impossible, what the five years since I spoke at TED has taught me as I've spoken about this issue again and again is, even if you think it's impossible, that is irrelevant. Irrelevant. I spoke at Dartmouth once, and a woman stood up after I spoke, I write in my book, and she said to me, "Professor, you've convinced me this is hopeless. Hopeless. There's nothing we can do." When she said that, I scrambled. I tried to think, "How do I respond to that hopelessness? What is that sense of hopelessness?" And what hit me was an image of my six-year-old son. And I imagined a doctor coming to me and saying, "Your son has terminal brain cancer, and there's nothing you can do. Nothing you can do." So would I do nothing? Would I just sit there? Accept it? Okay, nothing I can do? I'm going off to build Google Glass. Of course not. I would do everything I could, and I would do everything I could because this is what love means, that the odds are irrelevant and that you do whatever the hell you can, the odds be damned. And then I saw the obvious link, because even we liberals love this country. (Laughter) And so when the pundits and the politicians say that change is impossible, what this love of country says back is, "That's just irrelevant." We lose something dear, something everyone in this room loves and cherishes, if we lose this republic, and so we act with everything we can to prove these pundits wrong. So here's my question: Do you have that love? Do you have that love? Because if you do, then what the hell are you, what are the hell are we doing? When Ben Franklin was carried from the constitutional convention in September of 1787, he was stopped in the street by a woman who said, "Mr. Franklin, what have you wrought?" Franklin said, "A republic, madam, if you can keep it." A republic. A representative democracy. A government dependent upon the people alone. We have lost that republic. All of us have to act to get it back. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)

I'm going to talk to you about optimism -- or more precisely, the optimism bias. It's a cognitive illusion that we've been studying in my lab for the past few years, and 80 percent of us have it. It's our tendency to overestimate our likelihood of experiencing good events in our lives and underestimate our likelihood of experiencing bad events. So we underestimate our likelihood of suffering from cancer, being in a car accident. We overestimate our longevity, our career prospects. In short, we're more optimistic than realistic, but we are oblivious to the fact. Take marriage for example. In the Western world, divorce rates are about 40 percent. That means that out of five married couples, two will end up splitting their assets. But when you ask newlyweds about their own likelihood of divorce, they estimate it at zero percent. And even divorce lawyers, who should really know better, hugely underestimate their own likelihood of divorce. So it turns out that optimists are not less likely to divorce, but they are more likely to remarry. In the words of Samuel Johnson, "Remarriage is the triumph of hope over experience." (Laughter) So if we're married, we're more likely to have kids. And we all think our kids will be especially talented. This, by the way, is my two-year-old nephew, Guy. And I just want to make it absolutely clear that he's a really bad example of the optimism bias, because he is in fact uniquely talented. (Laughter) And I'm not alone. Out of four British people, three said that they were optimistic about the future of their own families. That's 75 percent. But only 30 percent said that they thought families in general are doing better than a few generations ago. And this is a really important point, because we're optimistic about ourselves, we're optimistic about our kids, we're optimistic about our families, but we're not so optimistic about the guy sitting next to us, and we're somewhat pessimistic about the fate of our fellow citizens and the fate of our country. But private optimism about our own personal future remains persistent. And it doesn't mean that we think things will magically turn out okay, but rather that we have the unique ability to make it so. Now I'm a scientist, I do experiments. So to show you what I mean, I'm going to do an experiment here with you. So I'm going to give you a list of abilities and characteristics, and I want you to think for each of these abilities where you stand relative to the rest of the population. The first one is getting along well with others. Who here believes they're at the bottom 25 percent? Okay, that's about 10 people out of 1,500. Who believes they're at the top 25 percent? That's most of us here. Okay, now do the same for your driving ability. How interesting are you? How attractive are you? How honest are you? And finally, how modest are you? So most of us put ourselves above average on most of these abilities. Now this is statistically impossible. We can't all be better than everyone else. (Laughter) But if we believe we're better than the other guy, well that means that we're more likely to get that promotion, to remain married, because we're more social, more interesting. And it's a global phenomenon. The optimism bias has been observed in many different countries -- in Western cultures, in non-Western cultures, in females and males, in kids, in the elderly. It's quite widespread. But the question is, is it good for us? So some people say no. Some people say the secret to happiness is low expectations. I think the logic goes something like this: If we don't expect greatness, if we don't expect to find love and be healthy and successful, well we're not going to be disappointed when these things don't happen. And if we're not disappointed when good things don't happen, and we're pleasantly surprised when they do, we will be happy. So it's a very good theory, but it turns out to be wrong for three reasons. Number one: Whatever happens, whether you succeed or you fail, people with high expectations always feel better. Because how we feel when we get dumped or win employee of the month depends on how we interpret that event. The psychologists Margaret Marshall and John Brown studied students with high and low expectations. And they found that when people with high expectations succeed, they attribute that success to their own traits. "I'm a genius, therefore I got an A, therefore I'll get an A again and again in the future." When they failed, it wasn't because they were dumb, but because the exam just happened to be unfair. Next time they will do better. People with low expectations do the opposite. So when they failed it was because they were dumb, and when they succeeded it was because the exam just happened to be really easy. Next time reality would catch up with them. So they felt worse. Number two: Regardless of the outcome, the pure act of anticipation makes us happy. The behavioral economist George Lowenstein asked students in his university to imagine getting a passionate kiss from a celebrity, any celebrity. Then he said, "How much are you willing to pay to get a kiss from a celebrity if the kiss was delivered immediately, in three hours, in 24 hours, in three days, in one year, in 10 years? He found that the students were willing to pay the most not to get a kiss immediately, but to get a kiss in three days. They were willing to pay extra in order to wait. Now they weren't willing to wait a year or 10 years; no one wants an aging celebrity. But three days seemed to be the optimum amount. So why is that? Well if you get the kiss now, it's over and done with. But if you get the kiss in three days, well that's three days of jittery anticipation, the thrill of the wait. The students wanted that time to imagine where is it going to happen, how is it going to happen. Anticipation made them happy. This is, by the way, why people prefer Friday to Sunday. It's a really curious fact, because Friday is a day of work and Sunday is a day of pleasure, so you'd assume that people will prefer Sunday, but they don't. It's not because they really, really like being in the office and they can't stand strolling in the park or having a lazy brunch. We know that, because when you ask people about their ultimate favorite day of the week, surprise, surprise, Saturday comes in at first, then Friday, then Sunday. People prefer Friday because Friday brings with it the anticipation of the weekend ahead, all the plans that you have. On Sunday, the only thing you can look forward to is the work week. So optimists are people who expect more kisses in their future, more strolls in the park. And that anticipation enhances their wellbeing. In fact, without the optimism bias, we would all be slightly depressed. People with mild depression, they don't have a bias when they look into the future. They're actually more realistic than healthy individuals. But individuals with severe depression, they have a pessimistic bias. So they tend to expect the future to be worse than it ends up being. So optimism changes subjective reality. The way we expect the world to be changes the way we see it. But it also changes objective reality. It acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy. And that is the third reason why lowering your expectations will not make you happy. Controlled experiments have shown that optimism is not only related to success, it leads to success. Optimism leads to success in academia and sports and politics. And maybe the most surprising benefit of optimism is health. If we expect the future to be bright, stress and anxiety are reduced. So all in all, optimism has lots of benefits. But the question that was really confusing to me was, how do we maintain optimism in the face of reality? As an neuroscientist, this was especially confusing, because according to all the theories out there, when your expectations are not met, you should alter them. But this is not what we find. We asked people to come into our lab in order to try and figure out what was going on. We asked them to estimate their likelihood of experiencing different terrible events in their lives. So, for example, what is your likelihood of suffering from cancer? And then we told them the average likelihood of someone like them to suffer these misfortunes. So cancer, for example, is about 30 percent. And then we asked them again, "How likely are you to suffer from cancer?" What we wanted to know was whether people will take the information that we gave them to change their beliefs. And indeed they did -- but mostly when the information we gave them was better than what they expected. So for example, if someone said, "My likelihood of suffering from cancer is about 50 percent," and we said, "Hey, good news. The average likelihood is only 30 percent," the next time around they would say, "Well maybe my likelihood is about 35 percent." So they learned quickly and efficiently. But if someone started off saying, "My average likelihood of suffering from cancer is about 10 percent," and we said, "Hey, bad news. The average likelihood is about 30 percent," the next time around they would say, "Yep. Still think it's about 11 percent." (Laughter) So it's not that they didn't learn at all -- they did -- but much, much less than when we gave them positive information about the future. And it's not that they didn't remember the numbers that we gave them; everyone remembers that the average likelihood of cancer is about 30 percent and the average likelihood of divorce is about 40 percent. But they didn't think that those numbers were related to them. What this means is that warning signs such as these may only have limited impact. Yes, smoking kills, but mostly it kills the other guy. What I wanted to know was what was going on inside the human brain that prevented us from taking these warning signs personally. But at the same time, when we hear that the housing market is hopeful, we think, "Oh, my house is definitely going to double in price." To try and figure that out, I asked the participants in the experiment to lie in a brain imaging scanner. It looks like this. And using a method called functional MRI, we were able to identify regions in the brain that were responding to positive information. One of these regions is called the left inferior frontal gyrus. So if someone said, "My likelihood of suffering from cancer is 50 percent," and we said, "Hey, good news. Average likelihood is 30 percent," the left inferior frontal gyrus would respond fiercely. And it didn't matter if you're an extreme optimist, a mild optimist or slightly pessimistic, everyone's left inferior frontal gyrus was functioning perfectly well, whether you're Barack Obama or Woody Allen. On the other side of the brain, the right inferior frontal gyrus was responding to bad news. And here's the thing: it wasn't doing a very good job. The more optimistic you were, the less likely this region was to respond to unexpected negative information. And if your brain is failing at integrating bad news about the future, you will constantly leave your rose-tinted spectacles on. So we wanted to know, could we change this? Could we alter people's optimism bias by interfering with the brain activity in these regions? And there's a way for us to do that. This is my collaborator Ryota Kanai. And what he's doing is he's passing a small magnetic pulse through the skull of the participant in our study into their inferior frontal gyrus. And by doing that, he's interfering with the activity of this brain region for about half an hour. After that everything goes back to normal, I assure you. (Laughter) So let's see what happens. First of all, I'm going to show you the average amount of bias that we see. So if I was to test all of you now, this is the amount that you would learn more from good news relative to bad news. Now we interfere with the region that we found to integrate negative information in this task, and the optimism bias grew even larger. We made people more biased in the way that they process information. Then we interfered with the brain region that we found to integrate good news in this task, and the optimism bias disappeared. We were quite amazed by these results because we were able to eliminate a deep-rooted bias in humans. And at this point we stopped and we asked ourselves, would we want to shatter the optimism illusion into tiny little bits? If we could do that, would we want to take people's optimism bias away? Well I've already told you about all of the benefits of the optimism bias, which probably makes you want to hold onto it for dear life. But there are, of course, pitfalls, and it would be really foolish of us to ignore them. Take for example this email I recieved from a firefighter here in California. He says, "Fatality investigations for firefighters often include 'We didn't think the fire was going to do that,' even when all of the available information was there to make safe decisions." This captain is going to use our findings on the optimism bias to try to explain to the firefighters why they think the way they do, to make them acutely aware of this very optimistic bias in humans. So unrealistic optimism can lead to risky behavior, to financial collapse, to faulty planning. The British government, for example, has acknowledged that the optimism bias can make individuals more likely to underestimate the costs and durations of projects. So they have adjusted the 2012 Olympic budget for the optimism bias. My friend who's getting married in a few weeks has done the same for his wedding budget. And by the way, when I asked him about his own likelihood of divorce, he said he was quite sure it was zero percent. So what we would really like to do, is we would like to protect ourselves from the dangers of optimism, but at the same time remain hopeful, benefiting from the many fruits of optimism. And I believe there's a way for us to do that. The key here really is knowledge. We're not born with an innate understanding of our biases. These have to be identified by scientific investigation. But the good news is that becoming aware of the optimism bias does not shatter the illusion. It's like visual illusions, in which understanding them does not make them go away. And this is good because it means we should be able to strike a balance, to come up with plans and rules to protect ourselves from unrealistic optimism, but at the same time remain hopeful. I think this cartoon portrays it nicely. Because if you're one of these pessimistic penguins up there who just does not believe they can fly, you certainly never will. Because to make any kind of progress, we need to be able to imagine a different reality, and then we need to believe that that reality is possible. But if you are an extreme optimistic penguin who just jumps down blindly hoping for the best, you might find yourself in a bit of a mess when you hit the ground. But if you're an optimistic penguin who believes they can fly, but then adjusts a parachute to your back just in case things don't work out exactly as you had planned, you will soar like an eagle, even if you're just a penguin. Thank you. (Applause)

The idea of eliminating poverty is a great goal. I don't think anyone in this room would disagree. What worries me is when politicians with money and charismatic rock stars -- (Laughter) use the words, " ... it all just sounds so, so simple." Now, I've got no bucket of money today and I've got no policy to release, and I certainly haven't got a guitar. I'll leave that to others. But I do have an idea, and that idea is called Housing for Health. Housing for Health works with poor people. It works in the places where they live, and the work is done to improve their health. Over the last 28 years, this tough, grinding, dirty work has been done by literally thousands of people around Australia and, more recently, overseas, and their work has proven that focused design can improve even the poorest living environments. It can improve health and it can play a part in reducing, if not eliminating, poverty. I'm going to start where the story began -- 1985, in Central Australia. A man called Yami Lester, an Aboriginal man, was running a health service. Eighty percent of what walked in the door, in terms of illness, was infectious disease -- third world, developing world infectious disease, caused by a poor living environment. Yami assembled a team in Alice Springs. He got a medical doctor. He got an environmental health guy. And he hand-selected a team of local Aboriginal people to work on this project. Yami told us at that first meeting, "There's no money," -- always a good start -- " ... no money, you have six months, and I want you to start on a project --" which, in his language, he called "Uwankara Palyanku Kanyintjaku," which, translated, is "a plan to stop people getting sick" -- a profound brief. That was our task. First step, the medical doctor went away for about six months. And he worked on what were to become these nine health goals -- what were we aiming at? After six months of work, he came to my office and presented me with those nine words on a piece of paper. [The 9 Healthy Living Practices: Washing, clothes, wastewater, nutrition, crowding, animals, dust, temperature, injury] I was very unimpressed. Big ideas need big words, and preferably a lot of them. This didn't fit the bill. What I didn't see and what you can't see was that he'd assembled thousands of pages of local, national and international health research that filled out the picture as to why these were the health targets. The pictures that came a bit later had a very simple reason. The Aboriginal people who were our bosses and the senior people were most commonly illiterate, so the story had to be told in pictures of what these goals were. We worked with the community, not telling them what was going to happen in a language they didn't understand. So we had the goals and each one of these goals -- and I won't go through them all -- puts at the center the person and their health issue, and it then connects them to the bits of the physical environment that are actually needed to keep their health good. And the highest priority, you see on the screen, is washing people once a day, particularly children. And I hope most of you are thinking, "What? That sounds simple." Now, I'm going to ask you all a very personal question. This morning before you came, who could have had a wash using a shower? I'm not going to ask if you had a shower, because I'm too polite. That's it. (Laughter) All right, I think it's fair to say most people here could have had a shower this morning. I'm going to ask you to do some more work. I want you all to select one of the houses of the 25 houses you see on the screen. I want you to select one of them and note the position of that house and keep that in your head. Have you all got a house? I'm going to ask you to live there for a few months, so make sure you've got it right. It's in the northwest of Western Australia, very pleasant place. OK. Let's see if your shower in that house is working. I hear some "Aw!" and I hear some "Ah!" If you get a green tick, your shower's working. You and your kids are fine. If you get a red cross, well, I've looked carefully around the room and it's not going to make much difference to this crew. Why? Because you're all too old. I know that's going to come as a shock to some of you, but you are. And before you get offended and leave, I've got to say that being too old, in this case, means that pretty much everyone in the room, I think, is over five years of age. We're really concerned with kids naught to five. And why? Washing is the antidote to the sort of bugs, the common infectious diseases of the eyes, the ears, the chest and the skin that, if they occur in the first five years of life, permanently damage those organs. They leave a lifelong remnant. That means that by the age of five, you can't see as well for the rest of your life. You can't hear as well for the rest of your life. You can't breathe as well. You've lost a third of your lung capacity by the age of five. And even skin infection, which we originally thought wasn't that big a problem, mild skin infections naught to five give you a greatly increased chance of renal failure, needing dialysis at age 40. This is a big deal, so the ticks and crosses on the screen are actually critical for young kids. Those ticks and crosses represent the 7,800 houses we've looked at nationally around Australia, the same proportion. What you see on the screen -- 35 percent of those not-so-famous houses lived in by 50,000 indigenous people -- 35 percent had a working shower. Ten percent of those same 7,800 houses had safe electrical systems. And 58 percent of those houses had a working toilet. These are by a simple, standard test. In the case of the shower: does it have hot and cold water, two taps that work, a shower rose to get water onto your head or onto your body, and a drain that takes the water away? Not well-designed, not beautiful, not elegant -- just that they function. And the same tests for the electrical system and the toilets. Housing for Health projects aren't about measuring failure -- they're actually about improving houses. We start on day one of every project. We've learned -- we don't make promises, we don't do reports. We arrive in the morning with tools, tons of equipment, trades, and we train up a local team on the first day to start work. By the evening of the first day, a few houses in that community are better than when we started in the morning. That work continues for six to 12 months, until all the houses are improved and we've spent our budget of 7,500 dollars total per house. That's our average budget. At the end of six months to a year, we test every house again. It's very easy to spend money. It's very difficult to improve the function of all those parts of the house. And for a whole house, the nine healthy living practices, we test, check and fix 250 items in every house. And these are the results we can get with our 7,500 dollars. We can get showers up to 86 percent working, we can get electrical systems up to 77 percent working and we can get 90 percent of toilets working in those 7,500 houses. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) The teams do a great job, and that's their work. I think there's an obvious question that I hope you're thinking about. Why do we have to do this work? Why are the houses in such poor condition? Seventy percent of the work we do is due to lack of routine maintenance -- the sort of things that happen in all our houses. Things wear out, should have been done by state government or local government, simply not done, the house doesn't work. Twenty-one percent of the things we fix are due to faulty construction -- literally things that are built upside down and back to front. They don't work, we have to fix them. And if you've lived in Australia in the last 30 years, the final cause -- you will have heard always that indigenous people trash houses. It's one of the almost rock-solid pieces of evidence which I've never seen evidence for, that's always reeled out as "That's the problem with indigenous housing." Well, nine percent of what we spend is damage, misuse or abuse of any sort. We argue strongly that the people living in the house are simply not the problem. And we'll go a lot further than that; the people living in the house are actually a major part of the solution. Seventy-five percent of our national team in Australia -- over 75 at the minute -- are actually local, indigenous people from the communities we work in. They do all aspects of the work. (Applause) In 2010, for example, there were 831, all over Australia, and the Torres Strait Islands, all states, working to improve the houses where they and their families live, and that's an important thing. Our work's always had a focus on health. That's the key. The developing world bug, trachoma, causes blindness. It's a developing-world illness, and yet, the picture you see behind is in an Aboriginal community in the late 1990s, where 95 percent of school-aged kids had active trachoma in their eyes, doing damage. OK, what do we do? Well, first thing we do, we get showers working. Why? Because that flushes the bug out. We put washing facilities in the school as well, so kids can wash their faces many times during the day. We wash the bug out. Second, the eye doctors tell us that dust scours the eye and lets the bug in quick. So what do we do? We call up the doctor of dust, and there is such a person. He was loaned to us by a mining company. He controls dust on mining company sites. And he came out and, within a day, it worked out that most dust in this community was within a meter of the ground, the wind-driven dust -- so he suggested making mounds to catch the dust before it went into the house area and affected the eyes of kids. So we used dirt to stop dust. We did it. He provided us dust monitors. We tested and we reduced the dust. Then we wanted to get rid of the bug generally. So how do we do that? Well, we call up the doctor of flies -- and, yes, there is a doctor of flies. As our Aboriginal mate said, "You white fellows ought to get out more." (Laughter) And the doctor of flies very quickly determined that there was one fly that carried the bug. He could give school kids in this community the beautiful fly trap you see above in the slide. They could trap the flies, send them to him in Perth. When the bug was in the gut, he'd send back by return post some dung beetles. The dung beetles ate the camel dung, the flies died through lack of food, and trachoma dropped. And over the year, trachoma dropped radically in this place, and stayed low. We changed the environment, not just treated the eyes. And finally, you get a good eye. All these small health gains and small pieces of the puzzle make a big difference. The New South Wales Department of Health, that radical organization, did an independent trial over three years to look at 10 years of the work we've been doing in these sorts of projects in New South Wales. And they found a 40 percent reduction in hospital admissions for the illnesses that you could attribute to the poor environment -- a 40 percent reduction. (Applause) Just to show that the principles we've used in Australia can be used in other places, I'm just going to go to one other place, and that's Nepal. And what a beautiful place to go. We were asked by a small village of 600 people to go in and make toilets where none existed. Health was poor. We went in with no grand plan, no grand promises of a great program, just the offer to build two toilets for two families. It was during the design of the first toilet that I went for lunch, invited by the family into their main room of the house. It was choking with smoke. People were cooking on their only fuel source, green timber. The smoke coming off that timber is choking, and in an enclosed house, you simply can't breathe. Later we found the leading cause of illness and death in this particular region is through respiratory failure. So all of a sudden, we had two problems. We were there originally to look at toilets and get human waste off the ground, that's fine. But all of a sudden now there was a second problem: How do we actually get the smoke down? So two problems, and design should be about more than one thing. Solution: Take human waste, take animal waste, put it into a chamber, out of that, extract biogas, methane gas. The gas gives three to four hours cooking a day -- clean, smokeless and free for the family. (Applause) I put it to you: is this eliminating poverty? And the answer from the Nepali team who's working at the minute would say, don't be ridiculous -- we have three million more toilets to build before we can even make a stab at that claim. And I don't pretend anything else. But as we all sit here today, there are now over 100 toilets built in this village and a couple nearby. Well over 1,000 people use those toilets. Yami Lama, he's a young boy. He's got significantly less gut infection because he's now got toilets, and there isn't human waste on the ground. Kanji Maya, she's a mother, and a proud one. She's probably right now cooking lunch for her family on biogas, smokeless fuel. Her lungs have got better, and they'll get better as time increases, because she's not cooking in the same smoke. Surya takes the waste out of the biogas chamber when it's shed the gas, he puts it on his crops. He's trebled his crop income, more food for the family and more money for the family. And finally Bishnu, the leader of the team, has now understood that not only have we built toilets, we've also built a team, and that team is now working in two villages where they're training up the next two villages to keep the work expanding. And that, to me, is the key. (Applause) People are not the problem. We've never found that. The problem: poor living environment, poor housing and the bugs that do people harm. None of those are limited by geography, by skin color or by religion. None of them. The common link between all the work we've had to do is one thing, and that's poverty. Nelson Mandela said, in the mid-2000s, not too far from here, he said that like slavery and apartheid, "Poverty is not natural. It is man-made and can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings." I want to end by saying it's been the actions of thousands of ordinary human beings doing -- I think -- extraordinary work, that have actually improved health, and, maybe only in a small way, reduced poverty. Thank you very much for your time. (Applause)

I want to start with a game. And to win this game, all you have to do is see the reality that's in front of you as it really is. All right? So, we have two panels here, of colored dots. And one of those dots is the same in the two panels. Okay? And you have to tell me which one. Now, narrow it down to the gray one, the green one and, say, the orange one. So, by a show of hands -- we'll start with the easiest one -- Show of hands: how many people think it's the gray one? Really? Okay. How many people think it's the green one? And how many people think it's the orange one? Pretty even split. Let's find out what the reality is. Here is the orange one. (Laughter) Here is the green one. And here is the gray one. (Laughter) So, for all of you who saw that, you're a complete realist. All right? (Laughter) So, this is pretty amazing, actually, isn't it? Because nearly every living system has evolved the ability to detect light in one way or another. So, for us, seeing color is one of the simplest things the brain does. And yet, even at this most fundamental level, context is everything. What I want to talk about is not that context is everything, but why is context everything. Because it's answering that question that tells us not only why we see what we do, but who we are as individuals, and who we are as a society. But first, we have to ask another question, which is, "What is color for?" And instead of telling you, I'll just show you. What you see here is a jungle scene, and you see the surfaces according to the amount of light that those surfaces reflect. Now, can any of you see the predator that's about to jump out at you? And if you haven't seen it yet, you're dead. Right? (Laughter) Can anyone see it? Anyone? No? Now, let's see the surfaces according to the quality of light that they reflect. And now you see it. So, color enables us to see the similarities and differences between surfaces, according to the full spectrum of light that they reflect. But what you've just done is, in many respects, mathematically impossible. Why? Because, as Berkeley tells us, we have no direct access to our physical world, other than through our senses. And the light that falls onto our eyes is determined by multiple things in the world -- not only the color of objects, but also the color of their illumination, and the color of the space between us and those objects. You vary any one of those parameters, and you'll change the color of the light that falls onto your eye. This is a huge problem because it means that the same image could have an infinite number of possible real-world sources. So let me show you what I mean. Imagine that this is the back of your eye. And these are two projections from the world. They are identical in every single way. Identical in shape, size, spectral content. They are the same, as far as your eye is concerned. And yet they come from completely different sources. The one on the right comes from a yellow surface, in shadow, oriented facing the left, viewed through a pinkish medium. The one on the left comes from an orange surface, under direct light, facing to the right, viewed through a sort of a bluish medium. Completely different meanings, giving rise to the exact same retinal information. And yet it's only the retinal information that we get. So how on Earth do we even see? So, if you remember anything in this next 18 minutes, remember this: that the light that falls on to your eye, sensory information, is meaningless, because it could mean literally anything. And what's true for sensory information is true for information generally. There is no inherent meaning in information. It's what we do with that information that matters. So, how do we see? Well, we see by learning to see. So, the brain evolved the mechanisms for finding patterns, finding relationships in information and associating those relationships with a behavioral meaning, a significance, by interacting with the world. We're very aware of this in the form of more cognitive attributes, like language. So, I'm going to give you some letter strings. And I want you to read them out for me, if you can. Audience: "Can you read this?" "You are not reading this." "What are you reading?" Beau Lotto: "What are you reading?" Half the letters are missing. Right? There is no a priori reason why an "H" has to go between that "W" and "A." But you put one there. Why? Because in the statistics of your past experience it would have been useful to do so. So you do so again. And yet you don't put a letter after that first "T." Why? Because it wouldn't have been useful in the past. So you don't do it again. So let me show you how quickly our brains can redefine normality, even at the simplest thing the brain does, which is color. So, if I could have the lights down up here. I want you to first notice that those two desert scenes are physically the same. One is simply the flipping of the other. Okay? Now I want you to look at that dot between the green and the red. Okay? And I want you to stare at that dot. Don't look anywhere else. And we're going to look at that for about 30 seconds, which is a bit of a killer in an 18-minute talk. (Laughter) But I really want you to learn. And I'll tell you -- don't look anywhere else -- and I'll tell you what's happening inside your head. Your brain is learning. And it's learning that the right side of its visual field is under red illumination; the left side of its visual field is under green illumination. That's what it's learning. Okay? Now, when I tell you, I want you to look at the dot between the two desert scenes. So why don't you do that now? (Laughter) Can I have the lights up again? I take it from your response they don't look the same anymore. Right? (Applause) Why? Because your brain is seeing that same information as if the right one is still under red light, and the left one is still under green light. That's your new normal. So, what does this mean for context? It means that I can take these two identical squares, and I can put them in light and dark surrounds. And now the one on the dark surround looks lighter than the one on the light surround. What's significant is not simply the light and dark surrounds that matter. It's what those light and dark surrounds meant for your behavior in the past. So I'll show you what I mean. Here we have that exact same illusion. We have two identical tiles, on the left, one in a dark surround, one in a light surround. And the same thing over on the right. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to review those two scenes. But I'm not going to change anything within those boxes, except their meaning. And see what happens to your perception. Notice that on the left the two tiles look nearly completely opposite: one very white and one very dark. All right? Whereas on the right, the two tiles look nearly the same. And yet there is still one on a dark surround and one on a light surround. Why? Because if the tile in that shadow were in fact in shadow, and reflecting the same amount of light to your eye as the one outside the shadow, it would have to be more reflective -- just the laws of physics. So you see it that way. Whereas on the right, the information is consistent with those two tiles being under the same light. If they are under the same light, reflecting the same amount of light to your eye, then they must be equally reflective. So you see it that way. Which means we can bring all this information together to create some incredibly strong illusions. This is one I made a few years ago. And you'll notice you see a dark brown tile at the top, and a bright orange tile at the side. That is your perceptual reality. The physical reality is that those two tiles are the same. Here you see four gray tiles on your left, seven gray tiles on the right. I'm not going to change those tiles at all, but I'm going to reveal the rest of the scene and see what happens to your perception. The four blue tiles on the left are gray. The seven yellow tiles on the right are also gray. They are the same. Okay? Don't believe me? Let's watch it again. What's true for color is also true for complex perceptions of motion. So here we have -- let's turn this around -- a diamond. And what I'm going to do is, I'm going to hold it here, and I'm going to spin it. And for all of you, you'll see it probably spinning this direction. Now I want you to keep looking at it. Move your eyes around, blink, maybe close one eye. And suddenly it will flip, and start spinning the opposite direction. Yes? Raise your hand if you got that. Yes? Keep blinking. Every time you blink it will switch. Alright? So I can ask you, which direction is it rotating? How do you know? Your brain doesn't know. Because both are equally likely. So depending on where it looks, it flips between the two possibilities. Are we the only ones that see illusions? The answer to this question is no. Even the beautiful bumblebee, with its mere one million brain cells, which is 250 times fewer cells than you have in one retina, sees illusions, does the most complicated things that even our most sophisticated computers can't do. So in my lab, we of course work on bumblebees. Because we can completely control their experience, and see how that alters the architecture of their brain. And we do this in what we call the Bee Matrix. And here you have the hive. You can see the queen bee, that large bee in the middle there. Those are all her daughters, the eggs. And they go back and forth between this hive and the arena, via this tube. And you'll see one of the bees come out here. You see how she has a little number on her? Yeah there is another one coming out. She has another number on her. Now, they are not born that way. Right? We pull them out, put them in the fridge, and they fall asleep. And then you can superglue little numbers on them. (Laughter) And now, in this experiment they get rewarded if they go to the blue flowers. And they land on the flower. They stick their tongue in there, called a proboscis, and they drink sugar water. Now she is drinking a glass of water that's about that big to you and I, will do that about three times, and then fly. And sometimes they learn not to go to the blue, but to go to where the other bees go. So they copy each other. They can count to five. They can recognize faces. And here she comes down the ladder. And she'll come into the hive, find an empty honey pot and throw up, and that's honey. (Laughter) Now remember -- (Laughter) -- she's supposed to be going to the blue flowers. But what are these bees doing in the upper right corner? It looks like they're going to green flowers. Now, are they getting it wrong? And the answer to the question is no. Those are actually blue flowers. But those are blue flowers under green light. So they are using the relationships between the colors to solve the puzzle, which is exactly what we do. So, illusions are often used, especially in art, in the words of a more contemporary artist, "to demonstrate the fragility of our senses." Okay, this is complete rubbish. The senses aren't fragile. And if they were, we wouldn't be here. Instead, color tells us something completely different, that the brain didn't actually evolve to see the world the way it is. We can't. Instead, the brain evolved to see the world the way it was useful to see in the past. And how we see is by continually redefining normality. So how can we take this incredible capacity of plasticity of the brain and get people to experience their world differently? Well, one of the ways we do in my lab and studio is we translate the light into sound and we enable people to hear their visual world. And they can navigate the world using their ears. Here is David, in the right. And he is holding a camera. On the left is what his camera sees. And you'll see there is a line, a faint line going across that image. That line is broken up into 32 squares. In each square we calculate the average color. And then we just simply translate that into sound. And now he's going to turn around, close his eyes, and find a plate on the ground with his eyes closed. He finds it. Amazing. Right? So not only can we create a prosthetic for the visually impaired, but we can also investigate how people literally make sense of the world. But we can also do something else. We can also make music with color. So, working with kids, they created images, thinking about what might the images you see sound like if we could listen to them. And then we translated these images. And this is one of those images. And this is a six-year-old child composing a piece of music for a 32-piece orchestra. And this is what it sounds like. So, a six-year-old child. Okay? Now, what does all this mean? What this suggests is that no one is an outside observer of nature. Okay? We are not defined by our central properties, by the bits that make us up. We're defined by our environment and our interaction with that environment -- by our ecology. And that ecology is necessarily relative, historical and empirical. So what I'd like to finish with is this over here. Because what I've been trying to do is really celebrate uncertainty. Because I think only through uncertainty is there potential for understanding. So, if some of you are still feeling a bit too certain, I'd like to do this one. So, if we have the lights down. And what we have here -- Can everyone see 25 purple surfaces on your left, and 25, call it yellowish, surfaces on your right? So, now, what I want to do: I'm going to put the middle nine surfaces here under yellow illumination by simply putting a filter behind them. All right. Now you can see that changes the light that's coming through there. Right? Because now the light is going through a yellowish filter and then a purplish filter. I'm going to do this opposite on the left here. I'm going to put the middle nine under a purplish light. Now, some of you will notice that the consequence is that the light coming through those middle nine on the right, or your left, is exactly the same as the light coming through the middle nine on your right. Agreed? Yes? Okay. So they are physically the same. Let's pull the covers off. Now remember, you know the middle nine are exactly the same. Do they look the same? No. The question is, "Is that an illusion?" And I'll leave you with that. So, thank you very much. (Applause)

Charles and Ray were a team. They were husband and wife. Despite the New York Times' and Vanity Fair's best efforts recently, they're not brothers. (Laughter) And they were a lot of fun. You know, Ray was the one who wore the ampersands in the family. (Laughter) We are going to focus on Charles today, because it is Charles' 100th birthday. But when I speak of him, I'm really speaking of both of them as a team. Here's Charles when he was three. So he would be 100 this June. We have a lot of cool celebrations that we're going to do. The thing about their work is that most people come to the door of furniture -- I suspect you probably recognize this chair and some of the others I'm going to show you. But we're going to first enter through the door of the Big Top. The whole thing about this, though, is that, you know, why am I showing it? Is it because Charles and Ray made this film? This is actually a training film for a clown college that they had. They also practiced a clown act when the future of furniture was not nearly as auspicious as it turned out to be. There is a picture of Charles. So let's watch the next clip. The film that we're about to see is a film they made for the Moscow World's Fair. Video: This is the land. It has many contrasts. It is rough and it is flat. In places it is cold. In some it is hot. Too much rain falls on some areas, and not enough on others. But people live on this land. And, as in Russia, they are drawn together into towns and cities. Here is something of the way they live. Eames Demetrios: Now, this is a film that was hardly ever seen in the United States. It was on seven screens and it was 200 feet across. And it was at the height of the Cold War. The Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debate happened about 50 feet from where this was shown. And yet, how did it start? You know, commonality, the first line in Charles' narration was, "The same stars that shine down on Russia shine down on the United States. From the sky, our cities look much the same." It was that human connection that Charles and Ray always found in everything. And you can imagine, and the thing about it is, that they believed that the human mind could handle this number of images because the important thing was to get the gestalt of what the images were about. So that was just a little snip. But the thing about Charles and Ray is that they were always modeling stuff. They were always trying things out. I think one of the things I am passionate about, my grandparents work, I'm passionate about my work, but on top of all that I'm passionate about a holistic vision of design, where design is a life skill, not a professional skill. And you know, those of us with kids often want our kids to take music. I'm no exception. But it's not about them becoming Bono or Tracy Chapman. It's about getting that music thing going through their heads and their thinking. Design is the same way. Design has to become that same way. And this is a model that they did of that seven-screen presentation. And Charles just checking it out there. So now we're going to go through that door of furniture. This is an unusual installation of airport seating. So what we're going to see is some of the icons of Eames furniture. And the thing about their furniture is that they said the role of the designer was essentially that of a good host, anticipating the needs of the guest. So those are cool images. But these are ones I think are really cool. These are all the prototypes. These are the mistakes, although I don't think mistakes is the right word in design. It's just the things you try out to kind of make it work better. And you know some of them would probably be terrible chairs. Some of them are kind of cool looking. It's like "Hey, why didn't they try that?" It was that hands-on iterative process which is so much like vernacular design and folk design in traditional cultures. And I think that's one of the commonalities between modernism and traditional design. I think it may be a real common ground as we kind of figure out what on earth to do in the next 20 or 30 years. The other thing that's kind of cool is that you look at this and in the media when people say design, they actually mean style. And I'm really here to talk about design. But you know the object is just a pivot. It's a pivot between a process and a system. And this is a little film I made about the making of the Eames lounge chair. The design process for Charles and Ray never ended in manufacturing. It continued. They were always trying to make thing better and better. Because it's like as Bill Clinton was saying about Rwandan health clinics. It's not enough to create one. You've got to create a system that will work better and better. So I've always liked this prototype picture. Because it just kind of, you know, doesn't get any more basic than that. You try things out. This is a relatively famous chair. Its early version had an "X" base. That's what the collectors like. Charles and Ray liked this one because it was better. It worked better: "H" base, much more practical. This is something called a splint. And I was very touched by Dean Kamen's work for the military, or for the soldiers, because Charles and Ray designed a molded plywood splint. This is it. And they'd been working on furniture before. But doing these splints they learned a lot about the manufacturing process, which was incredibly important to them. I'm trying to show you too much, because I want you to really get a broth of ideas and images. This is a house that Charles and Ray designed. My sister is chasing someone else. It's not me. Although I endorse heartily the fact that he stole her diary, it's not me. And then this is a film, on the lower left, that Charles and Ray made. Now look at that plastic chair. The house is 1949. The chair is done in 1949. Charles and Ray, they didn't obsess about style for it's own sake. They didn't say, "Our style is curves. Let's make the house curvy." They didn't say, "Our style is grids. Let's make the chair griddy." They focused on the need. They tried to solve the design problem. Charles used to say, "The extent to which you have a design style is the extent to which you have not solved the design problem." It's kind of a brutal quote. This is the earlier design of that house. And again, they managed to figure out a way to make a prototype of a house -- architecture, very expensive medium. Here's a film we've been hearing things about. The "Powers of Ten" is a film they made. If we watch the next clip, you're going to see the first version of "Powers of Ten," upper left. The familiar one on the lower right. The Eames' film Tops, lower left. And a lamp that Charles designed for a church. Video: Which in turn belongs to a local group of galaxies. These form part of a grouping system much as the stars do. They are so many and so varied that from this distance they appear like the stars from Earth. ED: You've seen that film, and what's so great about this whole conference is that everybody has been talking about scale. Everybody here is coming at it from a different way. I want to give you one example. E.O. Wilson once told me that when he looked at ants -- he loved them, of course, and he wanted to learn more about them -- he consciously looked at them from the standpoint of scale. So here is the tiny creature. And yet simply by changing the frame of reference it reveals so much, including what ended up being the TED Prize. Modeling, they tried modeling all the time. They were always modeling things. And I think part of that is that they never delegated understanding. And I think in our family we were very lucky, because we learned about design backwards. Design was not something other. It was part of the business of life in general. It was part of the quality of life. And here is some family pictures. And you can see why I'm down on style, with a haircut like that. But anyway, (Laughter) I remember the cut grapefruit that we would have at the Eames house when I was a kid. So we're going to watch another film. This is a film, the one called Toys. You can see me, I have the same haircut, in the upper right corner. Upper left is a film they did on toy trains. Lower right is a solar do-nothing toy. Lower left is Day-of-the-Dead toys. Charles used to say that toys are not as innocent as they appear. They are often the precursor to bigger things. And these ideas -- that train up there, being about the honest use of materials, is totally the same as the honest use of materials in the plywood. And now I'm going to test you. This is a letter that my grandfather sent to my mom when she was five years old. So can you read it? Lucia angel, okay, eye. Audience: Saw many trains. ED: Awl, also, good that the leather crafter's guild is here. Also, what is he doing? Row, rowed. Sun? No. Well is there another name for a sunrise? Dawn, very good. Also rode on one. I ... Audience: You had, I hope you had -- ED: Now you've been to the website Dogs of Saint Louis in the late, in the mid-1930's, then you'd know that was a Great Dane. So, I hope you had a Audience: Nice time, time -- ED: Time at. Citizen Kane, rose -- Audience: Rosebud. ED: No, bud. "D"'s right. At Buddy's -- Audience: Party. Love. ED: Okay, good. So, "I saw many trains and also rode on one. I hope you had a nice time at Buddy's party." So you guys did pretty good, cool. So my mom and Charles had this great relationship where they'd send those sorts of things back and forth to one another. And it's all part of the, you know, they used to say, "Take your pleasure seriously." These are some images from a project of mine that's called Kymaerica. It's sort of an alternative universe. It's kind of a reinterpretation of the landscape. Those plaques are plaques we've been installing around North America. We're about to do six in the U.K. next week. And they honor events in the linear world from the fictional world. So, of course, since it's bronze it has to be true. Video: Kymaerica with waterfalls, tumbling through our -- ED: This is one of the traditional Kymaerican songs. And so we had spelling bees in Paris, Illinois. Video: Your word is N. Carolina. Girl: Y-I-N-D-I-A-N-A. ED: And then Embassy Row is actually a historical site, because in the Kymaerican story this is where the Parisian Diaspora started, where there embassy was. So you can actually visit and have this three-dimensional fictional experience there. And the town has really embraced it. We had the spelling bee in conjunction with the Gwomeus Club. But what is really cool is that we take our visual environment as inevitable. And it's not. Other things could have happened. The Japanese could have discovered Monterey. And we could have been born 100,000 years ago. And there are a lot of fun things. This is the Museum of the Bench. They have trading cards and all sorts of cool things. And you're kind of trapped in the texture of Kymaerica. The Tahatchabe, the great road building culture. A guy named Nobu Naga, the so-called Japanese Columbus. But now I'm going to return you to the real world. And this is Cranbrook. I've got a real treat for you, which is the first film that Charles ever made. So let's watch that. Nobody's ever seen it. Cranbrook is very generous to let us show it for the first time here. It's a film about Maya Gretel, a famous ceramicist, and a teacher at Cranbrook. And he made it for the 1939 faculty exhibition. Silent. We don't have a track for it yet. Very simple. It's just a start. But it's that learn-by-doing thing. You want to learn how to make films? Go make a movie. And you try something out. But here is what's really great. See that chair there? The orange one? That's the organic chair. 1940. At the same time that Charles was doing that chair, he was doing this film. So my point is that this scope of vision, this holistic vision of design, was with them from the beginning. It wasn't like "Oh, we made some chairs and got successful. Now we're going to do some movies." It was always part of how they looked at the world. And that's what's really powerful. And I think that all of us in this room, as you move design forward, it's not about just doing one thing. It's about how you approach problems. And there is this huge, beautiful commonality between design, business and the world. So we're going to do the last clip. And I've shown you some of the images. I just want to focus on sound now. So this is Charles' voice. Charles Eames: In India, those without, and the lowest in caste, eat very often, particularly in southern India, they eat off of a banana leaf. And those a little bit up the scale eat off of a sort of a low-fired ceramic dish. And a little bit higher, why they have a glaze on a thing they call a thali. If you're up the scale a little bit more, why, a brass thali. And then things get to be a little questionable. There are things like silver-plated thalis. And there is solid silver thalis. And I suppose some nut has had a gold thali that he's eaten off of. But you can go beyond that. And the guys that have not only means, but a certain amount of knowledge and understanding, go to the next step, and they eat off a banana leaf. And I think that in these times when we fall back and regroup, that somehow or other, the banana leaf parable sort of got to get working there, because I'm not prepared to say that the banana leaf that one eats off of is the same as the other eats off of. But it is that process that has happened within the man that changes the banana leaf. ED: I've been looking forward to sharing that quote with you. Because that's part of where we've got to get to. And I also want to share this one. "Beyond the age of information is the age of choices." And I really think that's where we are. And it's kind of cool for me to be part of a family and a tradition where he was talking about that in 1978. And part of why this stuff is important and all the things that we do are important, is that these are the ideas we need. And I think that this is all part of surrendering to the design journey. That's what we all need to do. Design is not just for designers anymore. It's a process. It's not style. All that great thinking needs to really get about solving pretty key problems. I really thank you for your time. (Applause)

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

How will we be remembered in 200 years? I happen to live in a little town, Princeton, in New Jersey, which every year celebrates the great event in Princeton history: the Battle of Princeton, which was, in fact, a very important battle. It was the first battle that George Washington won, in fact, and was pretty much of a turning point in the war of independence. It happened 225 years ago. It was actually a terrible disaster for Princeton. The town was burned down; it was in the middle of winter, and it was a very, very severe winter. And about a quarter of all the people in Princeton died that winter from hunger and cold, but nobody remembers that. What they remember is, of course, the great triumph, that the Brits were beaten, and we won, and that the country was born. And so I agree very emphatically that the pain of childbirth is not remembered. It's the child that's remembered. And that's what we're going through at this time. I wanted to just talk for one minute about the future of biotechnology, because I think I know very little about that -- I'm not a biologist -- so everything I know about it can be said in one minute. (Laughter) What I'm saying is that we should follow the model that has been so successful with the electronic industry, that what really turned computers into a great success, in the world as a whole, is toys. As soon as computers became toys, when kids could come home and play with them, then the industry really took off. And that has to happen with biotech. There's a huge -- (Laughter) (Applause) -- there's a huge community of people in the world who are practical biologists, who are dog breeders, pigeon breeders, orchid breeders, rose breeders, people who handle biology with their hands, and who are dedicated to producing beautiful things, beautiful creatures, plants, animals, pets. These people will be empowered with biotech, and that will be an enormous positive step to acceptance of biotechnology. That will blow away a lot of the opposition. When people have this technology in their hands, you have a do-it-yourself biotech kit, grow your own -- grow your dog, grow your own cat. (Laughter) (Applause) Just buy the software, you design it. I won't say anymore, you can take it on from there. It's going to happen, and I think it has to happen before the technology becomes natural, becomes part of the human condition, something that everybody's familiar with and everybody accepts. So, let's leave that aside. I want to talk about something quite different, which is what I know about, and that is astronomy. And I'm interested in searching for life in the universe. And it's open to us to introduce a new way of doing that, and that's what I'll talk about for 10 minutes, or whatever the time remains. The important fact is, that most of the real estate that's accessible to us -- I'm not talking about the stars, I'm talking about the solar system, the stuff that's within reach for spacecraft and within reach of our earthbound telescopes -- most of the real estate is very cold and very far from the Sun. If you look at the solar system, as we know it today, it has a few planets close to the Sun. That's where we live. It has a fairly substantial number of asteroids between the orbit of the Earth out through -- to the orbit of Jupiter. The asteroids are a substantial amount of real estate, but not very large. And it's not very promising for life, since most of it consists of rock and metal, mostly rock. It's not only cold, but very dry. So the asteroids we don't have much hope for. There stand some interesting places a little further out: the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Particularly, there's a place called Europa, which is -- Europa is one of the moons of Jupiter, where we see a very level ice surface, which looks as if it's floating on top of an ocean. So, we believe that on Europa there is, in fact, a deep ocean. And that makes it extraordinarily interesting as a place to explore. Ocean -- probably the most likely place for life to originate, just as it originated on the Earth. So we would love to explore Europa, to go down through the ice, find out who is swimming around in the ocean, whether there are fish or seaweed or sea monsters -- whatever there may be that's exciting --- or cephalopods. But that's hard to do. Unfortunately, the ice is thick. We don't know just how thick it is, probably miles thick, so it's very expensive and very difficult to go down there -- send down your submarine or whatever it is -- and explore. That's something we don't yet know how to do. There are plans to do it, but it's hard. Go out a bit further, you'll find that beyond the orbit of Neptune, way out, far from the Sun, that's where the real estate really begins. You'll find millions or trillions or billions of objects which, in what we call the Kuiper Belt or the Oort Cloud -- these are clouds of small objects which appear as comets when they fall close to the Sun. Mostly, they just live out there in the cold of the outer solar system, but they are biologically very interesting indeed, because they consist primarily of ice with other minerals, which are just the right ones for developing life. So if life could be established out there, it would have all the essentials -- chemistry and sunlight -- everything that's needed. So, what I'm proposing is that there is where we should be looking for life, rather than on Mars, although Mars is, of course, also a very promising and interesting place. But we can look outside, very cheaply and in a simple fashion. And that's what I'm going to talk about. There is a -- imagine that life originated on Europa, and it was sitting in the ocean for billions of years. It's quite likely that it would move out of the ocean onto the surface, just as it did on the Earth. Staying in the ocean and evolving in the ocean for 2 billion years, finally came out onto the land. And then of course it had great -- much greater freedom, and a much greater variety of creatures developed on the land than had ever been possible in the ocean. And the step from the ocean to the land was not easy, but it happened. Now, if life had originated on Europa in the ocean, it could also have moved out onto the surface. There wouldn't have been any air there -- it's a vacuum. It is out in the cold, but it still could have come. You can imagine that the plants growing up like kelp through cracks in the ice, growing on the surface. What would they need in order to grow on the surface? They'd need, first of all, to have a thick skin to protect themselves from losing water through the skin. So they would have to have something like a reptilian skin. But better -- what is more important is that they would have to concentrate sunlight. The sunlight in Jupiter, on the satellites of Jupiter, is 25 times fainter than it is here, since Jupiter is five times as far from the Sun. So they would have to have -- these creatures, which I call sunflowers, which I imagine living on the surface of Europa, would have to have either lenses or mirrors to concentrate sunlight, so they could keep themselves warm on the surface. Otherwise, they would be at a temperature of minus 150, which is certainly not favorable for developing life, at least of the kind we know. But if they just simply could grow, like leaves, little lenses and mirrors to concentrate sunlight, then they could keep warm on the surface. They could enjoy all the benefits of the sunlight and have roots going down into the ocean; life then could flourish much more. So, why not look? Of course, it's not very likely that there's life on the surface of Europa. None of these things is likely, but my, my philosophy is, look for what's detectable, not for what's probable. There's a long history in astronomy of unlikely things turning out to be there. And I mean, the finest example of that was radio astronomy as a whole. This was -- originally, when radio astronomy began, Mr. Jansky, at the Bell labs, detected radio waves coming from the sky. And the regular astronomers were scornful about this. They said, "It's all right, you can detect radio waves from the Sun, but the Sun is the only object in the universe that's close enough and bright enough actually to be detectable. You can easily calculate that radio waves from the Sun are fairly faint, and everything else in the universe is millions of times further away, so it certainly will not be detectable. So there's no point in looking." And that, of course, that set back the progress of radio astronomy by about 20 years. Since there was nothing there, you might as well not look. Well, of course, as soon as anybody did look, which was after about 20 years, when radio astronomy really took off. Because it turned out the universe is absolutely full of all kinds of wonderful things radiating in the radio spectrum, much brighter than the Sun. So, the same thing could be true for this kind of life, which I'm talking about, on cold objects: that it could in fact be very abundant all over the universe, and it's not been detected just because we haven't taken the trouble to look. So, the last thing I want to talk about is how to detect it. There is something called pit lamping. That's the phrase which I learned from my son George, who is there in the audience. You take -- that's a Canadian expression. If you happen to want to hunt animals at night, you take a miner's lamp, which is a pit lamp. You strap it onto your forehead, so you can see the reflection in the eyes of the animal. So, if you go out at night, you shine a flashlight, the animals are bright. You see the red glow in their eyes, which is the reflection of the flashlight. And then, if you're one of these unsporting characters, you shoot the animals and take them home. And of course, that spoils the game for the other hunters who hunt in the daytime, so in Canada that's illegal. In New Zealand, it's legal, because the New Zealand farmers use this as a way of getting rid of rabbits, because the rabbits compete with the sheep in New Zealand. So, the farmers go out at night with heavily armed jeeps, and shine the headlights, and anything that doesn't look like a sheep, you shoot. (Laughter) So I have proposed to apply the same trick to looking for life in the universe. That if these creatures who are living on cold surfaces -- either on Europa, or further out, anywhere where you can live on a cold surface -- those creatures must be provided with reflectors. In order to concentrate sunlight, they have to have lenses and mirrors -- in order to keep themselves warm. And then, when you shine sunlight at them, the sunlight will be reflected back, just as it is in the eyes of an animal. So these creatures will be bright against the cold surroundings. And the further out you go in this, away from the Sun, the more powerful this reflection will be. So actually, this method of hunting for life gets stronger and stronger as you go further away, because the optical reflectors have to be more powerful so the reflected light shines out even more in contrast against the dark background. So as you go further away from the Sun, this becomes more and more powerful. So, in fact, you can look for these creatures with telescopes from the Earth. Why aren't we doing it? Simply because nobody thought of it yet. But I hope that we shall look, and with any -- we probably won't find anything, none of these speculations may have any basis in fact. But still, it's a good chance. And of course, if it happens, it will transform our view of life altogether. Because it means that -- the way life can live out there, it has enormous advantages as compared with living on a planet. It's extremely hard to move from one planet to another. We're having great difficulties at the moment and any creatures that live on a planet are pretty well stuck. Especially if you breathe air, it's very hard to get from planet A to planet B, because there's no air in between. But if you breathe air -- (Laughter) -- you're dead -- (Laughter) -- as soon as you're off the planet, unless you have a spaceship. But if you live in a vacuum, if you live on the surface of one of these objects, say, in the Kuiper Belt, this -- an object like Pluto, or one of the smaller objects in the neighborhood of Pluto, and you happened -- if you're living on the surface there, and you get knocked off the surface by a collision, then it doesn't change anything all that much. You still are on a piece of ice, you can still have sunlight and you can still survive while you're traveling from one place to another. And then if you run into another object, you can stay there and colonize the other object. So life will spread, then, from one object to another. So if it exists at all in the Kuiper Belt, it's likely to be very widespread. And you will have then a great competition amongst species -- Darwinian evolution -- so there'll be a huge advantage to the species which is able to jump from one place to another without having to wait for a collision. And there'll be advantages for spreading out long, sort of kelp-like forest of vegetation. I call these creatures sunflowers. They look like, maybe like sunflowers. They have to be all the time pointing toward the Sun, and they will be able to spread out in space, because gravity on these objects is weak. So they can collect sunlight from a big area. So they will, in fact, be quite easy for us to detect. So, I hope in the next 10 years, we'll find these creatures, and then, of course, our whole view of life in the universe will change. If we don't find them, then we can create them ourselves. (Laughter) That's another wonderful opportunity that's opening. We can -- as soon as we have a little bit more understanding of genetic engineering, one of the things you can do with your take-it-home, do-it-yourself genetic engineering kit -- (Laughter) -- is to design a creature that can live on a cold satellite, a place like Europa, so we could colonize Europa with our own creatures. That would be a fun thing to do. (Laughter) In the long run, of course, it would also make it possible for us to move out there. What's going to happen in the end, it's not going to be just humans colonizing space, it's going to be life moving out from the Earth, moving it into its kingdom. And the kingdom of life, of course, is going to be the universe. And if life is already there, it makes it much more exciting, in the short run. But in the long run, if there's no life there, we create it ourselves. We transform the universe into something much more rich and beautiful than it is today. So again, we have a big and wonderful future to look forward. Thank you. (Applause)

The future that we will create can be a future that we'll be proud of. I think about this every day; it's quite literally my job. I'm co-founder and senior columnist at Worldchanging.com. Alex Steffen and I founded Worldchanging in late 2003, and since then we and our growing global team of contributors have documented the ever-expanding variety of solutions that are out there, right now and on the near horizon. In a little over two years, we've written up about 4,000 items -- replicable models, technological tools, emerging ideas -- all providing a path to a future that's more sustainable, more equitable and more desirable. Our emphasis on solutions is quite intentional. There are tons of places to go, online and off, if what you want to find is the latest bit of news about just how quickly our hell-bound handbasket is moving. We want to offer people an idea of what they can do about it. We focus primarily on the planet's environment, but we also address issues of global development, international conflict, responsible use of emerging technologies, even the rise of the so-called Second Superpower and much, much more. The scope of solutions that we discuss is actually pretty broad, but that reflects both the range of challenges that need to be met and the kinds of innovations that will allow us to do so. A quick sampling really can barely scratch the surface, but to give you a sense of what we cover: tools for rapid disaster relief, such as this inflatable concrete shelter; innovative uses of bioscience, such as a flower that changes color in the presence of landmines; ultra high-efficiency designs for homes and offices; distributed power generation using solar power, wind power, ocean power, other clean energy sources; ultra, ultra high-efficiency vehicles of the future; ultra high-efficiency vehicles you can get right now; and better urban design, so you don't need to drive as much in the first place; bio-mimetic approaches to design that take advantage of the efficiencies of natural models in both vehicles and buildings; distributed computing projects that will help us model the future of the climate. Also, a number of the topics that we've been talking about this week at TED are things that we've addressed in the past on Worldchanging: cradle-to-cradle design, MIT's Fab Labs, the consequences of extreme longevity, the One Laptop per Child project, even Gapminder. As a born-in-the-mid-1960s Gen X-er, hurtling all too quickly to my fortieth birthday, I'm naturally inclined to pessimism. But working at Worldchanging has convinced me, much to my own surprise, that successful responses to the world's problems are nonetheless possible. Moreover, I've come to realize that focusing only on negative outcomes can really blind you to the very possibility of success. As Norwegian social scientist Evelin Lindner has observed, "Pessimism is a luxury of good times ... In difficult times, pessimism is a self-fulfilling, self-inflicted death sentence." The truth is, we can build a better world, and we can do so right now. We have the tools: we saw a hint of that a moment ago, and we're coming up with new ones all the time. We have the knowledge, and our understanding of the planet improves every day. Most importantly, we have the motive: we have a world that needs fixing, and nobody's going to do it for us. Many of the solutions that I and my colleagues seek out and write up every day have some important aspects in common: transparency, collaboration, a willingness to experiment, and an appreciation of science -- or, more appropriately, science! (Laughter) The majority of models, tools and ideas on Worldchanging encompass combinations of these characteristics, so I want to give you a few concrete examples of how these principles combine in world-changing ways. We can see world-changing values in the emergence of tools to make the invisible visible -- that is, to make apparent the conditions of the world around us that would otherwise be largely imperceptible. We know that people often change their behavior when they can see and understand the impact of their actions. As a small example, many of us have experienced the change in driving behavior that comes from having a real time display of mileage showing precisely how one's driving habits affect the vehicle's efficiency. The last few years have all seen the rise of innovations in how we measure and display aspects of the world that can be too big, or too intangible, or too slippery to grasp easily. Simple technologies, like wall-mounted devices that display how much power your household is using, and what kind of results you'll get if you turn off a few lights -- these can actually have a direct positive impact on your energy footprint. Community tools, like text messaging, that can tell you when pollen counts are up or smog levels are rising or a natural disaster is unfolding, can give you the information you need to act in a timely fashion. Data-rich displays like maps of campaign contributions, or maps of the disappearing polar ice caps, allow us to better understand the context and the flow of processes that affect us all. We can see world-changing values in research projects that seek to meet the world's medical needs through open access to data and collaborative action. Now, some people emphasize the risks of knowledge-enabled dangers, but I'm convinced that the benefits of knowledge-enabled solutions are far more important. For example, open-access journals, like the Public Library of Science, make cutting-edge scientific research free to all -- everyone in the world. And actually, a growing number of science publishers are adopting this model. Last year, hundreds of volunteer biology and chemistry researchers around the world worked together to sequence the genome of the parasite responsible for some of the developing world's worst diseases: African sleeping sickness, leishmaniasis and Chagas disease. That genome data can now be found on open-access genetic data banks around the world, and it's an enormous boon to researchers trying to come up with treatments. But my favorite example has to be the global response to the SARS epidemic in 2003, 2004, which relied on worldwide access to the full gene sequence of the SARS virus. The U.S. National Research Council in its follow-up report on the outbreak specifically cited this open availability of the sequence as a key reason why the treatment for SARS could be developed so quickly. And we can see world-changing values in something as humble as a cell phone. I can probably count on my fingers the number of people in this room who do not use a mobile phone -- and where is Aubrey, because I know he doesn't? (Laughter) For many of us, cell phones have really become almost an extension of ourselves, and we're really now beginning to see the social changes that mobile phones can bring about. You may already know some of the big-picture aspects: globally, more camera phones were sold last year than any other kind of camera, and a growing number of people live lives mediated through the lens, and over the network -- and sometimes enter history books. In the developing world, mobile phones have become economic drivers. A study last year showed a direct correlation between the growth of mobile phone use and subsequent GDP increases across Africa. In Kenya, mobile phone minutes have actually become an alternative currency. The political aspects of mobile phones can't be ignored either, from text message swarms in Korea helping to bring down a government, to the Blairwatch Project in the UK, keeping tabs on politicians who try to avoid the press. (Laughter) And it's just going to get more wild. Pervasive, always-on networks, high quality sound and video, even devices made to be worn instead of carried in the pocket, will transform how we live on a scale that few really appreciate. It's no exaggeration to say that the mobile phone may be among the world's most important technologies. And in this rapidly evolving context, it's possible to imagine a world in which the mobile phone becomes something far more than a medium for social interaction. I've long admired the Witness project, and Peter Gabriel told us more details about it on Wednesday, in his profoundly moving presentation. And I'm just incredibly happy to see the news that Witness is going to be opening up a Web portal to enable users of digital cameras and camera phones to send in their recordings over the Internet, rather than just hand-carrying the videotape. Not only does this add a new and potentially safer avenue for documenting abuses, it opens up the program to the growing global digital generation. Now, imagine a similar model for networking environmentalists. Imagine a Web portal collecting recordings and evidence of what's happening to the planet: putting news and data at the fingertips of people of all kinds, from activists and researchers to businesspeople and political figures. It would highlight the changes that are underway, but would more importantly give voice to the people who are willing to work to see a new world, a better world, come about. It would give everyday citizens a chance to play a role in the protection of the planet. It would be, in essence, an "Earth Witness" project. Now, just to be clear, in this talk I'm using the name "Earth Witness" as part of the scenario, simply as a shorthand, for what this imaginary project could aspire to, not to piggyback on the wonderful work of the Witness organization. It could just as easily be called, "Environmental Transparency Project," "Smart Mobs for Natural Security" -- but Earth Witness is a lot easier to say. Now, many of the people who participate in Earth Witness would focus on ecological problems, human-caused or otherwise, especially environmental crimes and significant sources of greenhouse gases and emissions. That's understandable and important. We need better documentation of what's happening to the planet if we're ever going to have a chance of repairing the damage. But the Earth Witness project wouldn't need to be limited to problems. In the best Worldchanging tradition, it might also serve as a showcase for good ideas, successful projects and efforts to make a difference that deserve much more visibility. Earth Witness would show us two worlds: the world we're leaving behind, and the world we're building for generations to come. And what makes this scenario particularly appealing to me is we could do it today. The key components are already widely available. Camera phones, of course, would be fundamental to the project. And for a lot of us, they're as close as we have yet to always-on, widely available information tools. We may not remember to bring our digital cameras with us wherever we go, but very few of us forget our phones. You could even imagine a version of this scenario in which people actually build their own phones. Over the course of last year, open-source hardware hackers have come up with multiple models for usable, Linux-based mobile phones, and the Earth Phone could spin off from this kind of project. At the other end of the network, there'd be a server for people to send photos and messages to, accessible over the Web, combining a photo-sharing service, social networking platforms and a collaborative filtering system. Now, you Web 2.0 folks in the audience know what I'm talking about, but for those of you for whom that last sentence was in a crazy moon language, I mean simply this: the online part of the Earth Witness project would be created by the users, working together and working openly. That's enough right there to start to build a compelling chronicle of what's now happening to our planet, but we could do more. An Earth Witness site could also serve as a collection spot for all sorts of data about conditions around the planet picked up by environmental sensors that attach to your cell phone. Now, you don't see these devices as add-ons for phones yet, but students and engineers around the world have attached atmospheric sensors to bicycles and handheld computers and cheap robots and the backs of pigeons -- that being a project that's actually underway right now at U.C. Irvine, using bird-mounted sensors as a way of measuring smog-forming pollution. It's hardly a stretch to imagine putting the same thing on a phone carried by a person. Now, the idea of connecting a sensor to your phone is not new: phone-makers around the world offer phones that sniff for bad breath, or tell you to worry about too much sun exposure. Swedish firm Uppsala Biomedical, more seriously, makes a mobile phone add-on that can process blood tests in the field, uploading the data, displaying the results. Even the Lawrence Livermore National Labs have gotten into the act, designing a prototype phone that has radiation sensors to find dirty bombs. Now, there's an enormous variety of tiny, inexpensive sensors on the market, and you can easily imagine someone putting together a phone that could measure temperature, CO2 or methane levels, the presence of some biotoxins -- potentially, in a few years, maybe even H5N1 avian flu virus. You could see that some kind of system like this would actually be a really good fit with Larry Brilliant's InSTEDD project. Now, all of this data could be tagged with geographic information and mashed up with online maps for easy viewing and analysis. And that's worth noting in particular. The impact of open-access online maps over the last year or two has been simply phenomenal. Developers around the world have come up with an amazing variety of ways to layer useful data on top of the maps, from bus routes and crime statistics to the global progress of avian flu. Earth Witness would take this further, linking what you see with what thousands or millions of other people see around the world. It's kind of exciting to think about what might be accomplished if something like this ever existed. We'd have a far better -- far better knowledge of what's happening on our planet environmentally than could be gathered with satellites and a handful of government sensor nets alone. It would be a collaborative, bottom-up approach to environmental awareness and protection, able to respond to emerging concerns in a smart mobs kind of way -- and if you need greater sensor density, just have more people show up. And most important, you can't ignore how important mobile phones are to global youth. This is a system that could put the next generation at the front lines of gathering environmental data. And as we work to figure out ways to mitigate the worst effects of climate disruption, every little bit of information matters. A system like Earth Witness would be a tool for all of us to participate in the improvement of our knowledge and, ultimately, the improvement of the planet itself. Now, as I suggested at the outset, there are thousands upon thousands of good ideas out there, so why have I spent the bulk of my time telling you about something that doesn't exist? Because this is what tomorrow could look like: bottom-up, technology-enabled global collaboration to handle the biggest crisis our civilization has ever faced. We can save the planet, but we can't do it alone -- we need each other. Nobody's going to fix the world for us, but working together, making use of technological innovations and human communities alike, we might just be able to fix it ourselves. We have at our fingertips a cornucopia of compelling models, powerful tools, and innovative ideas that can make a meaningful difference in our planet's future. We don't need to wait for a magic bullet to save us all; we already have an arsenal of solutions just waiting to be used. There's a staggering array of wonders out there, across diverse disciplines, all telling us the same thing: success can be ours if we're willing to try. And as we say at Worldchanging, another world isn't just possible; another world is here. We just need to open our eyes. Thank you very much.

The world's largest and most devastating environmental and industrial project is situated in the heart of the largest and most intact forest in the world, Canada's boreal forest. It stretches right across northern Canada, in Labrador, it's home to the largest remaining wild caribou herd in the world, the George River caribou herd, numbering approximately 400,000 animals. Unfortunately, when I was there I couldn't find one of them, but you have the antlers as proof. All across the boreal, we're blessed with this incredible abundance of wetlands. Wetlands globally are one of the most endangered ecosystems. They're absolutely critical ecosystems, they clean air, they clean water, they sequester large amounts of greenhouse gases, and they're home to a huge diversity of species. In the boreal, they are also the home where almost 50 percent of the 800 bird species found in North America migrate north to breed and raise their young. In Ontario, the boreal marches down south to the north shore of Lake Superior. And these incredibly beautiful boreal forests were the inspiration for some of the most famous art in Canadian history, the Group of Seven were very inspired by this landscape, and so the boreal is not just a really key part of our natural heritage, but also an important part of our cultural heritage. In Manitoba, this is an image from the east side of Lake Winnipeg, and this is the home of the newly designated UNESCO Cultural Heritage site. In Saskatchewan, as across all of the boreal, home to some of our most famous rivers, an incredible network of rivers and lakes that every school-age child learns about, the Peace, the Athabasca, the Churchill here, the Mackenzie, and these networks were the historical routes for the voyageur and the coureur des bois, the first non-Aboriginal explorers of northern Canada that, taking from the First Nations people, used canoes and paddled to explore for a trade route, a Northwest Passage for the fur trade. In the North, the boreal is bordered by the tundra, and just below that, in Yukon, we have this incredible valley, the Tombstone Valley. And the Tombstone Valley is home to the Porcupine caribou herd. Now you've probably heard about the Porcupine caribou herd in the context of its breeding ground in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Well, the wintering ground is also critical and it also is not protected, and is potentially, could be potentially, exploited for gas and mineral rights. The western border of the boreal in British Columbia is marked by the Coast Mountains, and on the other side of those mountains is the greatest remaining temperate rainforest in the world, the Great Bear Rainforest, and we'll discuss that in a few minutes in a bit more detail. All across the boreal, it's home for a huge incredible range of indigenous peoples, and a rich and varied culture. And I think that one of the reasons why so many of these groups have retained a link to the past, know their native languages, the songs, the dances, the traditions, I think part of that reason is because of the remoteness, the span and the wilderness of this almost 95 percent intact ecosystem. And I think particularly now, as we see ourselves in a time of environmental crisis, we can learn so much from these people who have lived so sustainably in this ecosystem for over 10,000 years. In the heart of this ecosystem is the very antithesis of all of these values that we've been talking about, and I think these are some of the core values that make us proud to be Canadians. This is the Alberta tar sands, the largest oil reserves on the planet outside of Saudi Arabia. Trapped underneath the boreal forest and wetlands of northern Alberta are these vast reserves of this sticky, tar-like bitumen. And the mining and the exploitation of that is creating devastation on a scale that the planet has never seen before. I want to try to convey some sort of a sense of the size of this. If you look at that truck there, it is the largest truck of its kind of the planet. It is a 400-ton-capacity dump truck and its dimensions are 45 feet long by 35 feet wide and 25 feet high. If I stand beside that truck, my head comes to around the bottom of the yellow part of that hubcap. Within the dimensions of that truck, you could build a 3,000-square-foot two-story home quite easily. I did the math. So instead of thinking of that as a truck, think of that as a 3,000-square-foot home. That's not a bad size home. And line those trucks/homes back and forth across there from the bottom all the way to the top. And then think of how large that very small section of one mine is. Now, you can apply that same kind of thinking here as well. Now, here you see -- of course, as you go further on, these trucks become like a pixel. Again, imagine those all back and forth there. How large is that one portion of a mine? That would be a huge, vast metropolitan area, probably much larger than the city of Victoria. And this is just one of a number of mines, 10 mines so far right now. This is one section of one mining complex, and there are about another 40 or 50 in the approval process. No tar sands mine has actually ever been denied approval, so it is essentially a rubber stamp. The other method of extraction is what's called the in-situ. And here, massive amounts of water are super-heated and pumped through the ground, through these vasts networks of pipelines, seismic lines, drill paths, compressor stations. And even though this looks maybe not quite as repugnant as the mines, it's even more damaging in some ways. It impacts and fragments a larger part of the wilderness, where there is 90 percent reduction of key species, like woodland caribou and grizzly bears, and it consumes even more energy, more water, and produces at least as much greenhouse gas. So these in-situ developments are at least as ecologically damaging as the mines. The oil produced from either method produces more greenhouse gas emissions than any other oil. This is one of the reasons why it's called the world's dirtiest oil. It's also one of the reasons why it is the largest and fastest-growing single source of carbon in Canada, and it is also a reason why Canada is now number three in terms of producing carbon per person. The tailings ponds are the largest toxic impoundments on the planet. Oil sands -- or rather I should say tar sands -- "oil sands" is a P.R.-created term so that the oil companies wouldn't be trying to promote something that sounds like a sticky tar-like substance that's the world's dirtiest oil. So they decided to call it oil sands. The tar sands consume more water than any other oil process, three to five barrels of water are taken, polluted and then returned into tailings ponds, the largest toxic impoundments on the planet. SemCrude, just one of the licensees, in just one of their tailings ponds, dumps 250,000 tons of this toxic gunk every single day. That's creating the largest toxic impoundments in the history of the planet. So far, this is enough toxin to cover the face of Lake Eerie a foot deep. And the tailings ponds range in size up to 9,000 acres. That's two-thirds the size of the entire island of Manhattan. That's like from Wall Street at the southern edge of Manhattan up to maybe 120th Street. So this is an absolutely -- this is one of the larger tailings ponds. This might be, what? I don't know, half the size of Manhattan. And you can see in the context, it's just a relatively small section of one of 10 mining complexes and another 40 to 50 on stream to be approved soon. And of course, these tailings ponds -- well, you can't see many ponds from outer space and you can see these, so maybe we should stop calling them ponds -- these massive toxic wastelands are built unlined and on the banks of the Athabasca River. And the Athabasca River drains downstream to a range of Aboriginal communities. In Fort Chippewa, the 800 people there, are finding toxins in the food chain, this has been scientifically proven. The tar sands toxins are in the food chain, and this is causing cancer rates up to 10 times what they are in the rest of Canada. In spite of that, people have to live, have to eat this food in order to survive. The incredibly high price of flying food into these remote Northern Aboriginal communities and the high rate of unemployment makes this an absolute necessity for survival. And not that many years ago, I was lent a boat by a First Nations man. And he said, "When you go out on the river, do not under any circumstances eat the fish. It's carcinogenic." And yet, on the front porch of that man's cabin, I saw four fish. He had to feed his family to survive. And as a parent, I just can't imagine what that does to your soul. And that's what we're doing. The boreal forest is also perhaps our best defense against global warming and climate change. The boreal forest sequesters more carbon than any other terrestrial ecosystem. And this is absolutely key. So what we're doing is, we're taking the most concentrated greenhouse gas sink, twice as much greenhouse gases are sequestered in the boreal per acre than the tropical rainforests. And what we're doing is we're destroying this carbon sink, turning it into a carbon bomb. And we're replacing that with the largest industrial project in the history of the world, which is producing the most high-carbon greenhouse gas emitting oil in the world. And we're doing this on the second largest oil reserves on the planet. This is one of the reasons why Canada, originally a climate change hero -- we were one of the first signatories of the Kyoto Accord. Now we're the country that has full-time lobbyists in the European Union and Washington, D.C. threatening trade wars when these countries talk about wanting to bring in positive legislation to limit the import of high-carbon fuels, of greenhouse gas emissions, anything like this, at international conferences, whether they're in Copenhagen or Cancun, international conferences on climate change, we're the country that gets the dinosaur award every single day as being the biggest obstacle to progress on this issue. Just 70 miles downstream is the world's largest freshwater delta, the Peace-Athabasca Delta, the only one at the juncture of all four migratory flyways. This is a globally significant wetland, perhaps the greatest on the planet. Incredible habitat for half the bird species you find in North America, migrating here. And also the last refuge for the largest herd of wild bison, and also, of course, critical habitat for another whole range of other species. But it too is being threatened by the massive amount of water being drawn from the Athabasca, which feeds these wetlands, and also the incredible toxic burden of the largest toxic unlined impoundments on the planet, which are leaching in to the food chain for all the species downstream. So as bad as all that is, things are going to get much worse, much, much worse. This is the infrastructure as we see it about now. This is what's planned for 2015. And you can see here the Keystone Pipeline, which would take tar sands raw down to the Gulf Coast, punching a pipeline through the heart, the agricultural heart of North America, of the United States, and securing the contract with the dirtiest fuel in the world by consumption of the United States, and promoting a huge disincentive to a sustainable clean energy future for America. Here you see the route down the Mackenzie Valley. This would put a pipeline to take natural gas from the Beaufort Sea through the heart of the third largest watershed basin in the world, and the only one which is 95 percent intact. And building a pipeline with an industrial highway would change forever this incredible wilderness, which is a true rarity on the planet today. So the Great Bear Rainforest is just over the hill there, within a few miles we go from these dry boreal forests of 100-year-old trees, maybe 10 inches across, and soon we're in the coastal temperate rainforest, rain-drenched, 1,000-year-old trees, 20 feet across, a completely different ecosystem. And the Great Bear Rainforest is generally considered to be the largest coastal temperate rainforest ecosystem in the world. Some of the greatest densities of, some of the most iconic and threatened species on the planet, and yet there's a proposal, of course, to build a pipeline to take huge tankers, 10 times the size of the Exxon Valdez, through some of the most difficult to navigate waters in the world, where only just a few years ago, a B.C. ferry ran aground. When one of these tar sands tankers, carrying the dirtiest oil, 10 times as much as the Exxon Valdez, eventually hits a rock and goes down, we're going to have one of the worst ecological disasters this planet has ever seen. And here we have the plan out to 2030. What they're proposing is an almost four-times increase in production, and that would industrialize an area the size of Florida. In doing so, we'll be removing a large part of our greatest carbon sink and replacing it with the most high greenhouse gas emission oil in the future. The world does not need any more tar mines. The world does not need any more pipelines to wed our addiction to fossil fuels. And the world certainly does not need the largest toxic impoundments to grow and multiply and further threaten the downstream communities. And let's face it, we all live downstream in an era of global warming and climate change. What we need, is we all need to act to ensure that Canada respects the massive amounts of freshwater that we hold in this country. We need to ensure that these wetlands and forests that are our best and greatest and most critical defense against global warming are protected, and we are not releasing that carbon bomb into the atmosphere. And we need to all gather together and say no to the tar sands. And we can do that. There is a huge network all over the world fighting to stop this project. And I quite simply think that this is not something that should be decided just in Canada. Everyone in this room, everyone across Canada, everyone listening to this presentation has a role to play and, I think, a responsibility. Because what we do here is going to change our history, it's going to color our possibility to survive, and for our children to survive and have a rich future. We have an incredible gift in the boreal, an incredible opportunity to preserve our best defense against global warming, but we could let that slip away. The tar sands could threaten not just a large section of the boreal. It compromises the life and the health of some of our most underprivileged and vulnerable people, the Aboriginal communities that have so much to teach us. It could destroy the Athabasca Delta, the largest and possibly greatest freshwater delta in the planet. It could destroy the Great Bear Rainforest, the largest temperate rainforest in the world. And it could have huge impacts on the future of the agricultural heartland of North America. I hope that you will all, if you've been moved by this presentation, join with the growing international community to get Canada to step up to its responsibilities, to convince Canada to go back to being a climate change champion instead of a climate change villain, and to say no to the tar sands, and yes to a clean energy future for all. Thank you so much. (Applause)

Dogs have interests. They have interest sniffing each other, chasing squirrels. And if we don't make that a reward in training, that will be a distraction. It's always sort of struck me as really a scary thought that if you see a dog in a park, and the owner is calling it, and the owner says, you know, "Puppy, come here, come here," and the dog thinks, "Hmm, interesting. I'm sniffing this other dog's rear end, the owner's calling." It's a difficult choice, right? Rear end, owner. Rear end wins. I mean, you lose. You cannot compete with the environment, if you have an adolescent dog's brain. So, when we train, we're always trying to take into account the dog's point of view. Now, I'm here largely because there's kind of a rift in dog training at the moment that -- on one side, we have people who think that you train a dog, number one, by making up rules, human rules. We don't take the dog's point of view into account. So the human says, "You're going to act this way, damn it. We're going to force you to act against your will, to bend to our will." Then, number two, we keep these rules a secret from the dog. And then number three, now we can punish the dog for breaking rules he didn't even know existed. So you get a little puppy, he comes. His only crime is he grew. When he was a little puppy, he puts his paws on your leg -- you know, isn't that nice? And you go, "Oh, there's a good boy." You bend down, you pat him -- you reward him for jumping up. His one mistake is he's a Tibetan mastiff, and a few months later, he weighs, you know, 80 pounds. Every time he jumps up, he gets all sorts of abuse. I mean, it is really very, very scary the abuse that dogs get. So, this whole dominance issue -- number one, what we get in dog training is this Mickey-Mouse interpretation of a very complicated social system. And they take this stuff seriously. Male dogs are very serious about a hierarchy, because it prevents physical fights. Of course, female dogs, bitches, on the other hand, have several bitch amendments to male hierarchical rule. The number one is, "I have it, you don't." And what you will find is a very, very low-ranking bitch will quite easily keep a bone away from a high-ranking male. So, we get in dog training this notion of dominances, or of the alpha dog. I'm sure that you've heard this. Dogs get so abused. Dogs, horses and humans -- these are the three species which are so abused in life. And the reason is built into their behavior -- is to always come back and apologize. Like, "Oh, I'm sorry you had to beat me. I'm really sorry, yes, it's my fault." They are just so beatable, and that's why they get beaten. The poor puppy jumps up, you open the dog book, what does it say? "Hold his front paws, squeeze his front paws, stamp on his hind feet, squirt him in the face with lemon juice, hit him on the head with a rolled-up newspaper, knee him in the chest, flip him over backwards." Because he grew? And because he's performing a behavior you've trained him to do? This is insanity. I ask owners, "Well, how would you like the dog to greet you?" And people say, "Well, I don't know, to sit, I guess." I said, "Let's teach him to sit." And then we give him a reason for sitting. Because the first stage is basically teaching a dog ESL. I could speak to you and say, "Laytay-chai, paisey, paisey." Go on, something should happen now. Why aren't you responding? Oh, you don't speak Swahili. Well, I've got news for you. The dog doesn't speak English, or American, or Spanish, or French. So the first stage in training is to teach the dog ESL, English as a second language. And that's how we use the food lure in the hand, and we use food because we're dealing with owners. My wife doesn't need food -- she's a great trainer, much better than I am. I don't need food, but the average owner says, "Puppy, sit." Or they go, "Sit, sit, sit." They're making a hand signal in front of the dog's rectum for some reason, like the dog has a third eye there -- it's insane. You know, "Sit, sit." No, we go, "Puppy, sit" -- boom, it's got it in six to 10 trials. Then we phase out the food as a lure, and now the dog knows that "sit" means sit, and you can actually communicate to a dog in a perfectly constructed English sentence. "Phoenix, come here, take this, and go to Jamie, please." And I've taught her "Phoenix," "come here," "take this," "go to" and the name of my son, "Jamie." And the dog can take a note, and I've got my own little search-and-rescue dog. He'll find Jamie wherever he is, you know, wherever kids are, crushing rocks by a stream or something, and take him a little message that says, "Hey, dinner's ready. Come in for dinner." So, at this point, the dog knows what we want it to do. Will it do it? Not necessarily, no. As I said, if he's in the park and there's a rear end to sniff, why come to the owner? The dog lives with you, the dog can get you any time. The dog can sniff your butt, if you like, when he wants to. At the moment, he's in the park, and you are competing with smells, and other dogs, and squirrels. So the second stage in training is to teach the dog to want to do what we want him to do, and this is very easy. We use the Premack principle. Basically, we follow a low-frequency behavior -- one the dog doesn't want to do -- by a high-frequency behavior, commonly known as a behavior problem, or a dog hobby -- something the dog does like to do. That will then become a reward for the lower-frequency behavior. So we go, "sit," on the couch; "sit," tummy-rub; "sit," look, I throw a tennis ball; "sit," say hello to that other dog. Yes, we put "sniff butt" on queue. "Sit," sniff butt. So now all of these distractions that worked against training now become rewards that work for training. And what we're doing, in essence, is we're teaching the dog, kind of like -- we're letting the dog think that the dog is training us. And I can imagine this dog, you know, speaking through the fence to, say, an Akita, saying, "Wow, my owners, they are so incredibly easy to train. They're like Golden Retrievers. All I have to do is sit, and they do everything. They open doors, they drive my car, they massage me, they will throw tennis balls, they will cook for me and serve the food. It's like, if I just sit, that's my command. Then I have my own personal doorman, chauffeur, masseuse, chef and waiter." And now the dog's really happy. And this, to me, is always what training is. So we really motivate the dog to want to do it, such that the need for punishment seldom comes up. Now we move to phase three, when now -- there's times, you know, when daddy knows best. And I have a little sign on my fridge, and it says, "Because I'm the daddy, that's why." Sorry, no more explanation. "I'm the daddy, you're not. Sit." And there's times, for example, if my son's friends leave the door open, the dogs have to know you don't step across this line. This is a life-or-death thing. You leave this, the sanctity of your house, and you could be hit on the street. So some things we have to let the dog know, "You mustn't do this." And so we have to enforce, but without force. People here get very confused about what a punishment is. They think a punishment is something nasty. I bet a lot of you do, right? You think it's something painful, or scary, or nasty. It doesn't have to be. There's several definitions of what a punishment is, but one definition, the most popular, is: a punishment is a stimulus that reduces the immediately preceding behavior, such that it's less likely to occur in the future. It does not have to be nasty, scary or painful. And I would say, if it doesn't have to be, then maybe it shouldn't be. I was working with a very dangerous dog about a year ago. And this was a dog that put both his owners in hospital, plus the brother-in-law, plus the child. And I only agreed to work with it if they promised it would stay in their house, and they never took it outside. The dog is actually euthanized now, but this was a dog I worked with for a while. A lot of the aggression happened around the kitchen, so while I was there -- this was on the fourth visit -- we did a four and a half hour down-stay, with the dog on his mat. And he was kept there by the owner's calm insistence. When the dog would try to leave the mat, she would say, "Rover, on the mat, on the mat, on the mat." The dog broke his down-stay 22 times in four and a half hours, while she cooked dinner, because we had a lot of aggression related towards food. The breaks got fewer and fewer. You see, the punishment was working. The behavior problem was going away. She never raised her voice. If she did, she would have got bitten. It's not a good dog you shout at. And a lot of my friends train really neat animals, grizzly bears -- if you've ever seen a grizzly bear on the telly or in film, then it's a friend of mine who's trained it -- killer whales. I love it because it wires you up. How are you going to reprimand a grizzly bear? "Bad bear, bad bear!" Voom! Your head now is 100 yards away, sailing through the air, OK? This is crazy. So, where do we go from here? We want a better way. Dogs deserve better. But for me, the reason for this actually has to do with dogs. It has to do with watching people train puppies, and realizing they have horrendous interaction skills, horrendous relationship skills. Not just with their puppy, but with the rest of the family at class. I mean, my all-time classic is another "come here" one. You see someone in the park -- and I'll cover my mic when I say this, because I don't want to wake you up -- and there's the owner in the park, and their dog's over here, and they say, "Rover, come here. Rover, come here. Rover, come here, you son of a bitch." The dog says, "I don't think so." (Laughter) I mean, who in their right mind would think that a dog would want to approach them when they're screaming like that? Instead, the dog says, "I know that tone. I know that tone. Previously, when I've approached, I've gotten punished there." I was walking onto a plane -- this, for me, was a pivotal moment in my career, and it really cemented what I wanted to do with this whole puppy-training thing, the notion of how to teach puppies in a dog-friendly way to want to do what we want to do, so we don't have to force them. You know, I puppy-train my child. And the seminal moment was, I was getting on a plane in Dallas, and in row two was a father, I presume, and a young boy about five, kicking the back of the chair. "Johnny, don't do that." Kick, kick, kick. "Johnny, don't do that." Kick, kick, kick. I'm standing right here with my bag. The father leans over, grabs him like this and gives him ugly face. And ugly face is this -- when you go face-to-face with a puppy or a child, you say, "What are you doing! Now stop it, stop it, stop it!" And I went, "Oh my God, do I do something?" That child has lost everything -- that one of the two people he can trust in this world has absolutely pulled the rug from under his feet. And I thought, "Do I tell this jerk to quit it?" I thought, "Ian, stay out of it, stay out of it, you know, walk on." I walked to the back of the plane, I sat down, and a thought came to me. If that had been a dog, I would have laid him out. (Laughter) If he had kicked a dog, I would have punched him out. He kicked a child, grabs the child like this and I let it go. And this is what it's all about. These relationship skills are so easy. I mean, we as humans, our shallowness when we choose a life-mate based on the three Cs -- coat color, conformation, cuteness. You know, kind of like a little robot. This is how we go into a relationship, and it's hunky-dory for a year. And then, a little behavior problem comes up. No different from the dog barking. The husband won't clear up his clothes, or the wife's always late for meetings, whatever it is, OK? And it then starts, and we get into this thing, and our personal feedback -- there's two things about it. When you watch people interacting with animals or other people, there is very little feedback, it's too infrequent. And when it happens, it's bad, it's nasty. You see it's especially in families, especially with spouses, especially with children, especially with parents. You see it especially in the workplace, especially from boss to employee. It's as if there's some schadenfreude there, that we actually take delight in people getting things wrong, so that we can then moan and groan and bitch at them. And this, I would say, is the biggest human foible that we have. It really is. We take the good for granted, and we moan and groan at the bad. And I think this whole notion of these skills should be taught. You know, calculus is wonderful. When I was a kid, I was a calculus whiz. I don't understand a thing about it now, but I could do it as a kid. Geometry, fantastic. You know, quantum mechanics -- these are cool things. But they don't save marriages and they don't raise children. And my look to the future is, and what I want to do with this doggy stuff, is to teach people that you know, your husband's just as easy to train. Probably easier -- if you got a Rottie -- much easier to train. Your kids are easy to train. All you've got to do is to watch them, to time-sample the behavior, and say, every five minutes, you ask the question, "Is it good, or is it bad?" If it's good, say, "That was really neat, thank you." That is such a powerful training technique. This should be taught in schools. Relationships -- how do you negotiate? How you do negotiate with your friend who wants your toy? You know, how to prepare you for your first relationship? How on earth about raising children? We think how we do it -- one night in bed, we're pregnant, and then we're raising the most important thing in life, a child. No, this is what should be taught -- the good living, the good habits, which are just as hard to break as bad habits. So, that would be my wish to the future. Ah, damn, I wanted to end exactly on time, but I got eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two -- so thank you very much. That's my talk, thank you. (Applause)

I'd like to start tonight by something completely different, asking you to join me by stepping off the land and jumping into the open ocean for a moment. 90 percent of the living space on the planet is in the open ocean, and it's where life -- the title of our seminar tonight -- it's where life began. And it's a lively and a lovely place, but we're rapidly changing the oceans with our -- not only with our overfishing, our irresponsible fishing, our adding of pollutants like fertilizer from our cropland, but also, most recently, with climate change, and Steve Schneider, I'm sure, will be going into greater detail on this. Now, as we continue to tinker with the oceans, more and more reports are predicting that the kinds of seas that we're creating will be conducive to low-energy type of animals, like jellyfish and bacteria. And this might be the kind of seas we're headed for. Now jellyfish are strangely hypnotic and beautiful, and you'll see lots of gorgeous ones at the aquarium on Friday, but they sting like hell, and jellyfish sushi and sashimi is just not going to fill you up. About 100 grams of jellyfish equals four calories. So it may be good for the waistline, but it probably won't keep you satiated for very long. And a sea that's just filled and teeming with jellyfish isn't very good for all the other creatures that live in the oceans, that is, unless you eat jellyfish. And this is this voracious predator launching a sneak attack on this poor little unsuspecting jellyfish there, a by-the-wind sailor. And that predator is the giant ocean sunfish, the Mola mola, whose primary prey are jellyfish. This animal is in "The Guinness World Book of Records" for being the world's heaviest bony fish. It reaches up to almost 5,000 pounds -- on a diet of jellyfish, primarily. And I think it's kind of a nice little cosmological convergence here that the Mola mola -- its common name is sunfish -- that its favorite food is the moon jelly. So it's kind of nice, the sun and the moon getting together this way, even if one is eating the other. Now this is typically how you see sunfish, this is where they get their common name. They like to sunbathe, can't blame them. They just lay out on the surface of the sea and most people think they're sick or lazy, but that's a typical behavior, they lie out and bask on the surface. Their other name, Mola mola, is -- it sounds Hawaiian, but it's actually Latin for millstone, and that's attributable to their roundish, very bizarre, cut-off shape. It's as if, as they were growing, they just forgot the tail part. And that's actually what drew me to the Mola in the first place, was this terribly bizarre shape. You know, you look at sharks, and they're streamlined, and they're sleek, and you look at tuna, and they're like torpedoes -- they just give away their agenda. They're about migration and strength, and then you look at the sunfish. (Laughter) And this is just so elegantly mysterious, it's just -- it really kind of holds its cards a lot tighter than say, a tuna. So I was just intrigued with what -- you know, what is this animal's story? Well, as with anything in biology, nothing really makes sense except in the light of evolution. The Mola's no exception. They appeared shortly after the dinosaurs disappeared, 65 million years ago, at a time when whales still had legs, and they come from a rebellious little puffer fish faction -- oblige me a little Kipling-esque storytelling here. Of course evolution is somewhat random, and you know, about 55 million years ago there was this rebellious little puffer fish faction that said, oh, the heck with the coral reefs -- we're going to head to the high seas. And lots of generations, lots of tweaking and torquing, and we turn our puffer into the Mola. You know, if you give Mother Nature enough time, that is what she will produce. They look -- maybe they look kind of prehistoric and unfinished, abridged perhaps, but in fact, in fact they are the -- they vie for the top position of the most evolutionarily-derived fish in the sea, right up there with flat fish. They're -- every single thing about that fish has been changed. And in terms of fishes -- fishes appeared 500 million years ago, and they're pretty modern, just 50 million years ago, so -- so interestingly, they give away their ancestry as they develop. They start as little eggs, and they're in "The Guinness World Book of Records" again for having the most number of eggs of any vertebrate on the planet. A single four-foot female had 300 million eggs, can carry 300 million eggs in her ovaries -- imagine -- and they get to be over 10 feet long. Imagine what a 10 foot one has. And from that little egg, they pass through this spiky little porcupine fish stage, reminiscent of their ancestry, and develop -- this is their little adolescent stage. They school as adolescents, and become behemoth loners as adults. That's a little diver up there in the corner. They're in "The Guinness World Book of Records" again for being the vertebrate growth champion of the world. From their little hatching size of their egg, into their little larval stage till they reach adulthood, they put on 600 million times an increase in weight. 600 million. Now imagine if you gave birth to a little baby, and you had to feed this thing. That would mean that your child, you would expect it to gain the weight of six Titanics. Now I don't know how you'd feed a child like that but -- we don't know how fast the Molas grow in the wild, but captive growth studies at the Monterey Bay Aquarium -- one of the first places to have them in captivity -- they had one that gained 800 lbs in 14 months. I said, now, that's a true American. (Laughter) (Applause) So being a loner is a great thing, especially in today's seas, because schooling used to be salvation for fishes, but it's suicide for fishes now. But unfortunately Molas, even though they don't school, they still get caught in nets as by-catch. If we're going to save the world from total jellyfish domination, then we've got to figure out what the jellyfish predators -- how they live their lives, like the Mola. And unfortunately, they make up a large portion of the California by-catch -- up to 26 percent of the drift net. And in the Mediterranean, in the swordfish net fisheries, they make up up to 90 percent. So we've got to figure out how they're living their lives. And how do you do that? How do you do that with an animal -- very few places in the world. This is an open ocean creature. It knows no boundaries -- it doesn't go to land. How do you get insight? How do you seduce an open ocean creature like that to spill its secrets? Well, there's some great new technology that has just recently become available, and it's just a boon for getting insight into open ocean animals. And it's pictured right here, that little tag up there. That little tag can record temperature, depth and light intensity, which is correlated with time, and from that we can get locations. And it can record this data for up to two years, and keep it in that tag, release at a pre-programmed time, float to the surface, upload all that data, that whole travelogue, to satellite, which relays it directly to our computers, and we've got that whole dataset. And we didn't even have -- we just had to tag the animal and then we went home and you know, sat at our desks. So the great thing about the Mola is that when we put the tag on them -- if you look up here -- that's streaming off, that's right where we put the tag. And it just so happens that's a parasite hanging off the Mola. Molas are infamous for carrying tons of parasites. They're just parasite hotels; even their parasites have parasites. I think Donne wrote a poem about that. But they have 40 genera of parasites, and so we figured just one more parasite won't be too much of a problem. And they happen to be a very good vehicle for carrying oceanographic equipment. They don't seem to mind, so far. So what are we trying to find out? We're focusing on the Pacific. We're tagging on the California coast, and we're tagging over in Taiwan and Japan. And we're interested in how these animals are using the currents, using temperature, using the open ocean, to live their lives. We'd love to tag in Monterey. Monterey is one of the few places in the world where Molas come in large numbers. Not this time of year -- it's more around October. And we'd love to tag here -- this is an aerial shot of Monterey -- but unfortunately, the Molas here end up looking like this because another one of our locals really likes Molas but in the wrong way. The California sea lion takes the Molas as soon as they come into the bay, rips off their fins, fashions them into the ultimate Frisbee, Mola style, and then tosses them back and forth. And I'm not exaggerating, it is just -- and sometimes they don't eat them, it's just spiteful. And you know, the locals think it's terrible behavior, it's just horrible watching this happen, day after day. The poor little Molas coming in, getting ripped to shreds, so we head down south, to San Diego. Not so many California sea lions down there. And the Molas there, you can find them with a spotter plane very easily, and they like to hang out under floating rafts of kelp. And under those kelps -- this is why the Molas come there because it's spa time for the Molas there. As soon as they get under those rafts of kelp, the exfoliating cleaner fish come. And they come and give the Molas -- you can see they strike this funny little position that says, "I'm not threatening, but I need a massage." (Laughter) And they'll put their fins out and their eyes go in the back of their head, and the fish come up and they just clean, clean, clean -- because the Molas, you know, there's just a smorgasbord of parasites. And it's also a great place to go down south because the water's warmer, and the Molas are kind of friendly down there. I mean what other kind of fish, if you approach it right, will say, "Okay, scratch me right there." You truly can swim up to a Mola -- they're very gentle -- and if you approach them right, you can give them a scratch and they enjoy it. So we've also tagged one part of the Pacific; we've gone over to another part of the Pacific, and we've tagged in Taiwan, and we tagged in Japan. And over in these places, the Molas are caught in set nets that line these countries. And they're not thrown back as by-catch, they're eaten. We were served a nine-course meal of Mola after we tagged. Well, not the one we tagged! And everything from the kidney, to the testes, to the back bone, to the fin muscle to -- I think that ís pretty much the whole fish -- is eaten. So the hardest part of tagging, now, is after you put that tag on, you have to wait, months. And you're just wondering, oh, I hope the fish is safe, I hope, I hope it's going to be able to actually live its life out during the course that the tag is recording. The tags cost 3500 dollars each, and then satellite time is another 500 dollars, so you're like, oh, I hope the tag is okay. And so the waiting is really the hardest part. I'm going to show you our latest dataset. And it hasn't been published, so it's totally privy information just for TED. And in showing you this, you know, when we're looking at this data, we're thinking, oh do these animals, do they cross the equator? Do they go from one side of the Pacific to the other? And we found that they kind of are homebodies. They're not big migrators. This is their track: we deployed the tag off of Tokyo, and the Mola in one month kind of got into the Kuroshio Current off of Japan and foraged there. And after four months, went up, you know, off of the north part of Japan. And that's kind of their home range. Now that's important, though, because if there's a lot of fishing pressure, that population doesn't get replenished. So that's a very important piece of data. But also what's important is that they're not slacker, lazy fish. They're super industrious. And this is a day in the life of a Mola, and if we -- they're up and down, and up and down, and up and down, and up and up and down, up to 40 times a day. As the sun comes up, you see in the blue, they start their dive. Down -- and as the sun gets brighter they go a little deeper, little deeper. They plumb the depths down to 600 meters, in temperatures to one degree centigrade, and this is why you see them on the surface -- it's so cold down there. They've got to come up, warm, get that solar power, and then plunge back into the depths, and go up and down and up and down. And they're hitting a layer down there; it's called the deep scattering layer -- which a whole variety of food's in that layer. So rather than just being some sunbathing slacker, they're really very industrious fish that dance this wild dance between the surface and the bottom and through temperature. We see the same pattern -- now with these tags we're seeing a similar pattern for swordfishes, manta rays, tunas, a real three-dimensional play. This is part of a much larger program called the Census of Marine Life, where they're going to be tagging all over the world and the Mola's going to enter into that. And what's exciting -- you all travel, and you know the best thing about traveling is to be able to find the locals, and to find the great places by getting the local knowledge. Well now with the Census of Marine Life, we'll be able to sidle up to all the locals and explore 90 percent of our living space, with local knowledge. It's never -- it's really never been a more exciting, or a vital time, to be a biologist. Which brings me to my last point, and what I think is kind of the most fun. I set up a website because I was getting so many questions about Molas and sunfish. And so I just figured I'd have the questions answered, and I'd be able to thank my funders, like National Geographic and Lindbergh. But people would write into the site with all sorts of, all sorts of stories about these animals and wanting to help me get samples for genetic analysis. And what I found most exciting is that everyone had a shared -- a shared love and an interest in the oceans. I was getting reports from Catholic nuns, Jewish Rabbis, Muslims, Christians -- everybody writing in, united by their love of life. And to me that -- I don't think I could say it any better than the immortal Bard himself: "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin." And sure, it may be just one big old silly fish, but it's helping. If it's helping to unite the world, I think it's definitely the fish of the future.

I grew up to study the brain because I have a brother who has been diagnosed with a brain disorder, schizophrenia. And as a sister and later, as a scientist, I wanted to understand, why is it that I can take my dreams, I can connect them to my reality, and I can make my dreams come true? What is it about my brother's brain and his schizophrenia that he cannot connect his dreams to a common and shared reality, so they instead become delusion? So I dedicated my career to research into the severe mental illnesses. And I moved from my home state of Indiana to Boston, where I was working in the lab of Dr. Francine Benes, in the Harvard Department of Psychiatry. And in the lab, we were asking the question, "What are the biological differences between the brains of individuals who would be diagnosed as normal control, as compared with the brains of individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, schizoaffective or bipolar disorder?" So we were essentially mapping the microcircuitry of the brain: which cells are communicating with which cells, with which chemicals, and then in what quantities of those chemicals? So there was a lot of meaning in my life because I was performing this type of research during the day, but then in the evenings and on the weekends, I traveled as an advocate for NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. But on the morning of December 10, 1996, I woke up to discover that I had a brain disorder of my own. A blood vessel exploded in the left half of my brain. And in the course of four hours, I watched my brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process all information. On the morning of the hemorrhage, I could not walk, talk, read, write or recall any of my life. I essentially became an infant in a woman's body. If you've ever seen a human brain, it's obvious that the two hemispheres are completely separate from one another. And I have brought for you a real human brain. (Groaning, laughter) So this is a real human brain. This is the front of the brain, the back of brain with the spinal cord hanging down, and this is how it would be positioned inside of my head. And when you look at the brain, it's obvious that the two cerebral cortices are completely separate from one another. For those of you who understand computers, our right hemisphere functions like a parallel processor, while our left hemisphere functions like a serial processor. The two hemispheres do communicate with one another through the corpus callosum, which is made up of some 300 million axonal fibers. But other than that, the two hemispheres are completely separate. Because they process information differently, each of our hemispheres think about different things, they care about different things, and, dare I say, they have very different personalities. Excuse me. Thank you. It's been a joy. Assistant: It has been. (Laughter) Our right human hemisphere is all about this present moment. It's all about "right here, right now." Our right hemisphere, it thinks in pictures and it learns kinesthetically through the movement of our bodies. Information, in the form of energy, streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems and then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like, what this present moment smells like and tastes like, what it feels like and what it sounds like. I am an energy-being connected to the energy all around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere. We are energy-beings connected to one another through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family. And right here, right now, we are brothers and sisters on this planet, here to make the world a better place. And in this moment we are perfect, we are whole and we are beautiful. My left hemisphere, our left hemisphere, is a very different place. Our left hemisphere thinks linearly and methodically. Our left hemisphere is all about the past and it's all about the future. Our left hemisphere is designed to take that enormous collage of the present moment and start picking out details, and more details about those details. It then categorizes and organizes all that information, associates it with everything in the past we've ever learned, and projects into the future all of our possibilities. And our left hemisphere thinks in language. It's that ongoing brain chatter that connects me and my internal world to my external world. It's that little voice that says to me, "Hey, you've got to remember to pick up bananas on your way home. I need them in the morning." It's that calculating intelligence that reminds me when I have to do my laundry. But perhaps most important, it's that little voice that says to me, "I am. I am." And as soon as my left hemisphere says to me "I am," I become separate. I become a single solid individual, separate from the energy flow around me and separate from you. And this was the portion of my brain that I lost on the morning of my stroke. On the morning of the stroke, I woke up to a pounding pain behind my left eye. And it was the kind of caustic pain that you get when you bite into ice cream. And it just gripped me -- and then it released me. And then it just gripped me -- and then it released me. And it was very unusual for me to ever experience any kind of pain, so I thought, "OK, I'll just start my normal routine." So I got up and I jumped onto my cardio glider, which is a full-body, full-exercise machine. And I'm jamming away on this thing, and I'm realizing that my hands look like primitive claws grasping onto the bar. And I thought, "That's very peculiar." And I looked down at my body and I thought, "Whoa, I'm a weird-looking thing." And it was as though my consciousness had shifted away from my normal perception of reality, where I'm the person on the machine having the experience, to some esoteric space where I'm witnessing myself having this experience. And it was all very peculiar, and my headache was just getting worse. So I get off the machine, and I'm walking across my living room floor, and I realize that everything inside of my body has slowed way down. And every step is very rigid and very deliberate. There's no fluidity to my pace, and there's this constriction in my area of perception, so I'm just focused on internal systems. And I'm standing in my bathroom getting ready to step into the shower, and I could actually hear the dialogue inside of my body. I heard a little voice saying, "OK. You muscles, you've got to contract. You muscles, you relax." And then I lost my balance, and I'm propped up against the wall. And I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. I can't define where I begin and where I end, because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall. And all I could detect was this energy -- energy. And I'm asking myself, "What is wrong with me? What is going on?" And in that moment, my left hemisphere brain chatter went totally silent. Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button. Total silence. And at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind. But then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of the energy around me. And because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there. Then all of a sudden my left hemisphere comes back online and it says to me, "Hey! We've got a problem! We've got to get some help." And I'm going, "Ahh! I've got a problem!" (Laughter) So it's like, "OK, I've got a problem." But then I immediately drifted right back out into the consciousness -- and I affectionately refer to this space as La La Land. But it was beautiful there. Imagine what it would be like to be totally disconnected from your brain chatter that connects you to the external world. So here I am in this space, and my job, and any stress related to my job -- it was gone. And I felt lighter in my body. And imagine all of the relationships in the external world and any stressors related to any of those -- they were gone. And I felt this sense of peacefulness. And imagine what it would feel like to lose 37 years of emotional baggage! (Laughter) Oh! I felt euphoria -- euphoria. It was beautiful. And again, my left hemisphere comes online and it says, "Hey! You've got to pay attention. We've got to get help." And I'm thinking, "I've got to get help. I've got to focus." So I get out of the shower and I mechanically dress and I'm walking around my apartment, and I'm thinking, "I've got to get to work. Can I drive?" And in that moment, my right arm went totally paralyzed by my side. Then I realized, "Oh my gosh! I'm having a stroke!" And the next thing my brain says to me is, Wow! This is so cool! (Laughter) This is so cool! How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out?" (Laughter) And then it crosses my mind, "But I'm a very busy woman!" (Laughter) "I don't have time for a stroke!" So I'm like, "OK, I can't stop the stroke from happening, so I'll do this for a week or two, and then I'll get back to my routine. OK. So I've got to call help. I've got to call work." I couldn't remember the number at work, so I remembered, in my office I had a business card with my number. So I go into my business room, I pull out a three-inch stack of business cards. And I'm looking at the card on top and even though I could see clearly in my mind's eye what my business card looked like, I couldn't tell if this was my card or not, because all I could see were pixels. And the pixels of the words blended with the pixels of the background and the pixels of the symbols, and I just couldn't tell. And then I would wait for what I call a wave of clarity. And in that moment, I would be able to reattach to normal reality and I could tell that's not the card... that's not the card. It took me 45 minutes to get one inch down inside of that stack of cards. In the meantime, for 45 minutes, the hemorrhage is getting bigger in my left hemisphere. I do not understand numbers, I do not understand the telephone, but it's the only plan I have. So I take the phone pad and I put it right here. I take the business card, I put it right here, and I'm matching the shape of the squiggles on the card to the shape of the squiggles on the phone pad. But then I would drift back out into La La Land, and not remember when I came back if I'd already dialed those numbers. So I had to wield my paralyzed arm like a stump and cover the numbers as I went along and pushed them, so that as I would come back to normal reality, I'd be able to tell, "Yes, I've already dialed that number." Eventually, the whole number gets dialed and I'm listening to the phone, and my colleague picks up the phone and he says to me, "Woo woo woo woo." (Laughter) (Laughter) And I think to myself, "Oh my gosh, he sounds like a Golden Retriever!" (Laughter) And so I say to him -- clear in my mind, I say to him: "This is Jill! I need help!" And what comes out of my voice is, "Woo woo woo woo woo." I'm thinking, "Oh my gosh, I sound like a Golden Retriever." So I couldn't know -- I didn't know that I couldn't speak or understand language until I tried. So he recognizes that I need help and he gets me help. And a little while later, I am riding in an ambulance from one hospital across Boston to [Massachusetts] General Hospital. And I curl up into a little fetal ball. And just like a balloon with the last bit of air, just right out of the balloon, I just felt my energy lift and just I felt my spirit surrender. And in that moment, I knew that I was no longer the choreographer of my life. And either the doctors rescue my body and give me a second chance at life, or this was perhaps my moment of transition. When I woke later that afternoon, I was shocked to discover that I was still alive. When I felt my spirit surrender, I said goodbye to my life. And my mind was now suspended between two very opposite planes of reality. Stimulation coming in through my sensory systems felt like pure pain. Light burned my brain like wildfire, and sounds were so loud and chaotic that I could not pick a voice out from the background noise, and I just wanted to escape. Because I could not identify the position of my body in space, I felt enormous and expansive, like a genie just liberated from her bottle. And my spirit soared free, like a great whale gliding through the sea of silent euphoria. Nirvana. I found Nirvana. And I remember thinking, there's no way I would ever be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny little body. But then I realized, "But I'm still alive! I'm still alive, and I have found Nirvana. And if I have found Nirvana and I'm still alive, then everyone who is alive can find Nirvana." And I pictured a world filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people who knew that they could come to this space at any time. And that they could purposely choose to step to the right of their left hemispheres -- and find this peace. And then I realized what a tremendous gift this experience could be, what a stroke of insight this could be to how we live our lives. And it motivated me to recover. Two and a half weeks after the hemorrhage, the surgeons went in, and they removed a blood clot the size of a golf ball that was pushing on my language centers. Here I am with my mama, who is a true angel in my life. It took me eight years to completely recover. So who are we? We are the life-force power of the universe, with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds. And we have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world. Right here, right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere, where we are. I am the life-force power of the universe. I am the life-force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form, at one with all that is. Or, I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere, where I become a single individual, a solid. Separate from the flow, separate from you. I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: intellectual, neuroanatomist. These are the "we" inside of me. Which would you choose? Which do you choose? And when? I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner-peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world, and the more peaceful our planet will be. And I thought that was an idea worth spreading. Thank you. (Applause)

It was an afternoon in the fall of 2005. I was working at the ACLU as the organization's science advisor. I really, really loved my job, but I was having one of those days where I was feeling just a little bit discouraged. So I wandered down the hallway to my colleague Chris Hansen's office. Chris had been at the ACLU for more than 30 years, so he had deep institutional knowledge and insights. I explained to Chris that I was feeling a little bit stuck. I had been investigating a number of issues at the intersection of science and civil liberties -- super interesting. But I wanted the ACLU to engage these issues in a much bigger way, in a way that could really make a difference. So Chris cut right to the chase, and he says, "Well, of all the issues you've been looking at, what are the top five?" "Well, there's genetic discrimination, and reproductive technologies, and biobanking, and ... oh, there's this really cool issue, functional MRI and using it for lie detection, and ... oh, and of course, there's gene patents." "Gene patents?" "Yes, you know, patents on human genes." "No! You're telling me that the US government has been issuing patents on part of the human body? That can't be right." I went back to my office and sent Chris three articles. And 20 minutes later, he came bursting in my office. "Oh my god! You're right! Who can we sue?" (Laughter) Now Chris is a really brilliant lawyer, but he knew almost nothing about patent law and certainly nothing about genetics. I knew something about genetics, but I wasn't even a lawyer, let alone a patent lawyer. So clearly we had a lot to learn before we could file a lawsuit. First, we needed to understand exactly what was patented when someone patented a gene. Gene patents typically contain dozens of claims, but the most controversial of these are to so-called "isolated DNA" -- namely, a piece of DNA that has been removed from a cell. Gene patent proponents say, "See? We didn't patent the gene in your body, we patented an isolated gene." And that's true, but the problem is that any use of the gene requires that it be isolated. And the patents weren't just to a particular gene that they isolated, but on every possible version of that gene. So what does that mean? That means that you can't give your gene to your doctor and ask him or her to look at it, say, to see if it has any mutations, without permission of the patent holder. It also means that the patent holder has the right to stop anyone from using that gene in research or clinical testing. Allowing patent holders, often private companies, to lock up stretches of the human genome was harming patients. Consider Abigail, a 10-year-old with long QT syndrome, a serious heart condition that, if left untreated, can result in sudden death. The company that obtained a patent on two genes associated with this condition developed a test to diagnose the syndrome. But then they went bankrupt and they never offered it. So another lab tried to offer the test, but the company that held the patents threatened to sue the lab for patent infringement. So as a result, for 2 years, no test was available. During that time, Abigail died of undiagnosed long QT. Gene patents clearly were a problem and were harming patients. But was there a way we could challenge them? Turns out that the Supreme Court has made clear through a long line of cases, that certain things are not patent eligible. You can't patent products of nature -- the air, the water, minerals, elements of the periodic table. And you can't patent laws of nature -- the law of gravity, E = mc2. These things are just too fundamental and must remain free to all and reserved exclusively to none. It seemed to us that DNA, the most fundamental structure of life, that codes for the production of all of our proteins, is both a product of nature and a law of nature, regardless of whether it's in our bodies or sitting in the bottom of a test tube. As we delved into this issue, we traveled all over the country to speak with many different experts -- scientists, medical professionals, lawyers, patent lawyers. Most of them agreed that we were right as a matter of policy, and, at least in theory, as a matter of law. All of them thought our chances of winning a gene-patent challenge were about zero. Why is that? Well, the patent office had been issuing these patents for more than 20 years. There were literally thousands of patents on human genes. The patent bar was deeply entrenched in the status quo, the biotech industry had grown up around this practice, and legislation to ban gene patents had been introduced year after year in Congress, and had gone absolutely nowhere. So the bottom line: courts just weren't going to be willing to overturn these patents. Now, neither Chris nor I were the type to shy away from a challenge, and hearing, "Being right just isn't enough," seemed all the more reason to take on this fight. So we set out to build our case. Now, patent cases tend to be: Company A sues Company B over some really narrow, obscure technical issue. We weren't really interested in that kind of case, and we thought this case was much bigger than that. This was about scientific freedom, medical progress, the rights of patients. So we decided we were going to develop a case that was not like your typical patent case -- more like a civil rights case. We set out to identify a gene-patent holder that was vigorously enforcing its patents and then to organize a broad coalition of plaintiffs and experts that could tell the court about all the ways that these patents were harming patients and innovation. We found the prime candidate to sue in Myriad Genetics, a company that's based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Myriad held patents on two genes, the BRCA1 and the BRCA2 genes. Women with certain mutations along these genes are considered to be at a significantly increased risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer. Myriad had used its patents to maintain a complete monopoly on BRCA testing in the United States. It had forced multiple labs that were offering BRCA testing to stop. It charged a lot of money for its test -- over 3,000 dollars. It had stopped sharing its clinical data with the international scientific community. And perhaps worst of all, for a period of several years, Myriad refused to update its test to include additional mutations that had been identified by a team of researchers in France. It has been estimated that during that period, for several years, as many as 12 percent of women undergoing testing received the wrong answer -- a negative test result that should have been positive. This is Kathleen Maxian. Kathleen's sister Eileen developed breast cancer at age 40 and she was tested by Myriad. The test was negative. The family was relieved. That meant that Eileen's cancer most likely didn't run in the family, and that other members of her family didn't need to be tested. But two years later, Kathleen was diagnosed with advanced-stage ovarian cancer. It turned out that Kathleen's sister was among the 12 percent who received a false-negative test result. Had Eileen received the proper result, Kathleen would have then been tested, and her ovarian cancer could have been prevented. Once we settled on Myriad, we then had to form a coalition of plaintiffs and experts that could illuminate these problems. We ended up with 20 highly committed plaintiffs: genetic counselors, geneticists who had received cease and desist letters, advocacy organizations, four major scientific organizations that collectively represented more than 150,000 scientists and medical professionals, and individual women who either couldn't afford Myriad's test, or who wanted to obtain a second opinion but could not, as a result of the patents. One of the major challenges we had in preparing the case was figuring out how best to communicate the science. So in order to argue that what Myriad did was not an invention, and that isolated BRCA genes were products of nature, we had to explain a couple of basic concepts, like: What's a gene? What's DNA? How is DNA isolated, and why isn't that an invention? We spent hours and hours with our plaintiffs and experts, trying to come up with ways of explaining these concepts simply yet accurately. And we ended up relying heavily on the use of metaphors, like gold. So isolating DNA -- it's like extracting gold from a mountain or taking it out of a stream bed. You might be able to patent the process for mining the gold, but you can't patent the gold itself. It might've taken a lot of hard work and effort to dig the gold out of the mountain; you still can't patent it, it's still gold. And the gold, once it's extracted, can clearly be used for all sorts of things that it couldn't be used for when it was in the mountain; you can make jewelry out of it for example -- still can't patent the gold, it's still gold. So now it's 2009, and we're ready to file our case. We filed in federal court in the Southern District of New York, and the case was randomly assigned to Judge Robert Sweet. In March 2010, Judge Sweet issued his opinion -- 152 pages -- and a complete victory for our side. In reading the opinion, we could not get over how eloquently he described the science in the case. I mean, our brief -- it was pretty good, but not this good. How did he develop such a deep understanding of this issue in such a short time? We just could not comprehend how this had happened. So it turned out, Judge Sweet's clerk working for him at the time, was not just a lawyer -- he was a scientist. He was not just a scientist -- he had a PhD in molecular biology. (Laughter) What an incredible stroke of luck! Myriad then appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. And here things got really interesting. First, in a pivotal moment of this case, the US government switched sides. So in the district court the government submitted a brief on Myriad's side. But now in direct opposition to its own patent office, the US government files a brief that states that is has reconsidered this issue in light of the district court's opinion, and has concluded that isolated DNA is not patent eligible. This was a really big deal, totally unexpected. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit hears all patent cases, and it has a reputation for being very, very pro-patent. So even with this remarkable development, we expected to lose. And we did. Sort of. Ends up split decision, 2 to 1. But the two judges who ruled against us, did so for completely different reasons. The first one, Judge Lourie, made up his own novel, biological theory -- totally wrong. (Laughter) He decided Myriad had created a new chemical -- made absolutely no sense. Myriad didn't even argue this, so it came out of the blue. The other, Judge Moore, said she basically agreed with us that isolated DNA is a product of nature. But she's like, "I don't want to shake up the biotech industry." The third, Judge Bryson, agreed with us. So now we sought review by the Supreme Court. And when you petition the Supreme Court, you have to present a question that you want the Court to answer. Usually these questions take the form of a super-long paragraph, like a whole page long with lots and lots of clauses, "wherein this" and "therefore that." We submitted perhaps the shortest question presented ever. Four words: Are human genes patentable? Now when Chris first asked me what I thought of these words, I said, "Well, I don't know. I think you have to say, 'Is isolated DNA patentable?'" "Nope. I want the justices to have the very same reaction that I had when you brought this issue to me seven years ago." Well, I certainly couldn't argue with that. The Supreme Court only hears about one percent of the cases that it receives, and it agreed to hear ours. The day of the oral argument arrives, and it was really, really exciting -- long line of people outside, people had been standing in line since 2:30 in the morning to try to get into the courthouse. Two breast cancer organizations, Breast Cancer Action and FORCE, had organized a demonstration on the courthouse steps. Chris and I sat quietly in the hallway, moments before he was to walk in and argue the most important case of his career. I was clearly more nervous than he was. But any remaining panic subsided as I walked into the courtroom and looked around at a sea of friendly faces: our individual women clients who had shared their deeply personal stories, the geneticists who had taken huge chunks of time out of their busy careers to dedicate themselves to this fight and representatives from a diverse array of medical, patient advocacy, environmental and religious organizations, who had submitted friend of the court briefs in the case. Also in the room were three leaders of the Human Genome Project, including the co-discoverer of DNA himself, James Watson, who had submitted a brief to the court, where he referred to gene patenting as "lunacy." (Laughter) The diversity of the communities represented in this room and the contributions each had made to make this day a reality spoke volumes to what was at stake. The argument itself was riveting. Chris argued brilliantly. But for me, the most thrilling aspect was watching the Supreme Court justices grapple with isolated DNA, through a series of colorful analogies and feisty exchanges, very much the same way as our legal team had done for the past seven years. Justice Kagan likened isolating DNA to extracting a medicinal plant from the Amazon. Justice Roberts distinguished it from carving a baseball bat from a tree. And in one of my absolutely favorite moments, Justice Sotomayor proclaimed isolated DNA to be "just nature sitting there." (Laughter) We felt pretty confident leaving the courtroom that day, but I could never have anticipated the outcome: nine to zero. "A naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature, and not patent-eligible merely because it has been isolated. And furthermore, Myriad did not create anything." Within 24 hours of the decision, five labs had announced that they would begin to offer testing for the BRCA genes. Some of them promised to offer the tests at a lower price than Myriad's. Some promised to provide a more comprehensive test than the one Myriad was offering. But of course the decision goes far beyond Myriad. It ends a 25-year practice of allowing patents on human genes in the United States. It clears a significant barrier to biomedical discovery and innovation. And it helps to ensure that patients like Abigail, Kathleen and Eileen have access to the tests that they need. A few weeks after the court issued its decision, I received a small package in the mail. It was from Bob Cook-Deegan, a professor at Duke University and one the very first people Chris and I went to visit when we started to consider whether to bring this case. I opened it up to find a small stuffed animal. (Laughter) We took a big risk in taking this case. Part of what gave us the courage to take that risk was knowing that we were doing the right thing. The process took nearly eight years from the start to finish, with many twists and turns along the way. A little luck certainly helped, but it was the communities that we bridged, the alliances that we created, that made pigs fly. Thank you. (Applause)

First place I'd like to take you is what many believe will be the world's deepest natural abyss. And I say believe because this process is still ongoing. Right now there are major expeditions being planned for next year that I'll talk a little bit about. One of the things that's changed here, in the last 150 years since Jules Verne had great science-fiction concepts of what the underworld was like, is that technology has enabled us to go to these places that were previously completely unknown and speculated about. We can now descend thousands of meters into the Earth with relative impunity. Along the way we've discovered fantastic abysses and chambers so large that you can see for hundreds of meters without a break in the line of sight. When you go on a thing like this, we can usually be in the field for anywhere from two to four months, with a team as small as 20 or 30, to as big as 150. And a lot of people ask me, you know, what kind of people do you get for a project like this? While our selection process is not as rigorous as NASA, it's nonetheless thorough. We're looking for competence, discipline, endurance, and strength. In case you're wondering, this is our strength test. (Laughter) But we also value esprit de corps and the ability to diplomatically resolve inter-personal conflict while under great stress in remote locations. We have already gone far beyond the limits of human endurance. From the entrance, this is nothing like a commercial cave. You're looking at Camp Two in a place called J2, not K2, but J2. We're roughly two days from the entrance at that point. And it's kind of like a high altitude mountaineering trip in reverse, except that you're now running a string of these things down. The idea is to try to provide some measure of physical comfort while you're down there, otherwise in damp, moist, cold conditions in utterly dark places. I should mention that everything you're seeing here, by the way, is artificially illuminated at great effort. Otherwise it is completely dark in these places. The deeper you go, the more you run into a conflict with water. It's basically like a tree collecting water coming down. And eventually you get to places where it is formidable and dangerous and unfortunately slides just don't do justice. So I've got a very brief clip here that was taken in the late 1980s. So descend into Huautla Plateau in Mexico. (Video) Now I have to tell you that the techniques being shown here are obsolete and dangerous. We would not do this today unless we were doing it for film. (Laughter) Along that same line, I have to tell you that with the spate of Hollywood movies that came out last year, we have never seen monsters underground -- at least the kind that eat you. If there is a monster underground, it is the crushing psychological remoteness that begins to hit every member of the team once you cross about three days inbound from the nearest entrance. Next year I'll be leading an international team to J2. We're going to be shooting from minus 2,600 meters -- that's a little over 8,600 feet down -- at 30 kilometers from the entrance. The lead crews will be underground for pushing 30 days straight. I don't think there's been a mission like that in a long time. Eventually, if you keep going down in these things, probability says that you're going to run into a place like this. It's a place where there's a fold in the geologic stratum that collects water and fills to the roof. And when you used to find these things, they would put a label on a map that said terminal siphon. Now I remember that term really well for two reasons. Number one, it's the name of my rock band, and second, is because the confrontation of these things forced me to become an inventor. And we've since gone on to develop many generations of gadgets for exploring places like this. This is some life-support equipment closed-cycle. And you can use that now to go for many kilometers horizontally underwater and to depths of 200 meters straight down underwater. When you do this kind of stuff it's like doing EVA. It's like doing extra-vehicular activity in space, but at much greater distances, and at much greater physical peril. So it makes you think about how to design your equipment for long range, away from a safe haven. Here's a clip from a National Geographic movie that came out in 1999. (Video) Narrator: Exploration is a physical process of putting your foot in places where humans have never stepped before. This is where the last little nugget of totally unknown territory remains on this planet. To experience it is a privilege. Bill Stone: That was taken in Wakulla Springs, Florida. Couple of things to note about that movie. Every piece of equipment that you saw in there did not exist before 1999. It was developed within a two-year period and used on actual exploratory projects. This gadget you see right here was called the digital wall mapper, and it produced the first three-dimensional map anybody has ever done of a cave, and it happened to be underwater in Wakulla Springs. It was that gadget that serendipitously opened a door to another unexplored world. This is Europa. Carolyn Porco mentioned another one called Enceladus the other day. This is one of the places where planetary scientists believe there is a highest probability of the detection of the first life off earth in the ocean that exists below there. For those who have never seen this story, Jim Cameron produced a really wonderful IMAX movie couple of years ago, called "Aliens of the Deep." There was a brief clip -- (Video) Narrator: A mission to explore under the ice of Europa would be the ultimate robotic challenge. Europa is so far away that even at the speed of light, it would take more than an hour for the command just to reach the vehicle. It has to be smart enough to avoid terrain hazards and to find a good landing site on the ice. Now we have to get through the ice. You need a melt probe. It's basically a nuclear-heated torpedo. The ice could be anywhere from three to 16 miles deep. Week after week, the melt probe will sink of its own weight through the ancient ice, until finally -- Now, what are you going to do when you reach the surface of that ocean? You need an AUV, an autonomous underwater vehicle. It needs to be one smart puppy, able to navigate and make decisions on its own in an alien ocean. BS: What Jim didn't know when he released that movie was that six months earlier NASA had funded a team I assembled to develop a prototype for the Europa AUV. I mean, I cut through three years of engineering meetings, design and system integration, and introduced DEPTHX -- Deep Phreatic Thermal Explorer. And as the movie says, this is one smart puppy. It's got 96 sensors, 36 onboard computers, 100,000 lines of behavioral autonomy code, packs more than 10 kilos of TNT in electrical onboard equivalent. This is the target site, the world's deepest hydrothermal spring at Cenote Zacaton in northern Mexico. It's been explored to a depth of 292 meters and beyond that nobody knows anything. This is part of DEPTHX's mission. There are two primary targets we're doing here. One is, how do you do science autonomy underground? How do you take a robot and turn it into a field microbiologist? There are more stages involved here than I've got time to tell you about, but basically we drive through the space, we populate it with environmental variables -- sulphide, halide, things like that. We calculate gradient surfaces, and drive the bot over to a wall where there's a high probability of life. We move along the wall, in what's called proximity operations, looking for changes in color. If we see something that looks interesting, we pull it into a microscope. If it passes the microscopic test, we go for a collection. We either draw in a liquid sample, or we can actually take a solid core from the wall. No hands at the wheel. This is all behavioral autonomy here that's being conducted by the robot on its own. The real hat trick for this vehicle, though, is a disruptive new navigation system we've developed, known as 3D SLAM, for simultaneous localization and mapping. DEPTHX is an all-seeing eyeball. Its sensor beams look both forward and backward at the same time, allowing it to do new exploration while it's still achieving geometric sensor-lock on what it's gone through already. What I'm going to show you next is the first fully autonomous robotic exploration underground that's ever been done. This May, we're going to go from minus 1,000 meters in Zacaton, and if we're very lucky, DEPTHX will bring back the first robotically-discovered division of bacteria. The next step after that is to test it in Antartica and then, if the funding continues and NASA has the resolution to go, we could potentially launch by 2016, and by 2019 we may have the first evidence of life off this planet. What then of manned space exploration? The government recently announced plans to return to the moon by 2024. The successful conclusion of that mission will result in infrequent visitation of the moon by a small number of government scientists and pilots. It will leave us no further along in the general expansion of humanity into space than we were 50 years ago. Something fundamental has to change if we are to see common access to space in our lifetime. What I'm going to show you next are a couple of controversial ideas. And I hope you'll bear with me and have some faith that there's credibility behind what we're going to say here. There are three underpinnings of working in space privately. One of them is the requirement for economical earth-to-space transport. The Bert Rutans and Richard Bransons of this world have got this in their sights and I salute them. Go, go, go. The next thing we need are places to stay on orbit. Orbital hotels to start with, but workshops for the rest of us later on. The final missing piece, the real paradigm-buster, is this: a gas station on orbit. It's not going to look like that. If it existed, it would change all future spacecraft design and space mission planning. Now, to give you a chance to understand why there is power in that statement, I've got to give you the basics of Space 101. And the first thing is everything you do in space you pay by the kilogram. Anybody drink one of these here this week? You'd pay 10,000 dollars for that in orbit. That's more than you pay for TED, if Google dropped their sponsorship. (Laughter) The second is more than 90 percent of the weight of a vehicle is in propellant. Thus, every time you'd want to do anything in space, you are literally blowing away enormous sums of money every time you hit the accelerator. Not even the guys at Tesla can fight that physics. So, what if you could get your gas at a 10th the price? There is a place where you can. In fact, you can get it better -- you can get it at 14 times lower if you can find propellant on the moon. There is a little-known mission that was launched by the Pentagon, 13 years ago now, called Clementine. And the most amazing thing that came out of that mission was a strong hydrogen signature at Shackleton crater on the south pole of the moon. That signal was so strong, it could only have been produced by 10 trillion tons of water buried in the sediment, collected over millions and billions of years by the impact of asteroids and comet material. If we're going to get that, and make that gas station possible, we have to figure out ways to move large volumes of payload through space. We can't do that right now. The way you normally build a system right now is you have a tube stack that has to be launched from the ground, and resist all kinds of aerodynamic forces. We have to beat that. We can do it because in space there are no aerodynamics. We can go and use inflatable systems for almost everything. This is an idea that, again, came out of Livermore back in 1989, with Dr. Lowell Wood's group. And we can extend that now to just about everything. Bob Bigelow currently has a test article in the orbit. We can go much further. We can build space tugs, orbiting platforms for holding cryogens and water. There's another thing. When you're coming back from the moon, you have to deal with orbital mechanics. It says you're moving 10,000 feet per second faster than you really want to be to get back to your gas station. You got two choices. You can burn rocket fuel to get there, or you can do something really incredible. You can dive into the stratosphere, and precisely dissipate that velocity, and come back out to the space station. It has never been done. It's risky and it's going to be one hell of a ride -- better than Disney. The traditional approach to space exploration has been that you carry all the fuel you need to get everybody back in case of an emergency. If you try to do that for the moon, you're going to burn a billion dollars in fuel alone sending a crew out there. But if you send a mining team there, without the return propellant, first -- (Laughter) Did any of you guys hear the story of Cortez? This is not like that. I'm much more like Scotty. I like this equipment, you know, and I really value it so we're not going to burn the gear. But, if you were truly bold you could get it there, manufacture it, and it would be the most dramatic demonstration that you could do something worthwhile off this planet that has ever been done. There's a myth that you can't do anything in space for less than a trillion dollars and 20 years. That's not true. In seven years, we could pull off an industrial mission to Shackleton and demonstrate that you could provide commercial reality out of this in low-earth orbit. We're living in one of the most exciting times in history. We're at a magical confluence where private wealth and imagination are driving the demand for access to space. The orbital refueling stations I've just described could create an entirely new industry and provide the final key for opening space to the general exploration. To bust the paradigm a radically different approach is needed. We can do it by jump-starting with an industrial Lewis and Clark expedition to Shackleton crater, to mine the moon for resources, and demonstrate they can form the basis for a profitable business on orbit. Talk about space always seems to be hung on ambiguities of purpose and timing. I would like to close here by putting a stake in the sand at TED. I intend to lead that expedition. (Applause) It can be done in seven years with the right backing. Those who join me in making it happen will become a part of history and join other bold individuals from time past who, had they been here today, would have heartily approved. There was once a time when people did bold things to open the frontier. We have collectively forgotten that lesson. Now we're at a time when boldness is required to move forward. 100 years after Sir Ernest Shackleton wrote these words, I intend to plant an industrial flag on the moon and complete the final piece that will open the space frontier, in our time, for all of us. Thank you. (Applause)

So for any of us in this room today, let's start out by admitting we're lucky. We don't live in the world our mothers lived in, our grandmothers lived in, where career choices for women were so limited. And if you're in this room today, most of us grew up in a world where we have basic civil rights, and amazingly, we still live in a world where some women don't have them. But all that aside, we still have a problem, and it's a real problem. And the problem is this: Women are not making it to the top of any profession anywhere in the world. The numbers tell the story quite clearly. 190 heads of state -- nine are women. Of all the people in parliament in the world, 13 percent are women. In the corporate sector, women at the top, C-level jobs, board seats -- tops out at 15, 16 percent. The numbers have not moved since 2002 and are going in the wrong direction. And even in the non-profit world, a world we sometimes think of as being led by more women, women at the top: 20 percent. We also have another problem, which is that women face harder choices between professional success and personal fulfillment. A recent study in the U.S. showed that, of married senior managers, two-thirds of the married men had children and only one-third of the married women had children. A couple of years ago, I was in New York, and I was pitching a deal, and I was in one of those fancy New York private equity offices you can picture. And I'm in the meeting -- it's about a three-hour meeting -- and two hours in, there needs to be that bio break, and everyone stands up, and the partner running the meeting starts looking really embarrassed. And I realized he doesn't know where the women's room is in his office. So I start looking around for moving boxes, figuring they just moved in, but I don't see any. And so I said, "Did you just move into this office?" And he said, "No, we've been here about a year." And I said, "Are you telling me that I am the only woman to have pitched a deal in this office in a year?" And he looked at me, and he said, "Yeah. Or maybe you're the only one who had to go to the bathroom." (Laughter) So the question is, how are we going to fix this? How do we change these numbers at the top? How do we make this different? I want to start out by saying, I talk about this -- about keeping women in the workforce -- because I really think that's the answer. In the high-income part of our workforce, in the people who end up at the top -- Fortune 500 CEO jobs, or the equivalent in other industries -- the problem, I am convinced, is that women are dropping out. Now people talk about this a lot, and they talk about things like flextime and mentoring and programs companies should have to train women. I want to talk about none of that today, even though that's all really important. Today I want to focus on what we can do as individuals. What are the messages we need to tell ourselves? What are the messages we tell the women that work with and for us? What are the messages we tell our daughters? Now, at the outset, I want to be very clear that this speech comes with no judgments. I don't have the right answer. I don't even have it for myself. I left San Francisco, where I live, on Monday, and I was getting on the plane for this conference. And my daughter, who's three, when I dropped her off at preschool, did that whole hugging-the-leg, crying, "Mommy, don't get on the plane" thing. This is hard. I feel guilty sometimes. I know no women, whether they're at home or whether they're in the workforce, who don't feel that sometimes. So I'm not saying that staying in the workforce is the right thing for everyone. My talk today is about what the messages are if you do want to stay in the workforce, and I think there are three. One, sit at the table. Two, make your partner a real partner. And three, don't leave before you leave. Number one: sit at the table. Just a couple weeks ago at Facebook, we hosted a very senior government official, and he came in to meet with senior execs from around Silicon Valley. And everyone kind of sat at the table. He had these two women who were traveling with him pretty senior in his department, and I kind of said to them, "Sit at the table. Come on, sit at the table," and they sat on the side of the room. When I was in college, my senior year, I took a course called European Intellectual History. Don't you love that kind of thing from college? I wish I could do that now. And I took it with my roommate, Carrie, who was then a brilliant literary student -- and went on to be a brilliant literary scholar -- and my brother -- smart guy, but a water-polo-playing pre-med, who was a sophomore. The three of us take this class together. And then Carrie reads all the books in the original Greek and Latin, goes to all the lectures. I read all the books in English and go to most of the lectures. My brother is kind of busy. He reads one book of 12 and goes to a couple of lectures, marches himself up to our room a couple days before the exam to get himself tutored. The three of us go to the exam together, and we sit down. And we sit there for three hours -- and our little blue notebooks -- yes, I'm that old. We walk out, we look at each other, and we say, "How did you do?" And Carrie says, "Boy, I feel like I didn't really draw out the main point on the Hegelian dialectic." And I say, "God, I really wish I had really connected John Locke's theory of property with the philosophers that follow." And my brother says, "I got the top grade in the class." (Laughter) "You got the top grade in the class? You don't know anything." (Laughter) The problem with these stories is that they show what the data shows: women systematically underestimate their own abilities. If you test men and women, and you ask them questions on totally objective criteria like GPAs, men get it wrong slightly high, and women get it wrong slightly low. Women do not negotiate for themselves in the workforce. A study in the last two years of people entering the workforce out of college showed that 57 percent of boys entering, or men, I guess, are negotiating their first salary, and only seven percent of women. And most importantly, men attribute their success to themselves, and women attribute it to other external factors. If you ask men why they did a good job, they'll say, "I'm awesome. Obviously. Why are you even asking?" If you ask women why they did a good job, what they'll say is someone helped them, they got lucky, they worked really hard. Why does this matter? Boy, it matters a lot. Because no one gets to the corner office by sitting on the side, not at the table, and no one gets the promotion if they don't think they deserve their success, or they don't even understand their own success. I wish the answer were easy. I wish I could go tell all the young women I work for, these fabulous women, "Believe in yourself and negotiate for yourself. Own your own success." I wish I could tell that to my daughter. But it's not that simple. Because what the data shows, above all else, is one thing, which is that success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women. And everyone's nodding, because we all know this to be true. There's a really good study that shows this really well. There's a famous Harvard Business School study on a woman named Heidi Roizen. And she's an operator in a company in Silicon Valley, and she uses her contacts to become a very successful venture capitalist. In 2002 -- not so long ago -- a professor who was then at Columbia University took that case and made it [Howard] Roizen. And he gave the case out, both of them, to two groups of students. He changed exactly one word: "Heidi" to "Howard." But that one word made a really big difference. He then surveyed the students, and the good news was the students, both men and women, thought Heidi and Howard were equally competent, and that's good. The bad news was that everyone liked Howard. He's a great guy. You want to work for him. You want to spend the day fishing with him. But Heidi? Not so sure. She's a little out for herself. She's a little political. You're not sure you'd want to work for her. This is the complication. We have to tell our daughters and our colleagues, we have to tell ourselves to believe we got the A, to reach for the promotion, to sit at the table, and we have to do it in a world where, for them, there are sacrifices they will make for that, even though for their brothers, there are not. The saddest thing about all of this is that it's really hard to remember this. And I'm about to tell a story which is truly embarrassing for me, but I think important. I gave this talk at Facebook not so long ago to about 100 employees, and a couple hours later, there was a young woman who works there sitting outside my little desk, and she wanted to talk to me. I said, okay, and she sat down, and we talked. And she said, "I learned something today. I learned that I need to keep my hand up." "What do you mean?" She said, "You're giving this talk, and you said you would take two more questions. I had my hand up with many other people, and you took two more questions. I put my hand down, and I noticed all the women did the same, and then you took more questions, only from the men." And I thought to myself, "Wow, if it's me -- who cares about this, obviously -- giving this talk -- and during this talk, I can't even notice that the men's hands are still raised, and the women's hands are still raised, how good are we as managers of our companies and our organizations at seeing that the men are reaching for opportunities more than women?" We've got to get women to sit at the table. (Cheers) (Applause) Message number two: Make your partner a real partner. I've become convinced that we've made more progress in the workforce than we have in the home. The data shows this very clearly. If a woman and a man work full-time and have a child, the woman does twice the amount of housework the man does, and the woman does three times the amount of childcare the man does. So she's got three jobs or two jobs, and he's got one. Who do you think drops out when someone needs to be home more? The causes of this are really complicated, and I don't have time to go into them. And I don't think Sunday football-watching and general laziness is the cause. I think the cause is more complicated. I think, as a society, we put more pressure on our boys to succeed than we do on our girls. I know men that stay home and work in the home to support wives with careers, and it's hard. When I go to the Mommy-and-Me stuff and I see the father there, I notice that the other mommies don't play with him. And that's a problem, because we have to make it as important a job, because it's the hardest job in the world to work inside the home, for people of both genders, if we're going to even things out and let women stay in the workforce. (Applause) Studies show that households with equal earning and equal responsibility also have half the divorce rate. And if that wasn't good enough motivation for everyone out there, they also have more -- how shall I say this on this stage? They know each other more in the biblical sense as well. (Cheers) Message number three: Don't leave before you leave. I think there's a really deep irony to the fact that actions women are taking -- and I see this all the time -- with the objective of staying in the workforce actually lead to their eventually leaving. Here's what happens: We're all busy. Everyone's busy. A woman's busy. And she starts thinking about having a child, and from the moment she starts thinking about having a child, she starts thinking about making room for that child. "How am I going to fit this into everything else I'm doing?" And literally from that moment, she doesn't raise her hand anymore, she doesn't look for a promotion, she doesn't take on the new project, she doesn't say, "Me. I want to do that." She starts leaning back. The problem is that -- let's say she got pregnant that day, that day -- nine months of pregnancy, three months of maternity leave, six months to catch your breath -- Fast-forward two years, more often -- and as I've seen it -- women start thinking about this way earlier -- when they get engaged, or married, when they start thinking about having a child, which can take a long time. One woman came to see me about this. She looked a little young. And I said, "So are you and your husband thinking about having a baby?" And she said, "Oh no, I'm not married." She didn't even have a boyfriend. (Laughter) I said, "You're thinking about this just way too early." But the point is that what happens once you start kind of quietly leaning back? Everyone who's been through this -- and I'm here to tell you, once you have a child at home, your job better be really good to go back, because it's hard to leave that kid at home. Your job needs to be challenging. It needs to be rewarding. You need to feel like you're making a difference. And if two years ago you didn't take a promotion and some guy next to you did, if three years ago you stopped looking for new opportunities, you're going to be bored because you should have kept your foot on the gas pedal. Don't leave before you leave. Stay in. Keep your foot on the gas pedal, until the very day you need to leave to take a break for a child -- and then make your decisions. Don't make decisions too far in advance, particularly ones you're not even conscious you're making. My generation really, sadly, is not going to change the numbers at the top. They're just not moving. We are not going to get to where 50 percent of the population -- in my generation, there will not be 50 percent of [women] at the top of any industry. But I'm hopeful that future generations can. I think a world where half of our countries and our companies were run by women, would be a better world. It's not just because people would know where the women's bathrooms are, even though that would be very helpful. I think it would be a better world. I have two children. I have a five-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter. I want my son to have a choice to contribute fully in the workforce or at home, and I want my daughter to have the choice to not just succeed, but to be liked for her accomplishments. Thank you. (Applause)

Can any of you remember what you wanted to be when you were 17? Do you know what I wanted to be? I wanted to be a biker chick. (Laughter) I wanted to race cars, and I wanted to be a cowgirl, and I wanted to be Mowgli from "The Jungle Book." Because they were all about being free, the wind in your hair -- just to be free. And on my seventeenth birthday, my parents, knowing how much I loved speed, gave me one driving lesson for my seventeenth birthday. Not that we could have afforded I drive, but to give me the dream of driving. And on my seventeenth birthday, I accompanied my little sister in complete innocence, as I always had all my life -- my visually impaired sister -- to go to see an eye specialist. Because big sisters are always supposed to support their little sisters. And my little sister wanted to be a pilot -- God help her. So I used to get my eyes tested just for fun. And on my seventeenth birthday, after my fake eye exam, the eye specialist just noticed it happened to be my birthday. And he said, "So what are you going to do to celebrate?" And I took that driving lesson, and I said, "I'm going to learn how to drive." And then there was a silence -- one of those awful silences when you know something's wrong. And he turned to my mother, and he said, "You haven't told her yet?" On my seventeenth birthday, as Janis Ian would best say, I learned the truth at 17. I am, and have been since birth, legally blind. And you know, how on earth did I get to 17 and not know that? Well, if anybody says country music isn't powerful, let me tell you this: I got there because my father's passion for Johnny Cash and a song, "A Boy Named Sue." I'm the eldest of three. I was born in 1971. And very shortly after my birth, my parents found out I had a condition called ocular albinism. And what the hell does that mean to you? So let me just tell you, the great part of all of this? I can't see this clock and I can't see the timing, so holy God, woohoo! (Laughter) I might buy some more time. But more importantly, let me tell you -- I'm going to come up really close here. Don't freak out, Pat. Hey. See this hand? Beyond this hand is a world of Vaseline. Every man in this room, even you, Steve, is George Clooney. (Laughter) And every woman, you are so beautiful. And when I want to look beautiful, I step three feet away from the mirror, and I don't have to see these lines etched in my face from all the squinting I've done all my life from all the dark lights. The really strange part is that, at three and a half, just before I was going to school, my parents made a bizarre, unusual and incredibly brave decision. No special needs schools. No labels. No limitations. My ability and my potential. And they decided to tell me that I could see. So just like Johnny Cash's Sue, a boy given a girl's name, I would grow up and learn from experience how to be tough and how to survive, when they were no longer there to protect me, or just take it all away. But more significantly, they gave me the ability to believe, totally, to believe that I could. And so when I heard that eye specialist tell me all the things, a big fat "no," everybody imagines I was devastated. And don't get me wrong, because when I first heard it -- aside from the fact that I thought he was insane -- I got that thump in my chest, just that "huh?" But very quickly I recovered. It was like that. The first thing I thought about was my mom, who was crying over beside me. And I swear to God, I walked out of his office, "I will drive. I will drive. You're mad. I'll drive. I know I can drive." And with the same dogged determination that my father had bred into me since I was such a child -- he taught me how to sail, knowing I could never see where I was going, I could never see the shore, and I couldn't see the sails, and I couldn't see the destination. But he told me to believe and feel the wind in my face. And that wind in my face made me believe that he was mad and I would drive. And for the next 11 years, I swore nobody would ever find out that I couldn't see, because I didn't want to be a failure, and I didn't want to be weak. And I believed I could do it. So I rammed through life as only a Casey can do. And I was an archeologist, and then I broke things. And then I managed a restaurant, and then I slipped on things. And then I was a masseuse. And then I was a landscape gardener. And then I went to business school. And you know, disabled people are hugely educated. And then I went in and I got a global consulting job with Accenture. And they didn't even know. And it's extraordinary how far belief can take you. In 1999, two and a half years into that job, something happened. Wonderfully, my eyes decided, enough. And temporarily, very unexpectedly, they dropped. And I'm in one of the most competitive environments in the world, where you work hard, play hard, you gotta be the best, you gotta be the best. And two years in, I really could see very little. And I found myself in front of an HR manager in 1999, saying something I never imagined that I would say. I was 28 years old. I had built a persona all around what I could and couldn't do. And I simply said, "I'm sorry. I can't see, and I need help." Asking for help can be incredibly difficult. And you all know what it is. You don't need to have a disability to know that. We all know how hard it is to admit weakness and failure. And it's frightening, isn't it? But all that belief had fueled me so long. And can I tell you, operating in the sighted world when you can't see, it's kind of difficult -- it really is. Can I tell you, airports are a disaster. Oh, for the love of God. And please, any designers out there? OK, designers, please put up your hands, even though I can't even see you. I always end up in the gents' toilets. And there's nothing wrong with my sense of smell. But can I just tell you, the little sign for a gents' toilet or a ladies' toilet is determined by a triangle. Have you ever tried to see that if you have Vaseline in front of your eyes? It's such a small thing, right? And you know how exhausting it can be to try to be perfect when you're not, or to be somebody that you aren't? And so after admitting I couldn't see to HR, they sent me off to an eye specialist. And I had no idea that this man was going to change my life. But before I got to him, I was so lost. I had no idea who I was anymore. And that eye specialist, he didn't bother testing my eyes. God no, it was therapy. And he asked me several questions, of which many were, "Why? Why are you fighting so hard not to be yourself? And do you love what you do, Caroline?" And you know, when you go to a global consulting firm, they put a chip in your head, and you're like, "I love Accenture. I love Accenture. I love my job. I love Accenture. I love Accenture. I love Accenture. I love my job. I love Accenture." (Laughter) To leave would be failure. And he said, "Do you love it?" I couldn't even speak I was so choked up. I just was so -- how do I tell him? And then he said to me, "What did you want to be when you were little?" Now listen, I wasn't going to say to him, "Well, I wanted to race cars and motorbikes." Hardly appropriate at this moment in time. He thought I was mad enough anyway. And as I left his office, he called me back and he said, "I think it's time. I think it's time to stop fighting and do something different." And that door closed. And that silence just outside a doctor's office, that many of us know. And my chest ached. And I had no idea where I was going. I had no idea. But I did know the game was up. And I went home, and, because the pain in my chest ached so much, I thought, "I'll go out for a run." Really not a very sensible thing to do. And I went on a run that I know so well. I know this run so well, by the back of my hand. I always run it perfectly fine. I count the steps and the lampposts and all those things that visually impaired people have a tendency to have a lot of meetings with. And there was a rock that I always missed. And I'd never fallen on it, never. And there I was crying away, and smash, bash on my rock. Broken, fallen over on this rock in the middle of March in 2000, typical Irish weather on a Wednesday -- gray, snot, tears everywhere, ridiculously self-pitying. And I was floored, and I was broken, and I was angry. And I didn't know what to do. And I sat there for quite some time going, "How am I going to get off this rock and go home? Because who am I going to be? What am I going to be?" And I thought about my dad, and I thought, "Good God, I'm so not Sue now." And I kept thinking over and over in my mind, what had happened? Where did it go wrong? Why didn't I understand? And you know, the extraordinary part of it is I just simply had no answers. I had lost my belief. Look where my belief had brought me to. And now I had lost it. And now I really couldn't see. I was crumpled. And then I remember thinking about that eye specialist asking me, "What do you want to be? What do you want to be? What did you want to be when you were little? Do you love what you do? Do something different. What do you want to be? Do something different. What do you want to be?" And really slowly, slowly, slowly, it happened. And it did happen this way. And then the minute it came, it blew up in my head and bashed in my heart -- something different. "Well, how about Mowgli from 'The Jungle Book'? You don't get more different than that." And the moment, and I mean the moment, the moment that hit me, I swear to God, it was like woo hoo! You know -- something to believe in. And nobody can tell me no. Yes, you can say I can't be an archeologist. But you can't tell me, no, I can't be Mowgli, because guess what? Nobody's ever done it before, so I'm going to go do it. And it doesn't matter whether I'm a boy or a girl, I'm just going to scoot. And so I got off that rock, and, oh my God, did I run home. And I sprinted home, and I didn't fall, and I didn't crash. And I ran up the stairs, and there was one of my favorite books of all time, "Travels on My Elephant" by Mark Shand -- I don't know if any of you know it. And I grabbed this book off, and I'm sitting on the couch going, "I know what I'm going to do. I know how to be Mowgli. I'm going to go across India on the back of an elephant. I'm going to be an elephant handler." And I had no idea how I was going to be an elephant handler. From global management consultant to elephant handler. I had no idea how. I had no idea how you hire an elephant, get an elephant. I didn't speak Hindi. I'd never been to India. Hadn't a clue. But I knew I would. Because, when you make a decision at the right time and the right place, God, that universe makes it happen for you. Nine months later, after that day on snot rock, I had the only blind date in my life with a seven and a half foot elephant called Kanchi. And together we would trek a thousand kilometers across India. (Applause) The most powerful thing of all, it's not that I didn't achieve before then. Oh my God, I did. But you know, I was believing in the wrong thing. Because I wasn't believing in me, really me, all the bits of me -- all the bits of all of us. Do you know how much of us all pretend to be somebody we're not? And you know what, when you really believe in yourself and everything about you, it's extraordinary what happens. And you know what, that trip, that thousand kilometers, it raised enough money for 6,000 cataract eye operations. Six thousand people got to see because of that. When I came home off that elephant, do you know what the most amazing part was? I chucked in my job at Accenture. I left, and I became a social entrepreneur, and I set up an organization with Mark Shand called Elephant Family, which deals with Asian elephant conservation. And I set up Kanchi, because my organization was always going to be named after my elephant, because disability is like the elephant in the room. And I wanted to make you see it in a positive way -- no charity, no pity. But I wanted to work only and truly with business and media leadership to totally reframe disability in a way that was exciting and possible. It was extraordinary. That's what I wanted to do. And I never thought about noes anymore, or not seeing, or any of that kind of nothing. It just seemed that it was possible. And you know, the oddest part is, when I was on my way traveling here to TED, I'll be honest, I was petrified. And I speak, but this is an amazing audience, and what am I doing here? But as I was traveling here, you'll be very happy to know, I did use my white symbol stick cane, because it's really good to skip queues in the airport. And I got my way here being happily proud that I couldn't see. And the one thing is that a really good friend of mine, he texted me on the way over, knowing I was scared. Even though I present confident, I was scared. He said, "Be you." And so here I am. This is me, all of me. (Applause) And I have learned, you know what, cars and motorbikes and elephants, that's not freedom. Being absolutely true to yourself is freedom. And I never needed eyes to see -- never. I simply needed vision and belief. And if you truly believe -- and I mean believe from the bottom of your heart -- you can make change happen. And we need to make it happen, because every single one of us -- woman, man, gay, straight, disabled, perfect, normal, whatever -- everyone of us must be the very best of ourselves. I no longer want anybody to be invisible. We all have to be included. And stop with the labels, the limiting. Losing of labels, because we are not jam jars. We are extraordinary, different, wonderful people. Thank you. (Applause)

I'm here today, as June said, to talk about a project that my twin sister and I have been doing for the past three and half years. We're crocheting a coral reef. And it's a project that we've actually been now joined by hundreds of people around the world, who are doing it with us. Indeed thousands of people have actually been involved in this project, in many of its different aspects. It's a project that now reaches across three continents, and its roots go into the fields of mathematics, marine biology, feminine handicraft and environmental activism. It's true. It's also a project that in a very beautiful way, the development of this has actually paralleled the evolution of life on earth, which is a particularly lovely thing to be saying right here in February 2009 -- which, as one of our previous speakers told us, is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. All of this I'm going to get to in the next 18 minutes, I hope. But let me first begin by showing you some pictures of what this thing looks like. Just to give you an idea of scale, that installation there is about six feet across, and the tallest models are about two or three feet high. This is some more images of it. That one on the right is about five feet high. The work involves hundreds of different crochet models. And indeed there are now thousands and thousands of models that people have contributed all over the world as part of this. The totality of this project involves tens of thousands of hours of human labor -- 99 percent of it done by women. On the right hand side, that bit there is part of an installation that is about 12 feet long. My sister and I started this project in 2005 because in that year, at least in the science press, there was a lot of talk about global warming, and the effect that global warming was having on coral reefs. Corals are very delicate organisms, and they are devastated by any rise in sea temperatures. It causes these vast bleaching events that are the first signs of corals of being sick. And if the bleaching doesn't go away -- if the temperatures don't go down -- reefs start to die. A great deal of this has been happening in the Great Barrier Reef, particularly in coral reefs all over the world. This is our invocation in crochet of a bleached reef. We have a new organization together called The Institute for Figuring, which is a little organization we started to promote, to do projects about the aesthetic and poetic dimensions of science and mathematics. And I went and put a little announcement up on our site, asking for people to join us in this enterprise. To our surprise, one of the first people who called was the Andy Warhol Museum. And they said they were having an exhibition about artists' response to global warming, and they'd like our coral reef to be part of it. I laughed and said, "Well we've only just started it, you can have a little bit of it." So in 2007 we had an exhibition, a small exhibition of this crochet reef. And then some people in Chicago came along and they said, "In late 2007, the theme of the Chicago Humanities Festival is global warming. And we've got this 3,000 square-foot gallery and we want you to fill it with your reef." And I, naively by this stage, said, "Oh, yes, sure." Now I say "naively" because actually my profession is as a science writer. What I do is I write books about the cultural history of physics. I've written books about the history of space, the history of physics and religion, and I write articles for people like the New York Times and the L.A. Times. So I had no idea what it meant to fill a 3,000 square-foot gallery. So I said yes to this proposition. And I went home, and I told my sister Christine. And she nearly had a fit because Christine is a professor at one of L.A.'s major art colleges, CalArts, and she knew exactly what it meant to fill a 3,000 square-foot gallery. She thought I'd gone off my head. But she went into crochet overdrive. And to cut a long story short, eight months later we did fill the Chicago Cultural Center's 3,000 square foot gallery. By this stage the project had taken on a viral dimension of its own, which got completely beyond us. The people in Chicago decided that as well as exhibiting our reefs, what they wanted to do was have the local people there make a reef. So we went and taught the techniques. We did workshops and lectures. And the people in Chicago made a reef of their own. And it was exhibited alongside ours. There were hundreds of people involved in that. We got invited to do the whole thing in New York, and in London, and in Los Angeles. In each of these cities, the local citizens, hundreds and hundreds of them, have made a reef. And more and more people get involved in this, most of whom we've never met. So the whole thing has sort of morphed into this organic, ever-evolving creature, that's actually gone way beyond Christine and I. Now some of you are sitting here thinking, "What planet are these people on? Why on earth are you crocheting a reef? Woolenness and wetness aren't exactly two concepts that go together. Why not chisel a coral reef out of marble? Cast it in bronze." But it turns out there is a very good reason why we are crocheting it because many organisms in coral reefs have a very particular kind of structure. The frilly crenulated forms that you see in corals, and kelps, and sponges and nudibranchs, is a form of geometry known as hyperbolic geometry. And the only way that mathematicians know how to model this structure is with crochet. It happens to be a fact. It's almost impossible to model this structure any other way, and it's almost impossible to do it on computers. So what is this hyperbolic geometry that corals and sea slugs embody? The next few minutes is, we're all going to get raised up to the level of a sea slug. (Laughter) This sort of geometry revolutionized mathematics when it was first discovered in the 19th century. But not until 1997 did mathematicians actually understand how they could model it. In 1997 a mathematician at Cornell, Daina Taimina, made the discovery that this structure could actually be done in knitting and crochet. The first one she did was knitting. But you get too many stitches on the needle. So she quickly realized crochet was the better thing. But what she was doing was actually making a model of a mathematical structure, that many mathematicians had thought it was actually impossible to model. And indeed they thought that anything like this structure was impossible per se. Some of the best mathematicians spent hundreds of years trying to prove that this structure was impossible. So what is this impossible hyperbolic structure? Before hyperbolic geometry, mathematicians knew about two kinds of space: Euclidean space, and spherical space. And they have different properties. Mathematicians like to characterize things by being formalist. You all have a sense of what a flat space is, Euclidean space is. But mathematicians formalize this in a particular way. And what they do is, they do it through the concept of parallel lines. So here we have a line and a point outside the line. And Euclid said, "How can I define parallel lines? I ask the question, how many lines can I draw through the point but never meet the original line?" And you all know the answer. Does someone want to shout it out? One. Great. Okay. That's our definition of a parallel line. It's a definition really of Euclidean space. But there is another possibility that you all know of: spherical space. Think of the surface of a sphere -- just like a beach ball, the surface of the Earth. I have a straight line on my spherical surface. And I have a point outside the line. How many straight lines can I draw through the point but never meet the original line? What do we mean to talk about a straight line on a curved surface? Now mathematicians have answered that question. They've understood there is a generalized concept of straightness, it's called a geodesic. And on the surface of a sphere, a straight line is the biggest possible circle you can draw. So it's like the equator or the lines of longitude. So we ask the question again, "How many straight lines can I draw through the point, but never meet the original line?" Does someone want to guess? Zero. Very good. Now mathematicians thought that was the only alternative. It's a bit suspicious isn't it? There is two answers to the question so far, Zero and one. Two answers? There may possibly be a third alternative. To a mathematician if there are two answers, and the first two are zero and one, there is another number that immediately suggests itself as the third alternative. Does anyone want to guess what it is? Infinity. You all got it right. Exactly. There is, there's a third alternative. This is what it looks like. There's a straight line, and there is an infinite number of lines that go through the point and never meet the original line. This is the drawing. This nearly drove mathematicians bonkers because, like you, they're sitting there feeling bamboozled. Thinking, how can that be? You're cheating. The lines are curved. But that's only because I'm projecting it onto a flat surface. Mathematicians for several hundred years had to really struggle with this. How could they see this? What did it mean to actually have a physical model that looked like this? It's a bit like this: imagine that we'd only ever encountered Euclidean space. Then our mathematicians come along and said, "There's this thing called a sphere, and the lines come together at the north and south pole." But you don't know what a sphere looks like. And someone that comes along and says, "Look here's a ball." And you go, "Ah! I can see it. I can feel it. I can touch it. I can play with it." And that's exactly what happened when Daina Taimina in 1997, showed that you could crochet models in hyperbolic space. Here is this diagram in crochetness. I've stitched Euclid's parallel postulate on to the surface. And the lines look curved. But look, I can prove to you that they're straight because I can take any one of these lines, and I can fold along it. And it's a straight line. So here, in wool, through a domestic feminine art, is the proof that the most famous postulate in mathematics is wrong. (Applause) And you can stitch all sorts of mathematical theorems onto these surfaces. The discovery of hyperbolic space ushered in the field of mathematics that is called non-Euclidean geometry. And this is actually the field of mathematics that underlies general relativity and is actually ultimately going to show us about the shape of the universe. So there is this direct line between feminine handicraft, Euclid and general relativity. Now, I said that mathematicians thought that this was impossible. Here's two creatures who've never heard of Euclid's parallel postulate -- didn't know it was impossible to violate, and they're simply getting on with it. They've been doing it for hundreds of millions of years. I once asked the mathematicians why it was that mathematicians thought this structure was impossible when sea slugs have been doing it since the Silurian age. Their answer was interesting. They said, "Well I guess there aren't that many mathematicians sitting around looking at sea slugs." And that's true. But it also goes deeper than that. It also says a whole lot of things about what mathematicians thought mathematics was, what they thought it could and couldn't do, what they thought it could and couldn't represent. Even mathematicians, who in some sense are the freest of all thinkers, literally couldn't see not only the sea slugs around them, but the lettuce on their plate -- because lettuces, and all those curly vegetables, they also are embodiments of hyperbolic geometry. And so in some sense they literally, they had such a symbolic view of mathematics, they couldn't actually see what was going on on the lettuce in front of them. It turns out that the natural world is full of hyperbolic wonders. And so, too, we've discovered that there is an infinite taxonomy of crochet hyperbolic creatures. We started out, Chrissy and I and our contributors, doing the simple mathematically perfect models. But we found that when we deviated from the specific setness of the mathematical code that underlies it -- the simple algorithm crochet three, increase one -- when we deviated from that and made embellishments to the code, the models immediately started to look more natural. And all of our contributors, who are an amazing collection of people around the world, do their own embellishments. As it were, we have this ever-evolving, crochet taxonomic tree of life. Just as the morphology and the complexity of life on earth is never ending, little embellishments and complexifications in the DNA code lead to new things like giraffes, or orchids -- so too, do little embellishments in the crochet code lead to new and wondrous creatures in the evolutionary tree of crochet life. So this project really has taken on this inner organic life of its own. There is the totality of all the people who have come to it. And their individual visions, and their engagement with this mathematical mode. We have these technologies. We use them. But why? What's at stake here? What does it matter? For Chrissy and I, one of the things that's important here is that these things suggest the importance and value of embodied knowledge. We live in a society that completely tends to valorize symbolic forms of representation -- algebraic representations, equations, codes. We live in a society that's obsessed with presenting information in this way, teaching information in this way. But through this sort of modality, crochet, other plastic forms of play -- people can be engaged with the most abstract, high-powered, theoretical ideas, the kinds of ideas that normally you have to go to university departments to study in higher mathematics, which is where I first learned about hyperbolic space. But you can do it through playing with material objects. One of the ways that we've come to think about this is that what we're trying to do with the Institute for Figuring and projects like this, we're trying to have kindergarten for grown-ups. And kindergarten was actually a very formalized system of education, established by a man named Friedrich Froebel, who was a crystallographer in the 19th century. He believed that the crystal was the model for all kinds of representation. He developed a radical alternative system of engaging the smallest children with the most abstract ideas through physical forms of play. And he is worthy of an entire talk on his own right. The value of education is something that Froebel championed, through plastic modes of play. We live in a society now where we have lots of think tanks, where great minds go to think about the world. They write these great symbolic treatises called books, and papers, and op-ed articles. We want to propose, Chrissy and I, through The Institute for Figuring, another alternative way of doing things, which is the play tank. And the play tank, like the think tank, is a place where people can go and engage with great ideas. But what we want to propose, is that the highest levels of abstraction, things like mathematics, computing, logic, etc. -- all of this can be engaged with, not just through purely cerebral algebraic symbolic methods, but by literally, physically playing with ideas. Thank you very much. (Applause)

I was here four years ago, and I remember, at the time, that the talks weren't put online. I think they were given to TEDsters in a box, a box set of DVDs, which they put on their shelves, where they are now. (Laughter) And actually, Chris called me a week after I'd given my talk and he said, "We're going to start putting them online. Can we put yours online?" And I said, "Sure." And four years later, as I said, it's been seen by four ... Well, it's been downloaded four million times. So I suppose you could multiply that by 20 or something to get the number of people who've seen it. And, as Chris says, there is a hunger for videos of me. (Laughter) (Applause) ... don't you feel? (Laughter) So, this whole event has been an elaborate build-up to me doing another one for you, so here it is. (Laughter) Al Gore spoke at the TED conference I spoke at four years ago and talked about the climate crisis. And I referenced that at the end of my last talk. So I want to pick up from there because I only had 18 minutes, frankly. So, as I was saying... (Laughter) You see, he's right. I mean, there is a major climate crisis, obviously, and I think if people don't believe it, they should get out more. (Laughter) But I believe there's a second climate crisis, which is as severe, which has the same origins, and that we have to deal with with the same urgency. And I mean by this -- and you may say, by the way, "Look, I'm good. I have one climate crisis; I don't really need the second one." But this is a crisis of, not natural resources -- though I believe that's true -- but a crisis of human resources. I believe fundamentally, as many speakers have said during the past few days, that we make very poor use of our talents. Very many people go through their whole lives having no real sense of what their talents may be, or if they have any to speak of. I meet all kinds of people who don't think they're really good at anything. Actually, I kind of divide the world into two groups now. Jeremy Bentham, the great utilitarian philosopher, once spiked this argument. He said, "There are two types of people in this world: those who divide the world into two types and those who do not." (Laughter) Well, I do. (Laughter) I meet all kinds of people who don't enjoy what they do. They simply go through their lives getting on with it. They get no great pleasure from what they do. They endure it rather than enjoy it and wait for the weekend. But I also meet people who love what they do and couldn't imagine doing anything else. If you said to them, "Don't do this anymore," they'd wonder what you were talking about. Because it isn't what they do, it's who they are. They say, "But this is me, you know. It would be foolish for me to abandon this, because it speaks to my most authentic self." And it's not true of enough people. In fact, on the contrary, I think it's still true of a minority of people. I think there are many possible explanations for it. And high among them is education, because education, in a way, dislocates very many people from their natural talents. And human resources are like natural resources; they're often buried deep. You have to go looking for them, they're not just lying around on the surface. You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves. And you might imagine education would be the way that happens, but too often it's not. Every education system in the world is being reformed at the moment and it's not enough. Reform is no use anymore, because that's simply improving a broken model. What we need -- and the word's been used many times during the course of the past few days -- is not evolution, but a revolution in education. This has to be transformed into something else. (Applause) One of the real challenges is to innovate fundamentally in education. Innovation is hard because it means doing something that people don't find very easy, for the most part. It means challenging what we take for granted, things that we think are obvious. The great problem for reform or transformation is the tyranny of common sense; things that people think, "Well, it can't be done any other way because that's the way it's done." I came across a great quote recently from Abraham Lincoln, who I thought you'd be pleased to have quoted at this point. (Laughter) He said this in December 1862 to the second annual meeting of Congress. I ought to explain that I have no idea what was happening at the time. We don't teach American history in Britain. (Laughter) We suppress it. You know, this is our policy. (Laughter) So, no doubt, something fascinating was happening in December 1862, which the Americans among us will be aware of. But he said this: "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion." I love that. Not rise to it, rise with it. "As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country." I love that word, "disenthrall." You know what it means? That there are ideas that all of us are enthralled to, which we simply take for granted as the natural order of things, the way things are. And many of our ideas have been formed, not to meet the circumstances of this century, but to cope with the circumstances of previous centuries. But our minds are still hypnotized by them, and we have to disenthrall ourselves of some of them. Now, doing this is easier said than done. It's very hard to know, by the way, what it is you take for granted. (Laughter) And the reason is that you take it for granted. So let me ask you something you may take for granted. How many of you here are over the age of 25? That's not what I think you take for granted, I'm sure you're familiar with that already. Are there any people here under the age of 25? Great. Now, those over 25, could you put your hands up if you're wearing your wristwatch? Now that's a great deal of us, isn't it? Ask a room full of teenagers the same thing. Teenagers do not wear wristwatches. I don't mean they can't or they're not allowed to, they just often choose not to. And the reason is, you see, that we were brought up in a pre-digital culture, those of us over 25. And so for us, if you want to know the time you have to wear something to tell it. Kids now live in a world which is digitized, and the time, for them, is everywhere. They see no reason to do this. And by the way, you don't need to do it either; it's just that you've always done it and you carry on doing it. My daughter never wears a watch, my daughter Kate, who's 20. She doesn't see the point. As she says, "It's a single function device." (Laughter) "Like, how lame is that?" And I say, "No, no, it tells the date as well." (Laughter) "It has multiple functions." But, you see, there are things we're enthralled to in education. Let me give you a couple of examples. One of them is the idea of linearity: that it starts here and you go through a track and if you do everything right, you will end up set for the rest of your life. Everybody who's spoken at TED has told us implicitly, or sometimes explicitly, a different story: that life is not linear; it's organic. We create our lives symbiotically as we explore our talents in relation to the circumstances they help to create for us. But, you know, we have become obsessed with this linear narrative. And probably the pinnacle for education is getting you to college. I think we are obsessed with getting people to college. Certain sorts of college. I don't mean you shouldn't go to college, but not everybody needs to go and not everybody needs to go now. Maybe they go later, not right away. And I was up in San Francisco a while ago doing a book signing. There was this guy buying a book, he was in his 30s. And I said, "What do you do?" And he said, "I'm a fireman." And I said, "How long have you been a fireman?" He said, "Always. I've always been a fireman." And I said, "Well, when did you decide?" He said, "As a kid." He said, "Actually, it was a problem for me at school, because at school, everybody wanted to be a fireman." He said, "But I wanted to be a fireman." And he said, "When I got to the senior year of school, my teachers didn't take it seriously. This one teacher didn't take it seriously. He said I was throwing my life away if that's all I chose to do with it; that I should go to college, I should become a professional person, that I had great potential and I was wasting my talent to do that." And he said, "It was humiliating because he said it in front of the whole class and I really felt dreadful. But it's what I wanted, and as soon as I left school, I applied to the fire service and I was accepted." And he said, "You know, I was thinking about that guy recently, just a few minutes ago when you were speaking, about this teacher," he said, "because six months ago, I saved his life." (Laughter) He said, "He was in a car wreck, and I pulled him out, gave him CPR, and I saved his wife's life as well." He said, "I think he thinks better of me now." (Laughter) (Applause) You know, to me, human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a singular conception of ability. And at the heart of our challenges -- (Applause) At the heart of the challenge is to reconstitute our sense of ability and of intelligence. This linearity thing is a problem. When I arrived in L.A. about nine years ago, I came across a policy statement -- very well-intentioned -- which said, "College begins in kindergarten." No, it doesn't. (Laughter) It doesn't. If we had time, I could go into this, but we don't. (Laughter) Kindergarten begins in kindergarten. (Laughter) A friend of mine once said, "You know, a three year-old is not half a six year-old." (Laughter) (Applause) They're three. But as we just heard in this last session, there's such competition now to get into kindergarten -- to get to the right kindergarten -- that people are being interviewed for it at three. Kids sitting in front of unimpressed panels, you know, with their resumes, (Laughter) flipping through and saying, "Well, this is it?" (Laughter) (Applause) "You've been around for 36 months, and this is it?" (Laughter) "You've achieved nothing -- commit. Spent the first six months breastfeeding, the way I can see it." (Laughter) See, it's outrageous as a conception, but it [unclear]. The other big issue is conformity. We have built our education systems on the model of fast food. This is something Jamie Oliver talked about the other day. You know there are two models of quality assurance in catering. One is fast food, where everything is standardized. The other are things like Zagat and Michelin restaurants, where everything is not standardized, they're customized to local circumstances. And we have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education, and it's impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies. (Applause) I think we have to recognize a couple of things here. One is that human talent is tremendously diverse. People have very different aptitudes. I worked out recently that I was given a guitar as a kid at about the same time that Eric Clapton got his first guitar. You know, it worked out for Eric, that's all I'm saying. (Laughter) In a way, it did not for me. I could not get this thing to work no matter how often or how hard I blew into it. (Laughter) It just wouldn't work. But it's not only about that. It's about passion. Often, people are good at things they don't really care for. It's about passion, and what excites our spirit and our energy. And if you're doing the thing that you love to do, that you're good at, time takes a different course entirely. My wife's just finished writing a novel, and I think it's a great book, but she disappears for hours on end. You know this, if you're doing something you love, an hour feels like five minutes. If you're doing something that doesn't resonate with your spirit, five minutes feels like an hour. And the reason so many people are opting out of education is because it doesn't feed their spirit, it doesn't feed their energy or their passion. So I think we have to change metaphors. We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it's an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish. So when we look at reforming education and transforming it, it isn't like cloning a system. There are great ones, like KIPP's; it's a great system. There are many great models. It's about customizing to your circumstances and personalizing education to the people you're actually teaching. And doing that, I think, is the answer to the future because it's not about scaling a new solution; it's about creating a movement in education in which people develop their own solutions, but with external support based on a personalized curriculum. Now in this room, there are people who represent extraordinary resources in business, in multimedia, in the Internet. These technologies, combined with the extraordinary talents of teachers, provide an opportunity to revolutionize education. And I urge you to get involved in it because it's vital, not just to ourselves, but to the future of our children. But we have to change from the industrial model to an agricultural model, where each school can be flourishing tomorrow. That's where children experience life. Or at home, if that's where they choose to be educated with their families or their friends. There's been a lot of talk about dreams over the course of this few days. And I wanted to just very quickly ... I was very struck by Natalie Merchant's songs last night, recovering old poems. I wanted to read you a quick, very short poem from W. B. Yeats, who some of you may know. He wrote this to his love, Maud Gonne, and he was bewailing the fact that he couldn't really give her what he thought she wanted from him. And he says, "I've got something else, but it may not be for you." He says this: "Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with gold and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams." And every day, everywhere, our children spread their dreams beneath our feet. And we should tread softly. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much.

There's a lot of exciting things happening in the design world and at IDEO this past year, and I'm pleased to get a chance to share some of those with you. I didn't attend the first TED back in 1984 but I've been to a lot of them since that time. I thought it [would] kind of be interesting to think back to that time when Richard got the whole thing started. Thank you very much, Richard; it's been a big, enjoyable part of my life, coming here. And so thinking back, I was thinking those of us in Silicon Valley were really focused on products or objects -- certainly technological objects. And so it was great fun in those days, and some of those of you who are in the audience were my clients. We'd come in with some prototype underneath a black cloth and we'd put it on the conference table, and we'd pull off the black cloth and everybody would "ooh" and "ah." That was a really good time. And so we'll continue to focus on products, as we always have. And if you were here last year, I probably wrestled you to the floor and tried to show you my new EyeModule 2, which was a camera that plugged into the Handspring. And I took a lot of pictures last year; very few people knew what I was up to, but I took a lot of pictures. This year -- maybe you could show the slides -- this year we're carrying this Treo, which we had a lot to do with and helped Handspring design it. Also, though we designed it a few years ago -- it's just become ubiquitous in the last year or so -- this Heartstream defibrillator which is saving lives. Maybe you've seen them in the airports? They seem to be everywhere now. Lots of lives are being saved by those. And, we're just about to announce the Zinio Reader product that I believe will make magazines even more enjoyable to read. So, we really will continue to focus on products. But something's happened in the last 18 years since Richard started TED, and that's that people like us -- I know people in other places have caught onto this for a long time, but for us, we've really just started ... we've kind of climbed Maslow's hierarchy a little bit -- and so we're now focused more and more on human-centered design, human-centeredness in an approach to design. That really involves designing behaviors and personality into products. And I think you're starting to see that, and it's making our job even more enjoyable. Interestingly enough, we used to primarily build 3-D models -- you know, you've seen some today -- and 3-D renderings. Then we'd go and we'd show those as communicating our ideas. But firms like ours are having to move to a point where we get those objects that we're designing and get them in motion, showing how they'll be used. And so in order to do that we've been forming internal video-production groups in order to make these kind of experience prototypes that show just what we mean about the man-machine relationship. And it's a much better way to see. It's kind of like architects who show people in their houses, as opposed to them being empty. So I thought that I would show you a few videos to show off this new, broader definition of design in products and services and environments. I have a few of them -- they're no more than a minute or a minute-and-a-half apiece -- but I thought you might be interested in seeing some of our work over the last year, and how it responds in video. So, Prada New York: we were asked by Rem Koolhaas and OMA to help us conceive the technology that's in their retail store in New York. He wanted a new kind of store -- a new one -- a store that had a cultural role as well as a retail one. And that meant actually designing custom technology as opposed to just buying things off the shelf and putting them to use. So, there're lots of things. Everything has RF tags: there's RF tags on the user, on the cards, there's the staff devices that are all around the store. You pick them up, and once you see something that you're interested in, the staff person can scan them in and then they can be shown on any screen throughout the store. You can look at color, and sizes, and how it appeared on the runway, or whatever. And so then the object -- the merchandise that you're interested in -- can be scanned. It's taken into the dressing room, and in the dressing room there are scanners so that we know exactly what clothing you have in the dressing room. We can put that up on a touch screen and you can play with that, and get more information about the clothing that you're interested in as you're trying it on. It's been used a lot of places, but I particularly like the use here of liquid crystal displays in the changing room. The last time I went to see this store, there was a huge buzz about people standing outside and wondering, "Am I going to actually get to see the people changing clothes here?" But if you push the button, of course, the whole wall goes dark. So you can try to get approval, or not, for whatever you're wearing. And then one of my favorite features of the technology is the magic mirror, where you put on the clothes. There's a big display in the mirror, and you can turn around -- but there's a three second delay. So you can see what you look like from the back or all the way around, as you look. (Applause) About a year and a half ago we were asked to design an installation in the museum -- this is a new wing of the Science Museum in London, and it's primarily about digital and biomedical issues. And a group at Itch, which is now part of IDEO, designed this interactive wall that's about four stories tall. I don't know if anybody's seen this -- it's pretty spectacular in the room. Anyway, it's based on the London subway system. And so you can see that the goal is to bring some of the feedback that the people who had gone to the museum were giving, and get it up on the wall so everybody could see. Just for everybody to see. So you enter your information. Then, like the London tube system, the little trains go around with what you're thinking about. And then when you get to a station, it's expanded so that you can actually read it. Then when you exit the IMAX theatre on the fourth floor -- mostly teenagers coming out of there -- there's this big open space that has these tables in it that have interactive games which are quite fun, also designed by Durrell [Bishop] and Andrew [Hirniak] of Itch. And the topics include things that the museum is about: male fertility, choosing the sex of your baby or what a driverless car might be like. There's lots of room, so people can come up and understand what it is before they get involved. And also, it's not shown in the video, but these are very beautiful. They go to the top of the wall and when they reach all the way to the top, after they've bounced around, they disperse into bits and go off into the atmosphere. The next video is not done by us. This is CBS Sunday Morning that aired about two weeks ago. Scott Adams ran into us and asked us if we wouldn't help to design the ultimate cubicle for Dilbert, which sounded like a fun thing and so we couldn't pass it up. He's always been interested in technology in the future. (Video: Scott Adams: I realized that at some point I might be the world's expert on what's wrong with cubicles. So we thought, well, wouldn't it be fun to get together with some of the smartest design guys in the world and try to figure out if we could make the cubicle better? Narrator: Though they work in a wide-open office space spectacularly set under San Francisco's Oakland Bay Bridge, the team built their own little cubicles to fully experience the problems. Woman: A one-way mirror. I can look out; you can look at yourself. Narrator: They took pictures. Woman: You feel so trapped, when someone kind of leans over and you're sort of held captive there for a minute. SA: So far it's chaos, but a lot of people are doing stuff, so that's good. We'll see what happens. Narrator: The first group builds a cubicle in which the walls are screens for the computer and for family photos. In the second group's scenario, the walls are alive and actually give Dilbert a group hug. (Laughter) Behind the humor is the idea of making the cubicle more human.) David Kelley: So here's the final thing, complete with orange lighting that follows the sun across -- that follows the tracks of the sun -- across the sky. So you feel that in your cubicle. And my favorite feature, which is a flower in a vase that wilts when you leave in disappointment, and then when you come back, it comes up to greet you, happy to see you. (SA: The storage is built right into the wall.) DK: You know, it has homey touches like a built-in fish tank in the walls, or something to be aggressive with to release tension. (SA: Customizable for the boss of your choice.) DK: And of course: a hammock for your afternoon nap that stretches across your cubicle. (SA: Life would be sweet in a cubicle like this.) DK: This next project, we were asked to design a pavilion to celebrate the recycling of the water on the Millennium Dome in London. The dome has an incredible amount of water that washes off of it, as well as wastewater. So this building actually celebrates the water as it comes out of the recycling plant and goes into the reed bed so that it can be filtered for the final time. The pavilion's design goal was to be kind of quiet and peaceful. In contrast to if you went inside the dome, where it's kind of wild and crazy and everybody's learning all kinds of things, or fooling around, or whatever they're doing. But it was intended to be quite quiet. And then you would wander around and gather information, in a straightforward fashion, about the recycling process and what's being done, and how they're going to reuse the water once it comes through the plant. And then, if you saw, the panels actually rotate. So you can get the information on the front side, but as they rotate, you can see the actual recycling plant behind, with all the machines as they actually process the water. You can see: there's the plant. These are all very low-budget videos, like quick prototypes. And we're announcing a new product here tonight, which is the first time this has ever been shown in public. It's called Spyfish, and it's a company called H2Eye, started by Nigel Jagger in London. And it's a company that's trying to bring the experience -- many people have boats, or enjoy being on boats, but a very small percentage of people actually have the capability or the interest in going under the water and actually seeing what's there, and enjoying what scuba divers do. This product, it has two cameras. You throw it over the side of your boat and you basically scuba dive without getting wet. For us -- there's the object -- for us, it was two projects. One, to design the interface so that the interface doesn't get in your way. You could have that kind of immersive experience of being underwater -- of feeling like you're underwater -- seeing what's going on. And the other one was to design the object and make sure that it was a consumer product and not a research tool. And so we spent a lot of time -- this has been going on for about seven or eight years, this project -- and [we're] just ready to start building them. (Narrator: The Spyfish is a revolutionary subaquatic video camera. It can dive to 500 feet, to where sunlight does not penetrate, and is equipped with powerful lights. It becomes your eyes and ears as you venture into the deep. The battery-powered Spyfish sends the live video-feed through a slender cable.) DK: This slender cable was a huge technological advancement and it allowed the whole thing to be the size that it is. (Narrator: And this central box connects the whole system together. Maneuvering the Spyfish is simple with the wireless remote control. You watch the video with superimposed graphics that indicate your depth and compass heading. The fluid graphics and ambient sounds combine to help you completely lose yourself underwater.) (Applause) DK: And the last thing I'll talk about is ApproTEC, which is a project that I'm very excited about. ApproTEC is a company started by Dr. Martin Fisher, who's a good friend of mine. He's a Ph.D. from Stanford. He found himself in Kenya on a Fulbright and he had a very interesting insight, which is that he said, "There must be entrepreneurs in Kenya; there must be entrepreneurs everywhere." And he noticed that for weddings and funerals there they could find enough money to put something together. So he decided to start manufacturing products in Kenya with Kenyan manufacturers -- designed by people like us, but taken there. And to this date -- he's been gone for only a few years -- he's started 19,000 companies. He's made 30,000 new jobs. And just the sales of the products -- this is a non-profit -- the sales of these products is now .6% of the GDP of Kenya. This is one guy doing this. This is a pretty spectacular thing. So we're in the process of helping them design deep-well, low-cost manual pumps in order for these people who have a quarter acre of land to be able to grow crops in the off-season. What they do now is: they can grow crops in the rainy season but they can't grow them in the off-season. And so by doing that, the woman that you saw in the first thing -- she's a school teacher -- always wanted to send her kids to college and she's going to be able to do it because of these things. So with seed-squeezers, and pumps, and hay-balers and very straightforward things that we're designing -- my students are doing this as class projects and IDEO has donated their time to do this kind of work -- it's really amazing to see his success, Martin's. We also were thinking about the experience of Richard, and so -- (Laughter) -- we designed this hat, because I knew I'd be the last one in the day and I needed to deal with him. So I just have one more thing to say. (Laughter) Can you read it? (Laughter) Well, it's always kind of funny when he comes up and hovers. You know, you don't want to be rude to him and you don't want to feel guilty, and so I thought this would do it, where I just sit here. (Laughter) (Applause) So we saw a lot of interesting things being designed today in this session, and from all the different presenters. And in my own practice, from product to ApproTEC, it's really exciting that we're taking a more human-centered approach to design, that we're including behaviors and personalities in the things we do, and I think this is great. Designers are more trusted and more integrated into the business strategy of companies, and I have to say, for one, I feel very lucky at the progress that design has made since the first TED. Thanks a lot.

In December of 2010, the city of Apatzingán in the coastal state of Michoacán, in Mexico, awoke to gunfire. For two straight days, the city became an open battlefield between the federal forces and a well-organized group, presumably from the local criminal organization, La Familia Michoacana, or the Michoacán family. The citizens didn't only experience incessant gunfire but also explosions and burning trucks used as barricades across the city, so truly like a battlefield. After these two days, and during a particularly intense encounter, it was presumed that the leader of La Familia Michoacana, Nazario Moreno, was killed. In response to this terrifying violence, the mayor of Apatzingán decided to call the citizens to a march for peace. The idea was to ask for a softer approach to criminal activity in the state. And so, the day of the scheduled procession, thousands of people showed up. As the mayor was preparing to deliver the speech starting the march, his team noticed that, while half of the participants were appropriately dressed in white, and bearing banners asking for peace, the other half was actually marching in support of the criminal organization and its now-presumed-defunct leader. Shocked, the mayor decided to step aside rather than participate or lead a procession that was ostensibly in support of organized crime. And so his team stepped aside. The two marches joined together, and they continued their path towards the state capital. This story of horrific violence followed by a fumbled approach by federal and local authorities as they tried to engage civil society, who has been very well engaged by a criminal organization, is a perfect metaphor for what's happening in Mexico today, where we see that our current understanding of drug violence and what leads to it is probably at the very least incomplete. If you decided to spend 30 minutes trying to figure out what's going on with drug violence in Mexico by, say, just researching online, the first thing you would find out is that while the laws state that all Mexican citizens are equal, there are some that are more and there are some that are much less equal than others, because you will quickly find out that in the past six years anywhere between 60 and 100,000 people have lost their lives in drug-related violence. To put these numbers in perspective, this is eight times larger than the number of casualties in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined. It's also shockingly close to the number of people who have died in the Syrian civil war, which is an active civil war. This is happening just south of the border. Now as you're reading, however, you will be maybe surprised that you will quickly become numb to the numbers of deaths, because you will see that these are sort of abstract numbers of faceless, nameless dead people. Implicitly or explicitly, there is a narrative that all the people who are dying were somehow involved in the drug trade, and we infer this because they were either tortured or executed in a professional manner, or, most likely, both. And so clearly they were criminals because of the way they died. And so the narrative is that somehow these people got what they were deserved. They were part of the bad guys. And that creates some form of comfort for a lot of people. However, while it's easier to think of us, the citizens, the police, the army, as the good guys, and them, the narcos, the carteles, as the bad guys, if you think about it, the latter are only providing a service to the former. Whether we like it or not, the U.S. is the largest market for illegal substances in the world, accounting for more than half of global demand. It shares thousands of miles of border with Mexico that is its only route of access from the South, and so, as the former dictator of Mexico, Porfirio Diaz, used to say, "Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States." The U.N. estimates that there are 55 million users of illegal drugs in the United States. Using very, very conservative assumptions, this yields a yearly drug market on the retail side of anywhere between 30 and 150 billion dollars. If we assume that the narcos only have access to the wholesale part, which we know is false, that still leaves you with yearly revenues of anywhere between 15 billion and 60 billion dollars. To put these numbers in perspective, Microsoft has yearly revenues of 60 billion dollars. And it so happens that this is a product that, because of its nature, a business model to address this market requires you to guarantee to your producers that their product will be reliably placed in the markets where it is consumed. And the only way to do this, because it's illegal, is to have absolute control of the geographic corridors that are used to transport drugs. Hence the violence. If you look at a map of cartel influence and violence, you will see that it almost perfectly aligns with the most efficient routes of transportation from the south to the north. The only thing that the cartels are doing is that they're trying to protect their business. It's not only a multi-billion dollar market, but it's also a complex one. For example, the coca plant is a fragile plant that can only grow in certain latitudes, and so it means that a business model to address this market requires you to have decentralized, international production, that by the way needs to have good quality control, because people need a good high that is not going to kill them and that is going to be delivered to them when they need it. And so that means they need to secure production and quality control in the south, and you need to ensure that you have efficient and effective distribution channels in the markets where these drugs are consumed. I urge you, but only a little bit, because I don't want to get you in trouble, to just ask around and see how difficult it would be to get whatever drug you want, wherever you want it, whenever you want it, anywhere in the U.S., and some of you may be surprised to know that there are many dealers that offer a service where if you send them a text message, they guarantee delivery of the drug in 30 minutes or less. Think about this for a second. Think about the complexity of the distribution network that I just described. It's very difficult to reconcile this with the image of faceless, ignorant goons that are just shooting each other, very difficult to reconcile. Now, as a business professor, and as any business professor would tell you, an effective organization requires an integrated strategy that includes a good organizational structure, good incentives, a solid identity and good brand management. This leads me to the second thing that you would learn in your 30-minute exploration of drug violence in Mexico. Because you would quickly realize, and maybe be confused by the fact, that there are three organizations that are constantly named in the articles. You will hear about Los Zetas, the Knights Templar, which is the new brand for the Familia Michoacana that I spoke about at the beginning, and the Sinaloa Federation. You will read that Los Zetas is this assortment of sociopaths that terrify the cities that they enter and they silence the press, and this is somewhat true, or mostly true. But this is the result of a very careful branding and business strategy. You see, Los Zetas is not just this random assortment of individuals, but was actually created by another criminal organization, the Gulf Cartel, that used to control the eastern corridor of Mexico. When that corridor became contested, they decided that they wanted to recruit a professional enforcement arm. So they recruited Los Zetas: an entire unit of elite paratroopers from the Mexican Army. They were incredibly effective as enforcers for the Gulf Cartel, so much so that at some point, they decided to just take over the operations, which is why I ask you to never keep tigers as pets, because they grow up. Because the Zetas organization was founded in treason, they lost some of the linkages to the production and distribution in the most profitable markets like cocaine, but what they did have, and this is again based on their military origin, was a perfectly structured chain of command with a very clear hierarchy and a very clear promotion path that allowed them to supervise and operate across many, many markets very effectively, which is the essence of what a chain of command seeks to do. And so because they didn't have access to the more profitable drug markets, this pushed them and gave them the opportunity to diversify into other forms of crime. That includes kidnapping, prostitution, local drug dealing and human trafficking, including of migrants that go from the south to the U.S. So what they currently run is truly and quite literally a franchise business. They focus most of their recruiting on the army, and they very openly advertise for better salaries, better benefits, better promotion paths, not to mention much better food, than what the army can deliver. The way they operate is that when they arrive in a locality, they let people know that they are there, and they go to the most powerful local gang and they say, "I offer you to be the local representative of the Zeta brand." If they agree -- and you don't want to know what happens if they don't -- they train them and they supervise them on how to run the most efficient criminal operation for that town, in exchange for royalties. This kind of business model obviously depends entirely on having a very effective brand of fear, and so Los Zetas carefully stage acts of violence that are spectacular in nature, especially when they arrive first in a city, but again, that's just a brand strategy. I'm not saying they're not violent, but what I am saying is that even though you will read that they are the most violent of all, when you count, when you do the body count, they're actually all the same. In contrast to them, the Knights Templar that arose in Michoacán emerged in reaction to the incursion of the Zetas into the state of Michoacán. Michoacán is a geographically strategic state because it has one of the largest ports in Mexico, and it has very direct routes to the center of Mexico, which then gives you direct access to the U.S. The Knights Templar realized very quickly that they couldn't face the Zetas on violence alone, and so they developed a strategy as a social enterprise. They brand themselves as representative of and protecting of the citizens of Michoacán against organized crime. Their brand of social enterprise means that they require a lot of civic engagement, so they invest heavily in providing local services, like dealing with home violence, going after petty criminals, treating addicts, and keeping drugs out of the local markets where they are, and, of course, protecting people from other criminal organizations. Now, they kill a lot of people too, but when they kill them, they provide very careful narratives and descriptions for why they did them, through newspaper insertions, YouTube videos, and billboards that explain that the people who were killed were killed because they represented a threat not to us, as an organization, of course, but to you, as citizens. And so we're actually here to protect you. They, as social enterprises do, have created a moral and ethical code that they advertise around, and they have very strict recruiting practices. And here you have the types of explanations that they provide for some of their actions. They have actually retained access to the profitable drug trade, but the way they do it is, because they control all of Michoacán, and they control the Port of Lázaro Cárdenas, they leverage that to, for example, trade copper from Michoacán that is legally created and legally extracted with illegal ephedrine from China which is a critical precursor for methamphetamines that they produce, and then they have partnerships with larger organizations like the Sinaloa Federation that place their products in the U.S. Finally, the Sinaloa Federation. When you read about them, you will often read about them with an undertone of reverence and admiration, because they are the most integrated and the largest of all the Mexican organizations, and, many people argue, the world. They started as just sort of a transport organization that specialized in smuggling between the U.S. and the Mexican borders, but now they have grown into a truly integrated multinational that has partnerships in production in the south and partnerships in global distribution across the planet. They have cultivated a brand of professionalism, business acumen and innovation. They have designed new drug products and new drug processes. They have designed narco-tunnels that go across the border, and you can see that these are not "The Shawshank Redemption" types. They have invented narco-submarines and boats that are not detected by radar. They have invented drones to transport drugs, catapults, you name it. One of the leaders of the Sinaloa Federation actually made it to the Forbes list. [#701 Joaquin Guzman Loera] Like any multinational would, they have specialized and focused only in the most profitable part of the business, which is high-margin drugs like cocaine, heroine, methamphetamines. Like any traditional Latin American multinational would, the way they control their operations is through family ties. When they're entering a new market, they send a family member to supervise it, or, if they're partnering with a new organization, they create a family tie, either through marriages or other types of ties. Like any other multinational would, they protect their brand by outsourcing the more questionable parts of the business model, like for example, when they have to engage in violence against other criminal organizations, they recruit gangs and other smaller players to do the dirty work for them, and they try to separate their operations and their violence and be very discrete about this. To further strengthen their brand, they actually have professional P.R. firms that shape how the press talks about them. They have professional videographers on staff. They have incredibly productive ties with the security organizations on both sides of the border. And so, differences aside, what these three organizations share is on the one hand, a very clear understanding that institutions cannot be imposed from the top, but rather they are built from the bottom up one interaction at a time. They have created extremely coherent structures that they use to show the inconsistencies in government policies. And so what I want you to remember from this talk are three things. The first one is that drug violence is actually the result of a huge market demand and an institutional setup that forces the servicing of this market to necessitate violence to guarantee delivery routes. The second thing I want you to remember is that these are sophisticated, coherent organizations that are business organizations, and analyzing them and treating them as such is probably a much more useful approach. The third thing I want you to remember is that even though we're more comfortable with this idea of "them," a set of bad guys separated from us, we are actually accomplices to them, either through our direct consumption or through our acceptance of the inconsistency between our policies of prohibition and our actual behavior of tolerance or even encouragement of consumption. These organizations service, recruit from, and operate within our communities, so necessarily, they are much more integrated within them than we are comfortable acknowledging. And so to me the question is not whether these dynamics will continue the way they have. We see that the nature of this phenomenon guarantees that they will. The question is whether we are willing to continue our support of a failed strategy based on our stubborn, blissful, voluntary ignorance at the cost of the deaths of thousands of our young. Thank you. (Applause)

My mission in life since I was a kid was, and is, to take the rest of you into space. It's during our lifetime that we're going to take the Earth, take the people of Earth and transition off, permanently. And that's exciting. In fact, I think it is a moral imperative that we open the space frontier. You know, it's the first time that we're going to have a chance to have planetary redundancy, a chance to, if you would, back up the biosphere. And if you think about space, everything we hold of value on this planet -- metals and minerals and real estate and energy -- is in infinite quantities in space. In fact, the Earth is a crumb in a supermarket filled with resources. The analogy for me is Alaska. You know, we bought Alaska. We Americans bought Alaska in the 1850s. It's called Seward's folly. We valued it as the number of seal pelts we could kill. And then we discovered these things -- gold and oil and fishing and timber -- and it became, you know, a trillion-dollar economy, and now we take our honeymoons there. The same thing will happen in space. We are on the verge of the greatest exploration that the human race has ever known. We explore for three reasons, the weakest of which is curiosity. You know, it's funded NASA's budget up until now. Some images from Mars, 1997. In fact, I think in the next decade, without any question, we will discover life on Mars and find that it is literally ubiquitous under the soils and different parts of that planet. The stronger motivator, the much stronger motivator, is fear. It drove us to the moon. We -- literally in fear -- with the Soviet Union raced to the moon. And we have these huge rocks, you know, killer-sized rocks in the hundreds of thousands or millions out there, and while the probability is very small, the impact, figured in literally, of one of these hitting the Earth is so huge that to spend a small fraction looking, searching, preparing to defend, is not unreasonable. And of course, the third motivator, one near and dear to my heart as an entrepreneur, is wealth. In fact, the greatest wealth. If you think about these other asteroids, there's a class of the nickel iron, which in platinum-group metal markets alone are worth something like 20 trillion dollars, if you can go out and grab one of these rocks. My plan is to actually buy puts on the precious metal market, and then actually claim that I'm going to go out and get one. And that will fund the actual mission to go and get one. But fear, curiosity and greed have driven us. And for me, this is -- I'm the short kid on the right. This was -- my motivation was actually during Apollo. And Apollo was one of the greatest motivators ever. If you think about what happened at the turn of -- early 1960s, on May 25, JFK said, "We're going to go to the moon." And people left their jobs and they went to obscure locations to go and be part of this amazing mission. And we knew nothing about going to space. We went from having literally put Alan Shepard in suborbital flight to going to the moon in eight years, and the average age of the people that got us there was 26 years old. They didn't know what couldn't be done. They had to make up everything. And that, my friend, is amazing motivation. This is Gene Cernan, a good friend of mine, saying, "If I can go to the moon" -- this is the last human on the moon so far -- "nothing, nothing is impossible." But of course, we've thought about the government always as the person taking us there. But I put forward here, the government is not going to get us there. The government is unable to take the risks required to open up this precious frontier. The shuttle is costing a billion dollars a launch. That's a pathetic number. It's unreasonable. We shouldn't be happy in standing for that. One of the things that we did with the Ansari X PRIZE was take the challenge on that risk is OK, you know. As we are going out there and taking on a new frontier, we should be allowed to risk. In fact, anyone who says we shouldn't, you know, just needs to be put aside, because, as we go forward, in fact, the greatest discoveries we will ever know is ahead of us. The entrepreneurs in the space business are the furry mammals, and clearly the industrial-military complex -- with Boeing and Lockheed and NASA -- are the dinosaurs. The ability for us to access these resources to gain planetary redundancy -- we can now gather all the information, the genetic codes, you know, everything stored on our databases, and back them up off the planet, in case there would be one of those disastrous situations. The difficulty is getting there, and clearly, the cost to orbit is key. Once you're in orbit, you are two thirds of the way, energetically, to anywhere -- the moon, to Mars. And today, there's only three vehicles -- the U.S. shuttle, the Russian Soyuz and the Chinese vehicle -- that gets you there. Arguably, it's about 100 million dollars a person on the space shuttle. One of the companies I started, Space Adventures, will sell you a ticket. We've done two so far. We'll be announcing two more on the Soyuz to go up to the space station for 20 million dollars. But that's expensive and to understand what the potential is -- (Laughter) -- it is expensive. But people are willing to pay that! You know, one -- we have a very unique period in time today. For the first time ever, we have enough wealth concentrated in the hands of few individuals and the technology accessible that will allow us to really drive space exploration. But how cheap could it get? I want to give you the end point. We know -- 20 million dollars today, you can go and buy a ticket, but how cheap could it get? Let's go back to high school physics here. If you calculate the amount of potential energy, mgh, to take you and your spacesuit up to a couple hundred miles, and then you accelerate yourself to 17,500 miles per hour -- remember, that one half MV squared -- and you figure it out. It's about 5.7 gigajoules of energy. If you expended that over an hour, it's about 1.6 megawatts. If you go to one of Vijay's micro-power sources, and they sell it to you for seven cents a kilowatt hour -- anybody here fast in math? How much will it cost you and your spacesuit to go to orbit? 100 bucks. That's the price-improvement curve that -- we need some breakthroughs in physics along the way, I'll grant you that. (Laughter) But guys, if history has taught us anything, it's that if you can imagine it, you will get there eventually. I have no question that the physics, the engineering to get us down to the point where all of us can afford orbital space flight is around the corner. The difficulty is that there needs to be a real marketplace to drive the investment. Today, the Boeings and the Lockheeds don't spend a dollar of their own money in R&D. It's all government research dollars, and very few of those. And in fact, the large corporations, the governments, can't take the risk. So we need what I call an exothermic economic reaction in space. Today's commercial markets worldwide, global commercial launch market? 12 to 15 launches per year. Number of commercial companies out there? 12 to 15 companies. One per company. That's not it. There's only one marketplace, and I call them self-loading carbon payloads. They come with their own money. They're easy to make. It's people. The Ansari X PRIZE was my solution, reading about Lindbergh for creating the vehicles to get us there. We offered 10 million dollars in cash for the first reusable ship, carry three people up to 100 kilometers, come back down, and within two weeks, make the trip again. Twenty-six teams from seven countries entered the competition, spending between one to 25 million dollars each. And of course, we had beautiful SpaceShipOne, which made those two flights and won the competition. And I'd like to take you there, to that morning, for just a quick video. (Video) Pilot: Release our fire. Richard Searfoss: Good luck. (Applause) RS: We've got an altitude call of 368,000 feet. (Applause) RS: So in my official capacity as the chief judge of the Ansari X PRIZE competition, I declare that Mojave Aerospace Ventures has indeed earned the Ansari X PRIZE. (Applause) Peter Diamandis: Probably the most difficult thing that I had to do was raise the capital for this. It was literally impossible. We went -- I went to 100, 200 CEOs, CMOs. No one believed it was done. Everyone said, "Oh, what does NASA think? Well, people are going to die, how can you possibly going to put this forward?" I found a visionary family, the Ansari family, and Champ Car, and raised part of the money, but not the full 10 million. And what I ended up doing was going out to the insurance industry and buying a hole-in-one insurance policy. See, the insurance companies went to Boeing and Lockheed, and said, "Are you going to compete?" No. "Are you going to compete?" No. "No one's going to win this thing." So, they took a bet that no one would win by January of '05, and I took a bet that someone would win. (Applause) So -- and the best thing is they paid off and the check didn't bounce. (Laughter) We've had a lot of accomplishments and it's been a tremendous success. One of the things I'm most happy about is that the SpaceShipOne is going to hang in Air and Space Museum, next to the Spirit of St. Louis and the Wright Flyer. Isn't that great? (Applause) So a little bit about the future, steps to space, what's available for you. Today, you can go and experience weightless flights. By '08, suborbital flights, the price tag for that, you know, on Virgin, is going to be about 200,000. There are three or four other serious efforts that will bring the price down very rapidly, I think, to about 25,000 dollars for a suborbital flight. Orbital flights -- we can take you to the space station. And then I truly believe, once a group is in orbit around the Earth -- I know if they don't do it, I am -- we're going to stockpile some fuel, make a beeline for the moon and grab some real estate. (Laughter) Quick moment for the designers in the audience. We spent 11 years getting FAA approval to do zero gravity flights. Here are some fun images. Here's Burt Rutan and my good friend Greg Meronek inside a zero gravity -- people think a zero gravity room, there's a switch on there that turns it off -- but it's actually parabolic flight of an airplane. And turns out 7-Up has just done a little commercial that's airing this month. If we can get the audio up? (Video) Narrator: For a chance to win the first free ticket to space, look for specially marked packages of Diet 7-Up. When you want the taste that won't weigh you down, the only way to go is up. PD: That was filmed inside our airplane, and so, you can now do this. We're based down in Florida. Let me talk about the other thing I'm excited about. The future of prizes. You know, prizes are a very old idea. I had the pleasure of borrowing from the Longitude Prize and the Orteig Prize that put Lindbergh forward. And we have made a decision in the X PRIZE Foundation to actually carry that concept forward into other technology areas, and we just took on a new mission statement: "to bring about radical breakthroughs in space and other technologies for the benefit of humanity." And this is something that we're very excited about. I showed this slide to Larry Page, who just joined our board. And you know, when you give to a nonprofit, you might have 50 cents on the dollar. If you have a matching grant, it's typically two or three to one. If you put up a prize, you can get literally a 50 to one leverage on your dollars. And that's huge. And then he turned around and said, "Well, if you back a prize institute that runs a 10 prize, you get 500 to one." I said, "Well, that's great." So, we have actually -- are looking to turn the X PRIZE into a world-class prize institute. This is what happens when you put up a prize, when you announce it and teams start to begin doing trials. You get publicity increase, and when it's won, publicity shoots through the roof -- if it's properly managed -- and that's part of the benefits to a sponsor. Then, when the prize is actually won, after it's moving, you get societal benefits, you know, new technology, new capability. And the benefit to the sponsors is the sum of the publicity and societal benefits over the long term. That's our value proposition in a prize. If you were going to go and try to create SpaceShipOne, or any kind of a new technology, you have to fund that from the beginning and maintain that funding with an uncertain outcome. It may or may not happen. But if you put up a prize, the beautiful thing is, you know, it's a very small maintenance fee, and you pay on success. Orteig didn't pay a dime out to the nine teams that went across -- tried to go across the Atlantic, and we didn't pay a dime until someone won the Ansari X PRIZE. So, prizes work great. You know, innovators, the entrepreneurs out there, you know that when you're going for a goal, the first thing you have to do is believe that you can do it yourself. Then, you've got to, you know, face potential public ridicule of -- that's a crazy idea, it'll never work. And then you have to convince others, so that they can, in fact, help you raise the funds, and then you've got to deal with the fact that you've got government bureaucracies and institutions that don't want you to move those things forward, and you have to deal with failures. What a prize does, what we've experienced a prize doing, is literally help to short-circuit or support all of these things, because a prize credentials the idea that this is a good idea. Well, it must be a good idea. Someone's offering 10 million dollars to go and do this thing. And each of these areas was something that we found the Ansari X PRIZE helped short-circuit these for innovation. So, as an organization, we put together a prize discovery process of how to come up with prizes and write the rules, and we're actually looking at creating prizes in a number of different categories. We're looking at attacking energy, environment, nanotechnology -- and I'll talk about those more in a moment. And the way we're doing that is we're creating prize teams within the X PRIZE. We have a space prize team. We're going after an orbital prize. We are looking at a number of energy prizes. Craig Venter has just joined our board and we're doing a rapid genome sequencing prize with him, we'll be announcing later this fall, about -- imagine being able to sequence anybody's DNA for under 1,000 dollars, revolutionize medicine. And clean water, education, medicine and even looking at social entrepreneurship. So my final slide here is, the most critical tool for solving humanity's grand challenges -- it isn't technology, it isn't money, it's only one thing -- it's the committed, passionate human mind. (Applause)

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

We've been told to go out on a limb and say something surprising. So I'll try and do that, but I want to start with two things that everyone already knows. And the first one, in fact, is something that has been known for most of recorded history, and that is, that the planet Earth, or the solar system, or our environment or whatever, is uniquely suited to sustain our evolution -- or creation, as it used to be thought -- and our present existence, and most important, our future survival. Nowadays, this idea has a dramatic name: Spaceship Earth. And the idea there is that outside the spaceship, the universe is implacably hostile, and inside is all we have, all we depend on, and we only get the one chance: if we mess up our spaceship, we've got nowhere else to go. Now, the second thing that everyone already knows is that, contrary to what was believed for most of human history, human beings are not, in fact, the hub of existence. As Stephen Hawking famously said, we're just a chemical scum on the surface of a typical planet that's in orbit around a typical star, which is on the outskirts of a typical galaxy, and so on. Now, the first of those two things that everyone knows is kind of saying that we're at a very un-typical place, uniquely suited and so on, and the second one is saying that we're at a typical place. And, especially if you regard these two as deep truths to live by and to inform your life decisions, then they seem a little bit to conflict with each other. But that doesn't prevent them from both being completely false. (Laughter) And they are. So let me start with the second one: "Typical." Well, is this a typical place? Well, let's look around, you know, look in a random direction, and we see a wall, and chemical scum -- (Laughter) and that's not typical of the universe at all. All you've got to do is go a few hundred miles in that same direction and look back, and you won't see any walls or chemical scum at all -- all you see is a blue planet. And if you go further than that, you'll see the Sun, the solar system and the stars and so on, but that's still not typical of the universe, because stars come in galaxies. And most places in the universe, a typical place in the universe, is nowhere near any galaxies. So let's go out further, till we're outside the galaxy, and look back, and yeah, there's the huge galaxy with spiral arms laid out in front of us. And at this point, we've come 100,000 light-years from here. But we're still nowhere near a typical place in the universe. To get to a typical place, you've got to go 1,000 times as far as that, into intergalactic space. And so, what does that look like -- "typical?" What does a "typical" place in the universe look like? Well, at enormous expense, TED has arranged a high-resolution immersion virtual reality rendering of the view from intergalactic space. Can we have the lights off, please, so we can see it? Well, not quite, not quite perfect. You see, intergalactic space is completely dark, pitch dark. It's so dark, that if you were to be looking at the nearest star to you, and that star were to explode as a supernova, and you were to be staring directly at it at the moment when its light reached you, you still wouldn't be able to see even a glimmer. That's how big and how dark the universe is. And that's despite the fact that a supernova is so bright, so brilliant an event, that it would kill you stone dead at a range of several light-years. (Laughter) And yet, from intergalactic space, it's so far away you wouldn't even see it. It's also very cold out there -- less than three degrees above absolute zero. And it's very empty. The vacuum there is one million times less dense than the highest vacuum that our best technology on Earth can currently create. So that's how different a typical place is from this place. And that is how un-typical this place is. So can we have the lights back on please? Thank you. Now, how do we know about an environment that's so far away and so different and so alien from anything we're used to? Well, the Earth -- our environment, in the form of us -- is creating knowledge. Well, what does that mean? Well, look out even further than we've just been -- I mean from here, with a telescope -- and you'll see things that look like stars, they're called quasars. "Quasars" originally meant "quasi-stellar object," which means "things that look a bit like stars." (Laughter) But they're not stars. And we know what they are. Billions of years ago and billions of light-years away, the material at the center of a galaxy collapsed towards a super-massive black hole. And then intense magnetic fields directed some of the energy of that gravitational collapse and some of the matter back out in the form of tremendous jets, which illuminated lobes with the brilliance of -- I think it's a trillion -- suns. Now, the physics of the human brain could hardly be more unlike the physics of such a jet. We couldn't survive for an instant in it. Language breaks down when trying to describe what it would be like in one of those jets. It would be a bit like experiencing a supernova explosion, but at point-blank range and for millions of years at a time. (Laughter) And yet, that jet happened in precisely such a way that billions of years later, on the other side of the universe, some bit of chemical scum could accurately describe and model and predict and explain, above all -- there's your reference -- what was happening there, in reality. The one physical system, the brain, contains an accurate working model of the other, the quasar. Not just a superficial image of it, though it contains that as well, but an explanatory model, embodying the same mathematical relationships and the same causal structure. Now, that is knowledge. And if that weren't amazing enough, the faithfulness with which the one structure resembles the other is increasing with time. That is the growth of knowledge. So, the laws of physics have this special property, that physical objects as unlike each other as they could possibly be, can nevertheless embody the same mathematical and causal structure and to do it more and more so over time. So we are a chemical scum that is different. This chemical scum has universality. Its structure contains, with ever-increasing precision, the structure of everything. This place, and not other places in the universe, is a hub which contains within itself the structural and causal essence of the whole of the rest of physical reality. And so, far from being insignificant, the fact that the laws of physics allow this or even mandate that this can happen, is one of the most important things about the physical world. Now how does the solar system -- our environment, in the form of us -- acquire this special relationship with the rest of the universe? Well, one thing that's true about Stephen Hawking's remark -- I mean, it is true, but it's the wrong emphasis. One thing that's true about it is that it doesn't do it with any special physics, there's no special dispensation, no miracles involved. It does it simply with three things that we have here in abundance. One of them is matter, because the growth of knowledge is a form of information processing. Information processing is computation, computation requires a computer -- there's no known way of making a computer without matter. We also need energy to make the computer, and most important, to make the media, in effect, onto which we record the knowledge that we discover. And then thirdly, less tangible but just as essential for the open-ended creation of knowledge, of explanations, is evidence. Now, our environment is inundated with evidence. We happen to get round to testing, let's say, Newton's Law of Gravity, about 300 years ago. But the evidence that we used to do that was falling down on every square meter of the Earth for billions of years before that, and will continue to fall for billions of years afterwards. And the same is true for all the other sciences. As far as we know, evidence to discover the most fundamental truths of all the sciences is here just for the taking, on our planet. Our location is saturated with evidence and also with matter and energy. Out in intergalactic space, those three prerequisites for the open-ended creation of knowledge are at their lowest possible supply -- as I said, it's empty, it's cold and it's dark out there. Or is it? Now actually, that's just another parochial misconception. (Laughter) Because imagine a cube out there in intergalactic space, the same size as our home, the solar system. Now that cube is very empty by human standards, but that still means that it contains over a million tons of matter. And a million tons is enough to make, say, a self-contained space station, on which there's a colony of scientists that are devoted to creating an open-ended stream of knowledge, and so on. Now, it's way beyond present technology to even gather the hydrogen from intergalactic space and form it into other elements and so on. But the thing is, in a comprehensible universe, if something isn't forbidden by the laws of physics, then what could possibly prevent us from doing it, other than knowing how? In other words, it's a matter of knowledge, not resources. If we could do that, we'd automatically have an energy supply, because this transmutation would be a fusion reactor. And evidence? Well, again, it's dark out there to human senses, but all you've got to do is take a telescope, even one of present-day design, look out, and you'll see the same galaxies as we do from here. And with a more powerful telescope, you'll be able to see stars and planets in those galaxies, you'll be able to do astrophysics and learn the laws of physics. And locally there you could build particle accelerators, and learn elementary particle physics and chemistry, and so on. Probably the hardest science to do would be biology field trips -- (Laughter) because it would take several hundred million years to get to the nearest life-bearing planet and back. But I have to tell you -- and sorry, Richard -- but I never did like biology field trips much, (Laughter) and I think we can just about make do with one every few hundred million years. (Laughter) So in fact, intergalactic space does contain all the prerequisites for the open-ended creation of knowledge. Any such cube anywhere in the universe could become the same kind of hub that we are, if the knowledge of how to do so were present there. So, we're not in a uniquely hospitable place. If intergalactic space is capable of creating an open-ended stream of explanations, then so is almost every other environment, so is the Earth. So is a polluted Earth. And the limiting factor, there and here, is not resources, because they're plentiful, but knowledge, which is scarce. Now this cosmic knowledge-based view may -- and I think ought to -- make us feel very special. But it should also make us feel vulnerable, because it means that without the specific knowledge that's needed to survive the ongoing challenges of the universe, we won't survive them. All it takes is for a supernova to go off a few light-years away, and we'll all be dead! Martin Rees has recently written a book about our vulnerability to all sorts of things, from astrophysics, to scientific experiments gone wrong, and most importantly, to terrorism with weapons of mass destruction. And he thinks that civilization has only a 50 percent chance of surviving this century. I think he's going to talk about that later in the conference. Now, I don't think that probability is the right category to discuss this issue in, but I do agree with him about this: We can survive and we can fail to survive. But it depends not on chance, but on whether we create the relevant knowledge in time. The danger is not at all unprecedented. Species go extinct all the time. Civilizations end. The overwhelming majority of all species and all civilizations that have ever existed are now history. And if we want to be the exception to that, then logically, our only hope is to make use of the one feature that distinguishes our species and civilization from all the others -- namely, our special relationship with the laws of physics, our ability to create new explanations, new knowledge -- to be a hub of existence. So let me now apply this to a current controversy, not because I want to advocate any particular solution, but just to illustrate the kind of thing I mean. And the controversy is global warming. Now, I'm a physicist, but I'm not the right kind of physicist. In regard to global warming, I'm just a layman. And the rational thing for a layman to do is to take seriously the prevailing scientific theory. And according to that theory, it's already too late to avoid a disaster, because if it's true that our best option at the moment is to prevent CO2 emissions with something like the Kyoto Protocol, with its constraints on economic activity and its enormous cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, or whatever it is, then that is already a disaster by any reasonable measure. And the actions that are advocated are not even purported to solve the problem, merely to postpone it by a little. So it's already too late to avoid it, and it probably has been too late to avoid it ever since before anyone realized the danger. It was probably already too late in the 1970s, when the best available scientific theory was telling us that industrial emissions were about to precipitate a new ice age, in which billions would die. Now, the lesson of that seems clear to me, and I don't know why it isn't informing public debate. It is that we can't always know. When we know of an impending disaster, and how to solve it at a cost less than the cost of the disaster itself, then there's not going to be much argument, really. But no precautions and no precautionary principle can avoid problems that we do not yet foresee. Hence, we need a stance of problem-fixing, not just problem-avoidance. And it's true that an ounce of prevention equals a pound of cure, but that's only if we know what to prevent. If you've been punched on the nose, then the science of medicine does not consist of teaching you how to avoid punches. (Laughter) If medical science stopped seeking cures and concentrated on prevention only, then it would achieve very little of either. The world is buzzing at the moment with plans to force reductions in gas emissions at all costs. It ought to be buzzing with plans to reduce the temperature, and with plans to live at the higher temperature -- and not at all costs, but efficiently and cheaply. And some such plans exist, things like swarms of mirrors in space to deflect the sunlight away, and encouraging aquatic organisms to eat more carbon dioxide. At the moment, these things are fringe research; they're not central to the human effort to face this problem, or problems in general. And with problems that we are not aware of yet, the ability to put right -- not the sheer good luck of avoiding indefinitely -- is our only hope, not just of solving problems, but of survival. So take two stone tablets, and carve on them. On one of them, carve: "Problems are soluble." And on the other one, carve: "Problems are inevitable." Thank you. (Applause)

Let me talk about India through the evolution of ideas. Now I believe this is an interesting way of looking at it because in every society, especially an open democratic society, it's only when ideas take root that things change. Slowly ideas lead to ideology, lead to policies that lead to actions. In 1930 this country went through a Great Depression, which led to all the ideas of the state and social security, and all the other things that happened in Roosevelt's time. In the 1980s we had the Reagan revolution, which lead to deregulation. And today, after the global economic crisis, there was a whole new set of rules about how the state should intervene. So ideas change states. And I looked at India and said, really there are four kinds of ideas which really make an impact on India. The first, to my mind, is what I call as "the ideas that have arrived." These ideas have brought together something which has made India happen the way it is today. The second set of ideas I call "ideas in progress." Those are ideas which have been accepted but not implemented yet. The third set of ideas are what I call as "ideas that we argue about" -- those are ideas where we have a fight, an ideological battle about how to do things. And the fourth thing, which I believe is most important, is "the ideas that we need to anticipate." Because when you are a developing country in the world where you can see the problems that other countries are having, you can actually anticipate what that did and do things very differently. Now in India's case I believe there are six ideas which are responsible for where it has come today. The first is really the notion of people. In the '60s and '70s we thought of people as a burden. We thought of people as a liability. Today we talk of people as an asset. We talk of people as human capital. And I believe this change in the mindset, of looking at people as something of a burden to human capital, has been one of the fundamental changes in the Indian mindset. And this change in thinking of human capital is linked to the fact that India is going through a demographic dividend. As healthcare improves, as infant mortality goes down, fertility rates start dropping. And India is experiencing that. India is going to have a lot of young people with a demographic dividend for the next 30 years. What is unique about this demographic dividend is that India will be the only country in the world to have this demographic dividend. In other words, it will be the only young country in an aging world. And this is very important. At the same time if you peel away the demographic dividend in India, there are actually two demographic curves. One is in the south and in the west of India, which is already going to be fully expensed by 2015, because in that part of the country, the fertility rate is almost equal to that of a West European country. Then there is the whole northern India, which is going to be the bulk of the future demographic dividend. But a demographic dividend is only as good as the investment in your human capital. Only if the people have education, they have good health, they have infrastructure, they have roads to go to work, they have lights to study at night -- only in those cases can you really get the benefit of a demographic dividend. In other words, if you don't really invest in the human capital, the same demographic dividend can be a demographic disaster. Therefore India is at a critical point where either it can leverage its demographic dividend or it can lead to a demographic disaster. The second thing in India has been the change in the role of entrepreneurs. When India got independence entrepreneurs were seen as a bad lot, as people who would exploit. But today, after 60 years, because of the rise of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurs have become role models, and they are contributing hugely to the society. This change has contributed to the vitality and the whole economy. The third big thing I believe that has changed India is our attitude towards the English language. English language was seen as a language of the imperialists. But today, with globalization, with outsourcing, English has become a language of aspiration. This has made it something that everybody wants to learn. And the fact that we have English is now becoming a huge strategic asset. The next thing is technology. Forty years back, computers were seen as something which was forbidding, something which was intimidating, something that reduced jobs. Today we live in a country which sells eight million mobile phones a month, of which 90 percent of those mobile phones are prepaid phones because people don't have credit history. Forty percent of those prepaid phones are recharged at less than 20 cents at each recharge. That is the scale at which technology has liberated and made it accessible. And therefore technology has gone from being seen as something forbidding and intimidating to something that is empowering. Twenty years back, when there was a report on bank computerization, they didn't name the report as a report on computers, they call them as "ledger posting machines." They didn't want the unions to believe that they were actually computers. And when they wanted to have more advanced, more powerful computers they called them "advanced ledger posting machines." So we have come a long way from those days where the telephone has become an instrument of empowerment, and really has changed the way Indians think of technology. And then I think the other point is that Indians today are far more comfortable with globalization. Again, after having lived for more than 200 years under the East India Company and under imperial rule, Indians had a very natural reaction towards globalization believing it was a form of imperialism. But today, as Indian companies go abroad, as Indians come and work all over the world, Indians have gained a lot more confidence and have realized that globalization is something they can participate in. And the fact that the demographics are in our favor, because we are the only young country in an aging world, makes globalization all the more attractive to Indians. And finally, India has had the deepening of its democracy. When democracy came to India 60 years back it was an elite concept. It was a bunch of people who wanted to bring in democracy because they wanted to bring in the idea of universal voting and parliament and constitution and so forth. But today democracy has become a bottom-up process where everybody has realized the benefits of having a voice, the benefits of being in an open society. And therefore democracy has become embedded. I believe these six factors -- the rise of the notion of population as human capital, the rise of Indian entrepreneurs, the rise of English as a language of aspiration, technology as something empowering, globalization as a positive factor, and the deepening of democracy -- has contributed to why India is today growing at rates it has never seen before. But having said that, then we come to what I call as ideas in progress. Those are the ideas where there is no argument in a society, but you are not able to implement those things. And really there are four things here. One is the question of education. For some reason, whatever reason -- lack of money, lack of priorities, because of religion having an older culture -- primary education was never given the focus it required. But now I believe it's reached a point where it has become very important. Unfortunately the government schools don't function, so children are going to private schools today. Even in the slums of India more than 50 percent of urban kids are going into private schools. So there is a big challenge in getting the schools to work. But having said that, there is an enormous desire among everybody, including the poor, to educate their children. So I believe primary education is an idea which is arrived but not yet implemented. Similarly, infrastructure -- for a long time, infrastructure was not a priority. Those of you who have been to India have seen that. It's certainly not like China. But today I believe finally infrastructure is something which is agreed upon and which people want to implement. It is reflected in the political statements. 20 years back the political slogan was, "Roti, kapada, makaan," which meant, "Food, clothing and shelter." And today's political slogan is, "Bijli, sadak, pani," which means "Electricity, water and roads." And that is a change in the mindset where infrastructure is now accepted. So I do believe this is an idea which has arrived, but simply not implemented. The third thing is again cities. It's because Gandhi believed in villages and because the British ruled from the cities, therefore Nehru thought of New Delhi as an un-Indian city. For a long time we have neglected our cities. And that is reflected in the kinds of situations that you see. But today, finally, after economic reforms, and economic growth, I think the notion that cities are engines of economic growth, cities are engines of creativity, cities are engines of innovation, have finally been accepted. And I think now you're seeing the move towards improving our cities. Again, an idea which is arrived, but not yet implemented. The final thing is the notion of India as a single market -- because when you didn't think of India as a market, you didn't really bother about a single market, because it didn't really matter. And therefore you had a situation where every state had its own market for products. Every province had its own market for agriculture. Increasingly now the policies of taxation and infrastructure and all that, are moving towards creating India as a single market. So there is a form of internal globalization which is happening, which is as important as external globalization. These four factors I believe -- the ones of primary education, infrastructure, urbanization, and single market -- in my view are ideas in India which have been accepted, but not implemented. Then we have what I believe are the ideas in conflict. The ideas that we argue about. These are the arguments we have which cause gridlock. What are those ideas? One is, I think, are ideological issues. Because of the historical Indian background, in the caste system, and because of the fact that there have been many people who have been left out in the cold, a lot of the politics is about how to make sure that we'll address that. And it leads to reservations and other techniques. It's also related to the way that we subsidize our people, and all the left and right arguments that we have. A lot of the Indian problems are related to the ideology of caste and other things. This policy is causing gridlock. This is one of the factors which needs to be resolved. The second one is the labor policies that we have, which make it so difficult for entrepreneurs to create standardized jobs in companies, that 93 percent of Indian labor is in the unorganized sector. They have no benefits: they don't have social security; they don't have pension; they don't have healthcare; none of those things. This needs to be fixed because unless you can bring these people into the formal workforce, you will end up creating a whole lot of people who are completely disenfranchised. Therefore we need to create a new set of labor laws, which are not as onerous as they are today. At the same time give a policy for a lot more people to be in the formal sector, and create the jobs for the millions of people that we need to create jobs for. The third thing is our higher education. Indian higher education is completely regulated. It's very difficult to start a private university. It's very difficult for a foreign university to come to India. As a result of that our higher education is simply not keeping pace with India's demands. That is leading to a lot of problems which we need to address. But most important I believe are the ideas we need to anticipate. Here India can look at what is happening in the west and elsewhere, and look at what needs to be done. The first thing is, we're very fortunate that technology is at a point where it is much more advanced than when other countries had the development. So we can use technology for governance. We can use technology for direct benefits. We can use technology for transparency, and many other things. The second thing is, the health issue. India has equally horrible health problems of the higher state of cardiac issue, the higher state of diabetes, the higher state of obesity. So there is no point in replacing a set of poor country diseases with a set of rich country diseases. Therefore we're to rethink the whole way we look at health. We really need to put in place a strategy so that we don't go to the other extreme of health. Similarly today in the West you're seeing the problem of entitlement -- the cost of social security, the cost of Medicare, the cost of Medicaid. Therefore when you are a young country, again you have a chance to put in place a modern pension system so that you don't create entitlement problems as you grow old. And then again, India does not have the luxury of making its environment dirty, because it has to marry environment and development. Just to give an idea, the world has to stabilize at something like 20 gigatons per year. On a population of nine billion our average carbon emission will have to be about two tons per year. India is already at two tons per year. But if India grows at something like eight percent, income per year per person will go to 16 times by 2050. So we're saying: income growing at 16 times and no growth in carbon. Therefore we will fundamentally rethink the way we look at the environment, the way we look at energy, the way we create whole new paradigms of development. Now why does this matter to you? Why does what's happening 10 thousand miles away matter to all of you? Number one, this matters because this represents more than a billion people. A billion people, 1/6th of the world population. It matters because this is a democracy. And it is important to prove that growth and democracy are not incompatible, that you can have a democracy, that you can have an open society, and you can have growth. It's important because if you solve these problems, you can solve the problems of poverty in the world. It's important because you need it to solve the world's environment problems. If we really want to come to a point, we really want to put a cap on our carbon emission, we want to really lower the use of energy -- it has to be solved in countries like India. You know if you look at the development in the West over 200 years, the average growth may have been about two percent. Here we are talking about countries growing at eight to nine percent. And that makes a huge difference. When India was growing at about three, 3.5 percent and the population was growing at two percent, its per capita income was doubling every 45 years. When the economic growth goes to eight percent and population growth drops to 1.5 percent, then per capita income is doubling every nine years. In other words, you're certainly fast-forwarding this whole process of a billion people going to prosperity. And you must have a clear strategy which is important for India and important for the world. That is why I think all of you should be equally concerned with it as I am. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Video: Narrator: An event seen from one point of view gives one impression. Seen from another point of view, it gives quite a different impression. But it's only when you get the whole picture you can fully understand what's going on. Sasha Vucinic: It's a great clip, isn't it? And I found that in 29 seconds, it tells more about the power of, and importance of, independent media than I could say in an hour. So I thought that it will be good to start with it. And also start with a little bit of statistics. According to relevant researchers, 83 percent of the population of this planet lives in the societies without independent press. Think about that number: 83 percent of the population on the whole planet does not really know what is going on in their countries. The information they get gets filtered through somebody who either twists that information, or colors that information, does something with it. So they're deprived of understanding their reality. That is just to understand how big and important this problem is. Now those of you who are lucky enough to live in those societies that represent 17 percent, I think should enjoy it until it lasts. You know, Sunday morning, you flick the paper, get your cappuccino. Enjoy it while it lasts. Because as we heard yesterday, countries can lose stars from their flags, but they can also lose press freedom, as I guess Americans among us can tell us more about. But that's totally another and separate topic. So I can go back to my story. My story starts -- the story I want to share -- starts in 1991. At that time I was running B92, the only independent, for that matter the only electronic media, in the country. And I guess we were sharing -- we had that regular life of the only independent media in the country, operating in hostile environment, where government really wants to make your life miserable. And there are different ways. Yeah, it was the usual cocktail: a little bit of threats, a little bit of friendly advice, a little bit of financial police, a little bit of text control, so you always have somebody who never leaves your office. But what they really do, which is very powerful, and that is what governments in the late '90s started doing if they don't like independent media companies -- you know, they threaten your advertisers. Once they threaten your advertisers, market forces are actually, you know, destroyed, and the advertisers do not want to come -- no matter how much does it make sense for them -- do not want to come and advertise. And you have a problem making ends meet. At that time at the beginning of the '90s, we had that problem, which was, you know, survival below one side, but what was really painful for me was, remember, the beginning of the '90s, Yugoslavia is falling apart. We were sitting over there with a country in a downfall, in a slow-motion downfall. And we all had all of that on tapes. We had the ability to understand what was going on. We were actually recording history. The problem was that we had to re-tape that history a week later; because if we did not, we could not afford enough tapes to keep archives of that history. So if I gave you that picture, I don't want to go too long on that. In that context a gentleman came to my office at that time. It was still 1991. He was running a media systems organization which is still in business, the gentleman is still in business. And what did I know at that time about media systems? I would think media systems were organizations, which means they should help you. So I prepared two plans for that meeting, two strategic plans: the small one and the big one. The small one was, I just wanted him to help us get those damn tapes, so we can keep that archive for the next 50 years. The big plan was to ask him for a 1,000,000-dollar loan. Because I thought, I still maintain, that serious and independent media companies are great business. And I thought that B92 will survive and be a great company once Milosevic is gone, which turned out to be true. It's now probably either the biggest or the second biggest media company in the country. And I thought that the only thing that we needed at that time was 1,000,000-dollar loan to take us through those hard times. To make a long story short, the gentleman comes into the office, great suit and tie. I gave him what I thought was a brilliant explanation of the political situation and explained how hard and difficult the war will be. Actually, I underestimated the atrocities, I have to admit. Anyway, after that whole, big, long explanation, the only question he had for me -- and this is not a joke -- is, are we paying royalties after we broadcast music of Michael Jackson? That was really the only question he had. He left, and I remember being actually very angry at myself because I thought there must be an institution in the world that is providing loans to media companies. It's so obvious, straight in your face, and somebody must have thought of it. Somebody must have started something like that. And I thought, I'm just dumb and I cannot find it. You know, in my defense, there was no Google at that time; you could not just Google in '91. So I thought that that's actually my problem. Now we go from here, fast forward to 1995. I have -- I left the country, I have a meeting with George Soros, trying for the third time to convince him that his foundation should invest in something that should operate like a media bank. And basically what I was saying is very simple. You know, forget about charity; it doesn't work. Forget about handouts; 20,000 dollars do not help anybody. What you should do is you should treat media companies as a business. It's business anywhere. Media business, or any other business, it needs to be capitalized. And what these guys need, actually, is access to capital. So third meeting, arguments are pretty well exercised. At the end of the meeting he says, look, it is not going to work; you will never see your money back; but my foundations will put 500,000 dollars so you can test the idea. See that it will not work. He said, I'll give you a rope to hang yourself. (Laughter) I knew two things after that meeting. First, under no circumstances I want to hang myself. And second, that I have no idea how to make it work. You see, at the level of a concept, it was a great concept. But it's one thing to have a concept; it's a totally separate thing to actually make it work. So I had absolutely no idea how that could actually work. Had the wrong idea; I thought that we can be a bank. You see banks -- I don't know if there are any bankers over here; I apologize in advance -- but it's the best job in the world. You know, you find somebody who is respectable and has a lot of money. You give them more money; they repay you that over a time. You collect interest and do nothing in between. So I thought, why don't we get into that business? (Laughter) So here we are having our first client, brilliant. First independent newspaper in Slovakia. The government cutting them off from all the printing facilities in Bratislava. So here's the daily newspaper that has to be printed 400 kilometers away from the capital. It's a daily newspaper with a deadline of 4 p.m. That means that they have no sports; they have no latest news; circulation goes down. It's a kind of very nice, sophisticated way how to economically strangle a daily newspaper. They come to us with a request for a loan. They want to -- the only way for them to survive is to get a printing press. And we said, that's fine; let's meet; you'll bring us your business plan, which eventually they did. We start the meeting. I get these two pieces of paper, not like this, A4 format, so it's much bigger. A lot of numbers there. A lot of numbers. But however you put it, you know, the numbers do not make any sense. And that's the best they could do. We were the best that they could do. So that is how we understood what our method is. It's not a bank. We had to actually go into these companies and earn our return by fixing them -- by establishing management systems, by providing all that knowledge, how do you run a business on one side -- while they all know how to run, how to create content. Just quickly on the results. Over these 10 years, 40 million dollars in affordable financing, average interest rate five percent to six percent. Lately we are going wild, charging seven percent from time to time. We do it in 17 countries of the developing world. And here is the most stunning number. Return rate -- the one that Soros was so worried about -- 97 percent. 97 percent of all the scheduled repayments came back to us on time. What do we typically finance? We finance anything that a media company would need, from printing presses to transmitters. What is most important is we do it either in form of loans, equities, lease -- whatever is appropriate for, you know, supporting anybody. But what is most important here is, who do we finance? We believe that in the last 10 years companies that we've financed are actually the best media companies in the developing world. That is a "Who is Who" list. And I could spend hours talking about them, because they're all kind of heroes. And I can, but I'll give you just, maybe one, and depending on time I may give you two examples who we work with. You see we started working in Eastern and Central Europe, and moved to Russia. Our first loan in Russia was in Chelyabinsk. I'll bet half of you have never heard of that place. In the south of Russia there's a guy called Boris Nikolayevich Kirshin, who is running an independent newspaper there. The city was closed until early '90s because, of all things, they were producing glass for Tupolev planes. Anyway, he's running independent newspaper there. After two years working with us, he becomes the most respected newspaper in that small place. Governor comes to him one day, actually invites him to come to his office. He goes and sees the governor. The governor says, Boris Nikolayevich, I understand you are doing a great job, and you are the most respected newspaper in our district. And I want to offer you a deal. Can you please give me your newspaper for the next nine months, because I have elections -- there are elections coming up in nine months. I will not run, but it's very important for me who is going to succeed me. So give me the paper for nine months. I'll give it back to you. I have no interest in being in media business. How much would that cost? Boris Nikolayevich says, "It's not for sale." The governor says, "We will close you." Boris Nikolayevich says, "No, you cannot do it." Six months later the newspaper was closed. Luckily, we had enough time to help Boris Nikolayevich take all the assets out of that company and bring him into a new one, to get all the subscription lists, rehire staff. So what the governor got was an empty shell. But that is what happens if you're in business of independent media, and if you are a banker for independent media. So it sounds like a great story. Somewhere down the road we opened a media management center. We started our media lab, sounds like a real great story. But there is a second angle to that. The second angle, like in this clip. If you take the camera above, you start thinking about these numbers again. 40 million dollars over 10 years spread over 17 countries. That is not too much, is it? It's actually just a drop in the sea. Because when you think about the importance, some of the issues that we were talking about last night -- this last session we had about Africa and his hypothetical 50 billion dollars destined for Africa. All of those, not all, half of those problems mentioned last night -- government accountability, corruption, how do you fight corruption, giving voice to unheard, to poor -- it's why independent media is in business. And it's why it was invented. So from that perspective, what we did is just really one drop in the sea of that need that we can identify. Now ours is just one story. I'm sure that in this room there are, like, 15 other wonderful stories of nonprofits doing spectacular work. Here is where the problem is, and I'll explain to you as well as I can what the problem is. And it's called fundraising. Imagine that this third of this room is filled with people who represent different foundations. Imagine two thirds over here running excellent organizations, doing very important work. Now imagine that every second person over here is deaf, does not hear, and switch the lights off. Now that is how difficult it is to match people from this side of the room with people of that side of the room. So we thought that some kind of a big idea is needed to reform, to totally rethink fundraising. You know, instead of people running in this dark, trying to find their own match, who will be willing, who has the same goals. Instead of all of that we thought there is -- something new needs to be invented. And we came up with this idea of issuing bonds, press freedom bonds. If there are investors willing to finance U.S. government budget deficit, why wouldn't we find investors willing to finance press freedom deficit? We've decided to do it this fall; we will issue them, probably in denominations of 1,000 dollars. I don't want to advertise them too much; that's not the point. But the point is, if we ever survive to actually issue them, find enough investors that this can be considered a success, there's nothing stopping the next organization to start to issue bonds next spring. And those can be environmental bonds. And then two weeks later, Iqbal Quadir can issue his electricity in Bangladesh bonds. And before you know it, any social cause can be actually financed in this way. Now we do daydreaming in 11:30 with 55 seconds left. But let's take the idea further. You do it, you start it in the States, because it's, you know, concepts are very, very close to American minds. But you can actually bring it to Europe, too. You can bring it to Asia. You can, once you have all of those different points, you can make it easy for investors. Put all of those bonds at one place and they sit down and click. Once you have more than 10 of them you have to develop some kind of a matrix. What do investors get? On one side financial, on the other side social. So that brings the idea of some kind of rating agency, Morningstar type. It says, you know, social impact over here is spectacular, five stars. Financial, they give you one percent, only one star. Now take it to the last step. Once you have all of that put together, there's not one reason why you couldn't actually have a marketplace for all of that, where you cannot dispose of all of those bonds in a pretty quick way. And in that way you organize the financing so there are no dark rooms, no blind people running around to find each other. Thank you.

So a few weeks ago, a friend of mine gave this toy car to his 8-year-old son. But instead of going into a store and buying one, like we do normally, he went to this website and he downloaded a file, and then he printed it on this printer. So this idea that you can manufacture objects digitally using these machines is something that The Economist magazine defined as the Third Industrial Revolution. Actually, I argue that there is another revolution going on, and it's the one that has to do with open-source hardware and the maker's movement, because the printer that my friend used to print the toy is actually open-source. So you go to the same website, you can download all the files that you need in order to make that printer: the construction files, the hardware, the software, all the instruction is there. And also this is part of a large community where there are thousands of people around the world that are actually making these kinds of printers, and there's a lot of innovation happening because it's all open-source. You don't need anybody's permission to create something great. And that space is like the personal computer in 1976, like the Apples with the other companies are fighting, and we will see in a few years, there will be the Apple of this kind of market come out. Well, there's also another interesting thing. I said the electronics are open-source, because at the heart of this printer there is something I'm really attached to: these Arduino boards, the motherboard that sort of powers this printer, is a project I've been working on for the past seven years. It's an open-source project. I worked with these friends of mine that I have here. So the five of us, two Americans, two Italians and a Spaniard, we — (Laughter) You know, it's a worldwide project. (Laughter) So we came together in this design institute called the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, which was teaching interaction design, this idea that you can take design from the simple shape of an object and you can move it forward to design the way you interact with things. Well, when you design an object that's supposed to interact with a human being, if you make a foam model of a mobile phone, it doesn't make any sense. You have to have something that actually interacts with people. So, we worked on Arduino and a lot of other projects there to create platforms that would be simple for our students to use, so that our students could just build things that worked, but they don't have five years to become an electronics engineer. We have one month. So how do I make something that even a kid can use? And actually, with Arduino, we have kids like Sylvia that you see here, that actually make projects with Arduino. I have 11-year-old kids stop me and show me stuff they built for Arduino that's really scary to see the capabilities that kids have when you give them the tools. So let's look at what happens when you make a tool that anybody can just pick up and build something quickly, so one of the examples that I like to sort of kick off this discussion is this example of this cat feeder. The gentleman who made this project had two cats. One was sick and the other one was healthy, so he had to make sure they ate the proper food. So he made this thing that recognizes the cat from a chip mounted inside on the collar of the cat, and opens the door and the cat can eat the food. This is made by recycling an old CD player that you can get from an old computer, some cardboard, tape, couple of sensors, a few blinking LEDs, and then suddenly you have a tool. You build something that you cannot find on the market. And I like this phrase: "Scratch your own itch." If you have an idea, you just go and you make it. This is the equivalent of sketching on paper done with electronics. So one of the features that I think is important about our work is that our hardware, on top of being made with love in Italy — as you can see from the back of the circuit — (Laughter) is that it's open, so we publish all the design files for the circuit online, so you can download it and you can actually use it to make something, or to modify, to learn. You know, when I was learning about programming, I learned by looking at other people's code, or looking at other people's circuits in magazines. And this is a good way to learn, by looking at other people's work. So the different elements of the project are all open, so the hardware is released with a Creative Commons license. So, you know, I like this idea that hardware becomes like a piece of culture that you share and you build upon, like it was a song or a poem with Creative Commons. Or, the software is GPL, so it's open-source as well. The documentation and the hands-on teaching methodology is also open-source and released as the Creative Commons. Just the name is protected so that we can make sure that we can tell people what is Arduino and what isn't. Now, Arduino itself is made of a lot of different open-source components that maybe individually are hard to use for a 12-year-old kid, so Arduino wraps everything together into a mashup of open-source technologies where we try to give them the best user experience to get something done quickly. So you have situations like this, where some people in Chile decided to make their own boards instead of buying them, to organize a workshop and to save money. Or there are companies that make their own variations of Arduino that fit in a certain market, and there's probably, maybe like a 150 of them or something at the moment. This one is made by a company called Adafruit, which is run by this woman called Limor Fried, also known as Ladyada, who is one of the heroes of the open-source hardware movement and the maker movement. So, this idea that you have a new, sort of turbo-charged DIY community that believes in open-source, in collaboration, collaborates online, collaborates in different spaces. There is this magazine called Make that sort of gathered all these people and sort of put them together as a community, and you see a very technical project explained in a very simple language, beautifully typeset. Or you have websites, like this one, like Instructables, where people actually teach each other about anything. So this one is about Arduino projects, the page you see on the screen, but effectively here you can learn how to make a cake and everything else. So let's look at some projects. So this one is a quadcopter. It's a small model helicopter. In a way, it's a toy, no? And so this one was military technology a few years ago, and now it's open-source, easy to use, you can buy it online. DIY Drones is the community; they do this thing called ArduCopter. But then somebody actually launched this start-up called Matternet, where they figured out that you could use this to actually transport things from one village to another in Africa, and the fact that this was easy to find, open-source, easy to hack, enabled them to prototype their company really quickly. Or, other projects. Matt Richardson: I'm getting a little sick of hearing about the same people on TV over and over and over again, so I decided to do something about it. This Arduino project, which I call the Enough Already, will mute the TV anytime any of these over-exposed personalities is mentioned. (Laughter) I'll show you how I made it. (Applause) MB: Check this out. MR: Our producers caught up with Kim Kardashian earlier today to find out what she was planning on wearing to her — MB: Eh? (Laughter) MR: It should do a pretty good job of protecting our ears from having to hear about the details of Kim Kardashian's wedding. MB: Okay. So, you know, again, what is interesting here is that Matt found this module that lets Arduino process TV signals, he found some code written by somebody else that generates infrared signals for the TV, put it together and then created this great project. It's also used, Arduino's used, in serious places like, you know, the Large Hadron Collider. There's some Arduino balls collecting data and sort of measuring some parameters. Or it's used for — (Music) So this is a musical interface built by a student from Italy, and he's now turning this into a product. Because it was a student project becoming a product. Or it can be used to make an assistive device. This is a glove that understands the sign language and transforms the gestures you make into sounds and writes the words that you're signing on a display And again, this is made of all different parts you can find on all the websites that sell Arduino-compatible parts, and you assemble it into a project. Or this is a project from the ITP part of NYU, where they met with this boy who has a severe disability, cannot play with the PS3, so they built this device that allows the kid to play baseball although he has limited movement capability. Or you can find it in arts projects. So this is the txtBomber. So you put a message into this device and then you roll it on the wall, and it basically has all these solenoids pressing the buttons on spray cans, so you just pull it over a wall and it just writes on the wall all the political messages. So, yeah. (Applause) Then we have this plant here. This is called Botanicalls, because there's an Arduino ball with a Wi-Fi module in the plant, and it's measuring the well-being of the plant, and it's creating a Twitter account where you can actually interact with the plant. (Laughter) So, you know, this plant will start to say, "This is really hot," or there's a lot of, you know, "I need water right now." (Laughter) So it just gives a personality to your plant. Or this is something that twitters when the baby inside the belly of a pregnant woman kicks. (Laughter) Or this is a 14-year-old kid in Chile who made a system that detects earthquakes and publishes on Twitter. He has 280,000 followers. He's 14 and he anticipated a governmental project by one year. (Applause) Or again, another project where, by analyzing the Twitter feed of a family, you can basically point where they are, like in the "Harry Potter" movie. So you can find out everything about this project on the website. Or somebody made a chair that twitters when somebody farts. (Laughter) It's interesting how, in 2009, Gizmodo basically defined, said that this project actually gives a meaning to Twitter, so it was — a lot changed in between. (Laughter) So very serious project. When the Fukushima disaster happened, a bunch of people in Japan, they realized that the information that the government was giving wasn't really open and really reliable, so they built this Geiger counter, plus Arduino, plus network interface. They made 100 of them and gave them to people around Japan, and essentially the data that they gathered gets published on this website called Cosm, another website they built, so you can actually get reliable real-time information from the field, and you can get unbiased information. Or this machine here, it's from the DIY bio movement, and it's one of the steps that you need in order to process DNA, and again, it's completely open-source from the ground up. Or you have students in developing countries making replicas of scientific instruments that cost a lot of money to make. Actually they just build them themselves for a lot less using Arduino and a few parts. This is a pH probe. Or you get kids, like these kids, they're from Spain. They learned how to program and to make robots when they were probably, like, 11, and then they started to use Arduino to make these robots that play football. They became world champions by making an Arduino-based robot. And so when we had to make our own educational robot, we just went to them and said, you know, "You design it, because you know exactly what is needed to make a great robot that excites kids." Not me. I'm an old guy. What am I supposed to excite, huh? (Laughter) But as I — in terms of educational assets. (Laughter) There's also companies like Google that are using the technology to create interfaces between mobile phones, tablets and the real world. So the Accessory Development Kit from Google is open-source and based on Arduino, as opposed to the one from Apple which is closed-source, NDA, sign your life to Apple. Here you are. There's a giant maze, and Joey's sitting there, and the maze is moving when you tilt the tablet. Also, I come from Italy, and the design is important in Italy, and yet very conservative. So we worked with a design studio called Habits, in Milan, to make this mirror, which is completely open-source. This doubles also as an iPod speaker. So the idea is that the hardware, the software, the design of the object, the fabrication, everything about this project is open-source and you can make it yourself. So we want other designers to pick this up and learn how to make great devices, to learn how to make interactive products by starting from something real. But when you have this idea, you know, what happens to all these ideas? There's, like, thousands of ideas that I — You know, it would take seven hours for me to do all the presentations. I will not take all the seven hours. Thank you. But let's start from this example: So, the group of people that started this company called Pebble, they prototyped a watch that communicates via Bluetooth with your phone, and you can display information on it. And they prototyped with an old LCD screen from a Nokia mobile phone and an Arduino. And then, when they had a final project, they actually went to Kickstarter and they were asking for 100,000 dollars to make a few of them to sell. They got 10 million dollars. They got a completely fully funded start-up, and they don't have to, you know, get VCs involved or anything, just excite the people with their great project. The last project I want to show you is this: It's called ArduSat. It's currently on Kickstarter, so if you want to contribute, please do it. It's a satellite that goes into space, which is probably the least open-source thing you can imagine, and it contains an Arduino connected to a bunch of sensors. So if you know how to use Arduino, you can actually upload your experiments into this satellite and run them. So imagine, if you as a high school can have the satellite for a week and do satellite space experiments like that. So, as I said, there's lots of examples, and I'm going to stop here. And I just want to thank the Arduino community for being the best, and just every day making lots of projects. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) And thanks to the community. Chris Anderson: Massimo, you told me earlier today that you had no idea, of course, that it would take off like this. MB: No. CA: I mean, how must you feel when you read this stuff and you see what you've unlocked? MB: Well, it's the work of a lot of people, so we as a community are enabling people to make great stuff, and I just feel overwhelmed. It's just, it's difficult to describe this. Every morning, I wake up and I look at all the stuff that Google Alerts sends me, and it's just amazing. It's just going into every field that you can imagine. CA: Thank you so much. (Applause) (Applause)

I live and work from Tokyo, Japan. And I specialize in human behavioral research, and applying what we learn to think about the future in different ways, and to design for that future. And you know, to be honest, I've been doing this for seven years, and I haven't got a clue what the future is going to be like. But I've got a pretty good idea how people will behave when they get there. This is my office. It's out there. It's not in the lab, and it's increasingly in places like India, China, Brazil, Africa. We live on a planet -- 6.3 billion people. About three billion people, by the end of this year, will have cellular connectivity. And it'll take about another two years to connect the next billion after that. And I mention this because, if we want to design for that future, we need to figure out what those people are about. And that's, kind of, where I see what my job is and what our team's job is. Our research often starts with a very simple question. So I'll give you an example. What do you carry? If you think of everything in your life that you own, when you walk out that door, what do you consider to take with you? When you're looking around, what do you consider? Of that stuff, what do you carry? And of that stuff, what do you actually use? So this is interesting to us, because the conscious and subconscious decision process implies that the stuff that you do take with you and end up using has some kind of spiritual, emotional or functional value. And to put it really bluntly, you know, people are willing to pay for stuff that has value, right? So I've probably done about five years' research looking at what people carry. I go in people's bags. I look in people's pockets, purses. I go in their homes. And we do this worldwide, and we follow them around town with video cameras. It's kind of like stalking with permission. And we do all this -- and to go back to the original question, what do people carry? And it turns out that people carry a lot of stuff. OK, that's fair enough. But if you ask people what the three most important things that they carry are -- across cultures and across gender and across contexts -- most people will say keys, money and, if they own one, a mobile phone. And I'm not saying this is a good thing, but this is a thing, right? I mean, I couldn't take your phones off you if I wanted to. You'd probably kick me out, or something. OK, it might seem like an obvious thing for someone who works for a mobile phone company to ask. But really, the question is, why? Right? So why are these things so important in our lives? And it turns out, from our research, that it boils down to survival -- survival for us and survival for our loved ones. So, keys provide an access to shelter and warmth -- transport as well, in the U.S. increasingly. Money is useful for buying food, sustenance, among all its other uses. And a mobile phone, it turns out, is a great recovery tool. If you prefer this kind of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, those three objects are very good at supporting the lowest rungs in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Yes, they do a whole bunch of other stuff, but they're very good at this. And in particular, it's the mobile phone's ability to allow people to transcend space and time. And what I mean by that is, you know, you can transcend space by simply making a voice call, right? And you can transcend time by sending a message at your convenience, and someone else can pick it up at their convenience. And this is fairly universally appreciated, it turns out, which is why we have three billion plus people who have been connected. And they value that connectivity. But actually, you can do this kind of stuff with PCs. And you can do them with phone kiosks. And the mobile phone, in addition, is both personal -- and so it also gives you a degree of privacy -- and it's convenient. You don't need to ask permission from anyone, you can just go ahead and do it, right? However, for these things to help us survive, it depends on them being carried. But -- and it's a pretty big but -- we forget. We're human, that's what we do. It's one of our features. I think, quite a nice feature. So we forget, but we're also adaptable, and we adapt to situations around us pretty well. And so we have these strategies to remember, and one of them was mentioned yesterday. And it's, quite simply, the point of reflection. And that's that moment when you're walking out of a space, and you turn around, and quite often you tap your pockets. Even women who keep stuff in their bags tap their pockets. And you turn around, and you look back into the space, and some people talk aloud. And pretty much everyone does it at some point. OK, the next thing is -- most of you, if you have a stable home life, and what I mean is that you don't travel all the time, and always in hotels, but most people have what we call a center of gravity. And a center of gravity is where you keep these objects. And these things don't stay in the center of gravity, but over time, they gravitate there. It's where you expect to find stuff. And in fact, when you're turning around, and you're looking inside the house, and you're looking for this stuff, this is where you look first, right? OK, so when we did this research, we found the absolutely, 100 percent, guaranteed way to never forget anything ever, ever again. And that is, quite simply, to have nothing to remember. (Laughter) OK, now, that sounds like something you get on a Chinese fortune cookie, right? But is, in fact, about the art of delegation. And from a design perspective, it's about understanding what you can delegate to technology and what you can delegate to other people. And it turns out, delegation -- if you want it to be -- can be the solution for pretty much everything, apart from things like bodily functions, going to the toilet. You can't ask someone to do that on your behalf. And apart from things like entertainment, you wouldn't pay for someone to go to the cinema for you and have fun on your behalf, or, at least, not yet. Maybe sometime in the future, we will. So, let me give you an example of delegation in practice, right. So this is -- probably the thing I'm most passionate about is the research that we've been doing on illiteracy and how people who are illiterate communicate. So, the U.N. estimated -- this is 2004 figures -- that there are almost 800 million people who can't read and write, worldwide. So, we've been conducting a lot of research. And one of the things we were looking at is -- if you can't read and write, if you want to communicate over distances, you need to be able to identify the person that you want to communicate with. It could be a phone number, it could be an e-mail address, it could be a postal address. Simple question: if you can't read and write, how do you manage your contact information? And the fact is that millions of people do it. Just from a design perspective, we didn't really understand how they did it, and so that's just one small example of the kind of research that we were doing. And it turns out that illiterate people are masters of delegation. So they delegate that part of the task process to other people, the stuff that they can't do themselves. Let me give you another example of delegation. This one's a little bit more sophisticated, and this is from a study that we did in Uganda about how people who are sharing devices, use those devices. Sente is a word in Uganda that means money. It has a second meaning, which is to send money as airtime. OK? And it works like this. So let's say, June, you're in a village, rural village. I'm in Kampala and I'm the wage earner. I'm sending money back, and it works like this. So, in your village, there's one person in the village with a phone, and that's the phone kiosk operator. And it's quite likely that they'd have a quite simple mobile phone as a phone kiosk. So what I do is, I buy a prepaid card like this. And instead of using that money to top up my own phone, I call up the local village operator. And I read out that number to them, and they use it to top up their phone. So, they're topping up the value from Kampala, and it's now being topped up in the village. You take a 10 or 20 percent commission, and then you -- the kiosk operator takes 10 or 20 percent commission, and passes the rest over to you in cash. OK, there's two things I like about this. So the first is, it turns anyone who has access to a mobile phone -- anyone who has a mobile phone -- essentially into an ATM machine. It brings rudimentary banking services to places where there's no banking infrastructure. And even if they could have access to the banking infrastructure, they wouldn't necessarily be considered viable customers, because they're not wealthy enough to have bank accounts. There's a second thing I like about this. And that is that despite all the resources at my disposal, and despite all our kind of apparent sophistication, I know I could never have designed something as elegant and as totally in tune with the local conditions as this. OK? And, yes, there are things like Grameen Bank and micro-lending. But the difference between this and that is, there's no central authority trying to control this. This is just street-up innovation. So, it turns out the street is a never-ending source of inspiration for us. And OK, if you break one of these things here, you return it to the carrier. They'll give you a new one. They'll probably give you three new ones, right? I mean, that's buy three, get one free. That kind of thing. If you go on the streets of India and China, you see this kind of stuff. And this is where they take the stuff that breaks, and they fix it, and they put it back into circulation. This is from a workbench in Jilin City, in China, and you can see people taking down a phone and putting it back together. They reverse-engineer manuals. This is a kind of hacker's manual, and it's written in Chinese and English. They also write them in Hindi. You can subscribe to these. There are training institutes where they're churning out people for fixing these things as well. But what I like about this is, it boils down to someone on the street with a small, flat surface, a screwdriver, a toothbrush for cleaning the contact heads -- because they often get dust on the contact heads -- and knowledge. And it's all about the social network of the knowledge, floating around. And I like this because it challenges the way that we design stuff, and build stuff, and potentially distribute stuff. It challenges the norms. OK, for me the street just raises so many different questions. Like, this is Viagra that I bought from a backstreet sex shop in China. And China is a country where you get a lot of fakes. And I know what you're asking -- did I test it? I'm not going to answer that, OK. But I look at something like this, and I consider the implications of trust and confidence in the purchase process. And we look at this and we think, well, how does that apply, for example, for the design of -- the lessons from this -- apply to the design of online services, future services in these markets? This is a pair of underpants from -- (Laughter) -- from Tibet. And I look at something like this, and honestly, you know, why would someone design underpants with a pocket, right? And I look at something like this and it makes me question, if we were to take all the functionality in things like this, and redistribute them around the body in some kind of personal area network, how would we prioritize where to put stuff? And yes, this is quite trivial, but actually the lessons from this can apply to that kind of personal area networks. And what you see here is a couple of phone numbers written above the shack in rural Uganda. This doesn't have house numbers. This has phone numbers. So what does it mean when people's identity is mobile? When those extra three billion people's identity is mobile, it isn't fixed? Your notion of identity is out-of-date already, OK, for those extra three billion people. This is how it's shifting. And then I go to this picture here, which is the one that I started with. And this is from Delhi. It's from a study we did into illiteracy, and it's a guy in a teashop. You can see the chai being poured in the background. And he's a, you know, incredibly poor teashop worker, on the lowest rungs in the society. And he, somehow, has the appreciation of the values of Livestrong. And it's not necessarily the same values, but some kind of values of Livestrong, to actually go out and purchase them, and actually display them. For me, this kind of personifies this connected world, where everything is intertwined, and the dots are -- it's all about the dots joining together. OK, the title of this presentation is "Connections and Consequences," and it's really a kind of summary of five years of trying to figure out what it's going to be like when everyone on the planet has the ability to transcend space and time in a personal and convenient manner, right? When everyone's connected. And there are four things. So, the first thing is the immediacy of ideas, the speed at which ideas go around. And I know TED is about big ideas, but actually, the benchmark for a big idea is changing. If you want a big idea, you need to embrace everyone on the planet, that's the first thing. The second thing is the immediacy of objects. And what I mean by that is, as these become smaller, as the functionality that you can access through this becomes greater -- things like banking, identity -- these things quite simply move very quickly around the world. And so the speed of the adoption of things is just going to become that much more rapid, in a way that we just totally cannot conceive, when you get it to 6.3 billion and the growth in the world's population. The next thing is that, however we design this stuff -- carefully design this stuff -- the street will take it, and will figure out ways to innovate, as long as it meets base needs -- the ability to transcend space and time, for example. And it will innovate in ways that we cannot anticipate. In ways that, despite our resources, they can do it better than us. That's my feeling. And if we're smart, we'll look at this stuff that's going on, and we'll figure out a way to enable it to inform and infuse both what we design and how we design. And the last thing is that -- actually, the direction of the conversation. With another three billion people connected, they want to be part of the conversation. And I think our relevance and TED's relevance is really about embracing that and learning how to listen, essentially. And we need to learn how to listen. So thank you very, very much. (Applause)

So when I was a kid ... this was my team. (Laughter) I stunk at sports. I didn't like to play them, I didn't like to watch them. So this is what I did. I went fishing. And for all of my growing up I fished on the shores of Connecticut, and these are the creatures that I saw on a regular basis. But after I grew up and went to college, and I came home in the early 90's, this is what I found. My team had shrunk. It was like literally having your roster devastated. And as I sort of looked into that, from a very personal point of view as a fisherman, I started to kind of figure out, well, what was the rest of the world thinking about it? First place I started to look was fish markets. And when I went to fish markets, in spite of where I was -- whether I was in North Carolina, or Paris, or London, or wherever -- I kept seeing this weirdly repeating trope of four creatures, again and again -- on the menus, on ice -- shrimp, tuna, salmon and cod. And I thought this was pretty strange, and as I looked at it, I was wondering, did anyone else notice this sort of shrinking of the market? Well, when I looked into it, I realized that people didn't look at it as their team. Ordinary people, the way they looked at seafood was like this. It's not an unusual human characteristic to reduce the natural world down to very few elements. We did it before, 10,000 years ago, when we came out of our caves. If you look at fire pits from 10,000 years ago, you'll see raccoons, you'll see, you know, wolves, you'll see all kinds of different creatures. But if you telescope to the age of -- you know, 2,000 years ago, you'll see these four mammals: pigs, cows, sheep and goats. It's true of birds, too. You look at the menus in New York City restaurants 150 years ago, 200 years ago, you'll see snipe, woodcock, grouse, dozens of ducks, dozens of geese. But telescope ahead to the age of modern animal husbandry, and you'll see four: turkeys, ducks, chicken and geese. So it makes sense that we've headed in this direction. But how have we headed in this direction? Well ... first it's a very, very new problem. This is the way we've been fishing the oceans over the last 50 years. World War II was a tremendous incentive to arm ourselves in a war against fish. All of the technology that we perfected during World War II -- sonar, lightweight polymers -- all these things were redirected towards fish. And so you see this tremendous buildup in fishing capacity, quadrupling in the course of time, from the end of World War II to the present time. And right now that means we're taking between 80 and 90 million metric tons out of the sea every year. That's the equivalent of the human weight of China taken out of the sea every year. And it's no coincidence that I use China as the example because China is now the largest fishing nation in the world. Well, that's only half the story. The other half of the story is this incredible boom in fish farming and aquaculture, which is now, only in the last year or two, starting to exceed the amount of wild fish that we produce. So that if you add wild fish and farmed fish together, you get the equivalent of two Chinas created from the ocean each and every year. And again, it's not a coincidence that I use China as the example, because China, in addition to being the biggest catcher of fish, is also the biggest farmer of fish. So let's look though at the four choices we are making right now. The first one -- by far the most consumed seafood in America and in much of the West, is shrimp. Shrimp in the wild -- as a wild product -- is a terrible product. 5, 10, 15 pounds of wild fish are regularly killed to bring one pound of shrimp to the market. They're also incredibly fuel inefficient to bring to the market. In a recent study that was produced out of Dalhousie University, it was found that dragging for shrimp is one of the most carbon-intensive ways of fishing that you can find. So you can farm them, and people do farm them, and they farm them a lot in this very area. Problem is ... the place where you farm shrimp is in these wild habitats -- in mangrove forests. Now look at those lovely roots coming down. Those are the things that hold soil together, protect coasts, create habitats for all sorts of young fish, young shrimp, all sorts of things that are important to this environment. Well, this is what happens to a lot of coastal mangrove forests. We've lost millions of acres of coastal mangroves over the last 30 or 40 years. That rate of destruction has slowed, but we're still in a major mangrove deficit. The other thing that's going on here is a phenomenon that the filmmaker Mark Benjamin called "Grinding Nemo." This phenomenon is very, very relevant to anything that you've ever seen on a tropical reef. Because what's going on right now, we have shrimp draggers dragging for shrimp, catching a huge amount of bycatch, that bycatch in turn gets ground up and turned into shrimp food. And sometimes, many of these vessels -- manned by slaves -- are catching these so-called "trash fish," fish that we would love to see on a reef, grinding them up and turning them into shrimp feed -- an ecosystem literally eating itself and spitting out shrimp. The next most consumed seafood in America, and also throughout the West, is tuna. So tuna is this ultimate global fish. These huge management areas have to be observed in order for tuna to be well managed. Our own management area, called a Regional Fisheries Management Organization, is called ICCAT, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas. The great naturalist Carl Safina once called it, "The International Conspiracy to Catch all the Tunas." Of course we've seen incredible improvement in ICCAT in the last few years, there is total room for improvement, but it remains to be said that tuna is a global fish, and to manage it, we have to manage the globe. Well, we could also try to grow tuna but tuna is a spectacularly bad animal for aquaculture. Many people don't know this but tuna are warm-blooded. They can heat their bodies 20 degrees above ambient temperature, they can swim at over 40 miles an hour. So that pretty much eliminates all the advantages of farming a fish, right? A farmed fish is -- or a fish is cold-blooded, it doesn't move too much. That's a great thing for growing protein. But if you've got this crazy, wild creature that swims at 40 miles an hour and heats its blood -- not a great candidate for aquaculture. The next creature -- most consumed seafood in America and throughout the West -- is salmon. Now salmon got its plundering, too, but it didn't really necessarily happen through fishing. This is my home state of Connecticut. Connecticut used to be home to a lot of wild salmon. But if you look at this map of Connecticut, every dot on that map is a dam. There are over 3,000 dams in the state of Connecticut. I often say this is why people in Connecticut are so uptight -- (Laughter) If somebody could just unblock Connecticut's chi, I feel that we could have an infinitely better world. But I made this particular comment at a convention once of national parks officers, and this guy from North Carolina sidled up to me, he says, "You know, you oughtn't be so hard on your Connecticut, cause we here in North Carolina, we got 35,000 dams." So it's a national epidemic, it's an international epidemic. And there are dams everywhere, and these are precisely the things that stop wild salmon from reaching their spawning grounds. So as a result, we've turned to aquaculture, and salmon is one the most successful, at least from a numbers point of view. When they first started farming salmon, it could take as many as six pounds of wild fish to make a single pound of salmon. The industry has, to its credit, greatly improved. They've gotten it below two to one, although it's a little bit of a cheat because if you look at the way aquaculture feed is produced, they're measuring pellets -- pounds of pellets per pound of salmon. Those pellets are in turn reduced fish. So the actual -- what's called the FIFO, the fish in and the fish out -- kind of hard to say. But in any case, credit to the industry, it has lowered the amount of fish per pound of salmon. Problem is we've also gone crazy with the amount of salmon that we're producing. Aquaculture is the fastest growing food system on the planet. It's growing at something like seven percent per year. And so even though we're doing less per fish to bring it to the market, we're still killing a lot of these little fish. And it's not just fish that we're feeding fish to, we're also feeding fish to chickens and pigs. So we've got chickens and they're eating fish, but weirdly, we also have fish that are eating chickens. Because the byproducts of chickens -- feathers, blood, bone -- get ground up and fed to fish. So I often wonder, is there a fish that ate a chicken that ate a fish? It's sort of a reworking of the chicken and egg thing. Anyway -- (Laughter) All together, though, it results in a terrible mess. What you're talking about is something between 20 and 30 million metric tons of wild creatures that are taken from the ocean and used and ground up. That's the equivalent of a third of a China, or of an entire United States of humans that's taken out of the sea each and every year. The last of the four is a kind of amorphous thing. It's what the industry calls "whitefish." There are many fish that get cycled into this whitefish thing but the way to kind of tell the story, I think, is through that classic piece of American culinary innovation, the Filet-O-Fish sandwich. So the Filet-O-Fish sandwich actually started as halibut. And it started because a local franchise owner found that when he served his McDonald's on Friday, nobody came. Because it was a Catholic community, they needed fish. So he went to Ray Kroc and he said, "I'm going to bring you a fish sandwich, going to be made out of halibut." Ray Kroc said, "I don't think it's going to work. I want to do a Hula Burger, and there's going to be a slice of pineapple on a bun. But let's do this, let's have a bet. Whosever sandwich sells more, that will be the winning sandwich." Well, it's kind of sad for the ocean that the Hula Burger didn't win. So he made his halibut sandwich. Unfortunately though, the sandwich came in at 30 cents. Ray wanted the sandwich to come in at 25 cents, so he turned to Atlantic cod. We all know what happened to Atlantic cod in New England. So now the Filet-O-Fish sandwich is made out of Alaska pollock, it's the largest fin fish fishery in the United States, 2 to 3 billion pounds of fish taken out of the sea every single year. If we go through the pollock, the next choice is probably going to be tilapia. Tilapia is one of those fish nobody ever heard of 20 years ago. It's actually a very efficient converter of plant protein into animal protein, and it's been a godsend to the third world. It's actually a tremendously sustainable solution, it goes from an egg to an adult in nine months. The problem is that when you look about the West, it doesn't do what the West wants it to do. It really doesn't have what's called an oily fish profile. It doesn't have the EPA and DHA omega-3s that we all think are going to make us live forever. So what do we do? I mean, first of all, what about this poor fish, the clupeids? The fish that represent a huge part of that 20 to 30 million metric tons. Well, one possibility that a lot of conservationists have raised is could we eat them? Could we eat them directly instead of feeding them to salmon? There are arguments for it. They are tremendously fuel efficient to bring to market, a fraction of the fuel cost of say, shrimp, and at the very top of the carbon efficiency scale. They also are omega-3 rich, a great source for EPA and DHA. So that is a potential. And if we were to go down that route what I would say is, instead of paying a few bucks a pound -- or a few bucks a ton, really -- and making it into aquafeed, could we halve the catch and double the price for the fishermen and make that our way of treating these particular fish? Other possibility though, which is much more interesting, is looking at bivalves, particularly mussels. Now, mussels are very high in EPA and DHA, they're similar to canned tuna. They're also extremely fuel efficient. To bring a pound of mussels to market is about a thirtieth of the carbon as required to bring beef to market. They require no forage fish, they actually get their omega-3s by filtering the water of microalgae. In fact, that's where omega-3s come from, they don't come from fish. Microalgae make the omega-3s, they're only bioconcentrated in fish. Mussels and other bivalves do tremendous amounts of water filtration. A single mussel can filter dozens of gallons every single day. And this is incredibly important when we look at the world. Right now, nitrification, overuse of phosphates in our waterways are causing tremendous algal blooms. Over 400 new dead zones have been created in the last 20 years, tremendous sources of marine life death. We also could look at not a fish at all. We could look at a vegetable. We could look at seaweed, the kelps, all these different varieties of things that can be high in omega-3s, can be high in proteins, tremendously good things. They filter the water just like mussels do. And weirdly enough, it turns out that you can actually feed this to cows. Now, I'm not a big fan of cattle. But if you wanted to keep growing cattle in a time and place where water resources are limited, you're growing seaweed in the water, you don't have to water it -- major consideration. And the last fish is a question mark. We have the ability to create aquacultured fish that creates a net gain of marine protein for us. This creature would have to be vegetarian, it would have to be fast growing, it would have to be adaptable to a changing climate and it would have to have that oily fish profile, that EPA, DHA, omega-3 fatty acid profile that we're looking for. This exists kind of on paper. I have been reporting on these subjects for 15 years. Every time I do a new story, somebody tells me, "We can do all that. We can do it. We've figured it all out. We can produce a fish that's a net gain of marine protein and has omega-3s." Great. It doesn't seem to be getting scaled up. It is time to scale this up. If we do, 30 million metric tons of seafood, a third of the world catch, stays in the water. So I guess what I'm saying is this is what we've been going with. We tend to go with our appetites rather than our minds. But if we went with this, or some configuration of it, we might have a little more of this. Thank you. (Applause)

Roger Ebert: These are my words, but this is not my voice. This is Alex, the best computer voice I've been able to find, which comes as standard equipment on every Macintosh. For most of my life, I never gave a second thought to my ability to speak. It was like breathing. In those days, I was living in a fool's paradise. After surgeries for cancer took away my ability to speak, eat or drink, I was forced to enter this virtual world in which a computer does some of my living for me. For several days now, we have enjoyed brilliant and articulate speakers here at TED. I used to be able to talk like that. Maybe I wasn't as smart, but I was at least as talkative. I want to devote my talk today to the act of speaking itself, and how the act of speaking or not speaking is tied so indelibly to one's identity as to force the birth of a new person when it is taken away. However, I've found that listening to a computer voice for any great length of time can be monotonous. So I've decided to recruit some of my TED friends to read my words aloud for me. I will start with my wife, Chaz. Chaz Ebert: It was Chaz who stood by my side through three attempts to reconstruct my jaw and restore my ability to speak. Going into the first surgery for a recurrence of salivary cancer in 2006, I expected to be out of the hospital in time to return to my movie review show, 'Ebert and Roeper at the Movies.' I had pre-taped enough shows to get me through six weeks of surgery and recuperation. The doctors took a fibula bone from my leg and some tissue from my shoulder to fashion into a new jaw. My tongue, larynx and vocal cords were still healthy and unaffected. (Laughter) (Laughter) CE: I was optimistic, and all was right with the world. The first surgery was a great success. I saw myself in the mirror and I looked pretty good. Two weeks later, I was ready to return home. I was using my iPod to play the Leonard Cohen song 'I'm Your Man' for my doctors and nurses. Suddenly, I had an episode of catastrophic bleeding. My carotid artery had ruptured. Thank God I was still in my hospital room and my doctors were right there. Chaz told me that if that song hadn't played for so long, I might have already been in the car, on the way home, and would have died right there and then. So thank you, Leonard Cohen, for saving my life. (Applause) There was a second surgery -- which held up for five or six days and then it also fell apart. And then a third attempt, which also patched me back together pretty well, until it failed. A doctor from Brazil said he had never seen anyone survive a carotid artery rupture. And before I left the hospital, after a year of being hospitalized, I had seven ruptures of my carotid artery. There was no particular day when anyone told me I would never speak again; it just sort of became obvious. Human speech is an ingenious manipulation of our breath within the sound chamber of our mouth and respiratory system. We need to be able to hold and manipulate that breath in order to form sounds. Therefore, the system must be essentially airtight in order to capture air. Because I had lost my jaw, I could no longer form a seal, and therefore my tongue and all of my other vocal equipment was rendered powerless. Dean Ornish: At first for a long time, I wrote messages in notebooks. Then I tried typing words on my laptop and using its built in voice. This was faster, and nobody had to try to read my handwriting. I tried out various computer voices that were available online, and for several months I had a British accent, which Chaz called Sir Lawrence." (Laughter) "It was the clearest I could find. Then Apple released the Alex voice, which was the best I'd heard. It knew things like the difference between an exclamation point and a question mark. When it saw a period, it knew how to make a sentence sound like it was ending instead of staying up in the air. There are all sorts of html codes you can use to control the timing and inflection of computer voices, and I've experimented with them. For me, they share a fundamental problem: they're too slow. When I find myself in a conversational situation, I need to type fast and to jump right in. People don't have the time or the patience to wait for me to fool around with the codes for every word or phrase. But what value do we place on the sound of our own voice? How does that affect who you are as a person? When people hear Alex speaking my words, do they experience a disconnect? Does that create a separation or a distance from one person to the next? How did I feel not being able to speak? I felt, and I still feel, a lot of distance from the human mainstream. I've become uncomfortable when I'm separated from my laptop. Even then, I'm aware that most people have little patience for my speaking difficulties. So Chaz suggested finding a company that could make a customized voice using my TV show voice from a period of 30 years. At first I was against it. I thought it would be creepy to hear my own voice coming from a computer. There was something comforting about a voice that was not my own. But I decided then to just give it a try. So we contacted a company in Scotland that created personalized computer voices. They'd never made one from previously-recorded materials. All of their voices had been made by a speaker recording original words in a control booth. But they were willing to give it a try. So I sent them many hours of recordings of my voice, including several audio commentary tracks that I'd made for movies on DVDs. And it sounded like me, it really did. There was a reason for that; it was me. But it wasn't that simple. The tapes from my TV show weren't very useful because there were too many other kinds of audio involved -- movie soundtracks, for example, or Gene Siskel arguing with me -- (Laughter) and my words often had a particular emphasis that didn't fit into a sentence well enough. I'll let you hear a sample of that voice. These are a few of the comments I recorded for use when Chaz and I appeared on the Oprah Winfrey program. And here's the voice we call Roger Jr. or Roger 2.0. Roger 2.0: Oprah, I can't tell you how great it is to be back on your show. We have been talking for a long time, and now here we are again. This is the first version of my computer voice. It still needs improvement, but at least it sounds like me and not like HAL 9000. When I heard it the first time, it sent chills down my spine. When I type anything, this voice will speak whatever I type. When I read something, it will read in my voice. I have typed these words in advance, as I didn't think it would be thrilling to sit here watching me typing. The voice was created by a company in Scotland named CereProc. It makes me feel good that many of the words you are hearing were first spoken while I was commenting on "Casablanca" and "Citizen Kane." This is the first voice they've created for an individual. There are several very good voices available for computers, but they all sound like somebody else, while this voice sounds like me. I plan to use it on television, radio and the Internet. People who need a voice should know that most computers already come with built-in speaking systems. Many blind people use them to read pages on the Web to themselves. But I've got to say, in first grade, they said I talked too much, and now I still can. (Laughter) Roger Ebert: As you can hear, it sounds like me, but the words jump up and down. The flow isn't natural. The good people in Scotland are still improving my voice, and I'm optimistic about it. But so far, the Apple Alex voice is the best one I've heard. I wrote a blog about it and actually got a comment from the actor who played Alex. He said he recorded many long hours in various intonations to be used in the voice. A very large sample is needed. John Hunter: All my life I was a motormouth. Now I have spoken my last words, and I don't even remember for sure what they were. I feel like the hero of that Harlan Ellison story titled "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream." On Wednesday, David Christian explained to us what a tiny instant the human race represents in the time-span of the universe. For almost all of its millions and billions of years, there was no life on Earth at all. For almost all the years of life on Earth, there was no intelligent life. Only after we learned to pass knowledge from one generation to the next, did civilization become possible. In cosmological terms, that was about 10 minutes ago. Finally came mankind's most advanced and mysterious tool, the computer. That has mostly happened in my lifetime. Some of the famous early computers were being built in my hometown of Urbana, the birthplace of HAL 9000. When I heard the amazing talk by Salman Khan on Wednesday, about the Khan Academy website that teaches hundreds of subjects to students all over the world, I had a flashback. It was about 1960. As a local newspaper reporter still in high school, I was sent over to the computer lab of the University of Illinois to interview the creators of something called PLATO. The initials stood for Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations. This was a computer-assisted instruction system, which in those days ran on a computer named ILLIAC. The programmers said it could assist students in their learning. I doubt, on that day 50 years ago, they even dreamed of what Salman Khan has accomplished. But that's not the point. The point is PLATO was only 50 years ago, an instant in time. It continued to evolve and operated in one form or another on more and more sophisticated computers, until only five years ago. I have learned from Wikipedia that, starting with that humble beginning, PLATO established forums, message boards, online testing, email, chat rooms, picture languages, instant messaging, remote screen sharing and multiple-player games. Since the first Web browser was also developed in Urbana, it appears that my hometown in downstate Illinois was the birthplace of much of the virtual, online universe we occupy today. But I'm not here from the Chamber of Commerce. (Laughter) I'm here as a man who wants to communicate. All of this has happened in my lifetime. I started writing on a computer back in the 1970s when one of the first Atech systems was installed at the Chicago Sun-Times. I was in line at Radio Shack to buy one of the first Model 100's. And when I told the people in the press room at the Academy Awards that they'd better install some phone lines for Internet connections, they didn't know what I was talking about. When I bought my first desktop, it was a DEC Rainbow. Does anybody remember that?" (Applause) "The Sun Times sent me to the Cannes Film Festival with a portable computer the size of a suitcase named the Porteram Telebubble. I joined CompuServe when it had fewer numbers than I currently have followers on Twitter. (Laughter) CE: All of this has happened in the blink of an eye. It is unimaginable what will happen next. It makes me incredibly fortunate to live at this moment in history. Indeed, I am lucky to live in history at all, because without intelligence and memory there is no history. For billions of years, the universe evolved completely without notice. Now we live in the age of the Internet, which seems to be creating a form of global consciousness. And because of it, I can communicate as well as I ever could. We are born into a box of time and space. We use words and communication to break out of it and to reach out to others. For me, the Internet began as a useful tool and now has become something I rely on for my actual daily existence. I cannot speak; I can only type so fast. Computer voices are sometimes not very sophisticated, but with my computer, I can communicate more widely than ever before. I feel as if my blog, my email, Twitter and Facebook have given me a substitute for everyday conversation. They aren't an improvement, but they're the best I can do. They give me a way to speak. Not everybody has the patience of my wife, Chaz. But online, everybody speaks at the same speed. This whole adventure has been a learning experience. Every time there was a surgery that failed, I was left with a little less flesh and bone. Now I have no jaw left at all. While harvesting tissue from both my shoulders, the surgeries left me with back pain and reduced my ability to walk easily. Ironic that my legs are fine, and it's my shoulders that slow up my walk. When you see me today, I look like the Phantom of the Opera. But no you don't. (Laughter) (Applause) It is human nature to look at someone like me and assume I have lost some of my marbles. People -- (Applause) People talk loudly -- I'm so sorry. Excuse me. (Applause) People talk loudly and slowly to me. Sometimes they assume I am deaf. There are people who don't want to make eye contact. Believe me, he didn't mean this as -- anyway, let me just read it. (Laughter) You should never let your wife read something like this. (Laughter) It is human nature to look away from illness. We don't enjoy a reminder of our own fragile mortality. That's why writing on the Internet has become a lifesaver for me. My ability to think and write have not been affected. And on the Web, my real voice finds expression. I have also met many other disabled people who communicate this way. One of my Twitter friends can type only with his toes. One of the funniest blogs on the Web is written by a friend of mine named Smartass Cripple. (Laughter) Google him and he will make you laugh. All of these people are saying, in one way or another, that what you see is not all you get. So I have not come here to complain. I have much to make me happy and relieved. I seem, for the time being, to be cancer-free. I am writing as well as ever. I am productive. If I were in this condition at any point before a few cosmological instants ago, I would be as isolated as a hermit. I would be trapped inside my head. Because of the rush of human knowledge, because of the digital revolution, I have a voice, and I do not need to scream. RE: Wait. I have one more thing to add. A guy goes into a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist says, "You're crazy." The guy says, "I want a second opinion." The psychiatrist says, "All right, you're ugly." (Laughter) You all know the test for artificial intelligence -- the Turing test. A human judge has a conversation with a human and a computer. If the judge can't tell the machine apart from the human, the machine has passed the test. I now propose a test for computer voices -- the Ebert test. If a computer voice can successfully tell a joke and do the timing and delivery as well as Henny Youngman, then that's the voice I want. (Applause)

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

I need to make a confession at the outset here. A little over 20 years ago, I did something that I regret, something that I'm not particularly proud of. Something that, in many ways, I wish no one would ever know, but here I feel kind of obliged to reveal. (Laughter) In the late 1980s, in a moment of youthful indiscretion, I went to law school. (Laughter) In America, law is a professional degree: after your university degree, you go on to law school. When I got to law school, I didn't do very well. To put it mildly, I didn't do very well. I, in fact, graduated in the part of my law school class that made the top 90% possible. (Laughter) Thank you. I never practiced law a day in my life; I pretty much wasn't allowed to. (Laughter) But today, against my better judgment, against the advice of my own wife, I want to try to dust off some of those legal skills -- what's left of those legal skills. I don't want to tell you a story. I want to make a case. I want to make a hard-headed, evidence-based, dare I say lawyerly case, for rethinking how we run our businesses. So, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, take a look at this. This is called the candle problem. Some of you might know it. It's created in 1945 by a psychologist named Karl Duncker. He created this experiment that is used in many other experiments in behavioral science. And here's how it works. Suppose I'm the experimenter. I bring you into a room. I give you a candle, some thumbtacks and some matches. And I say to you, "Your job is to attach the candle to the wall so the wax doesn't drip onto the table." Now what would you do? Many people begin trying to thumbtack the candle to the wall. Doesn't work. I saw somebody kind of make the motion over here -- some people have a great idea where they light the match, melt the side of the candle, try to adhere it to the wall. It's an awesome idea. Doesn't work. And eventually, after five or ten minutes, most people figure out the solution, which you can see here. The key is to overcome what's called functional fixedness. You look at that box and you see it only as a receptacle for the tacks. But it can also have this other function, as a platform for the candle. The candle problem. I want to tell you about an experiment using the candle problem, done by a scientist named Sam Glucksberg, who is now at Princeton University, US, This shows the power of incentives. He gathered his participants and said: "I'm going to time you, how quickly you can solve this problem." To one group he said, "I'm going to time you to establish norms, averages for how long it typically takes someone to solve this sort of problem." To the second group he offered rewards. He said, "If you're in the top 25% of the fastest times, you get five dollars. If you're the fastest of everyone we're testing here today, you get 20 dollars." Now this is several years ago, adjusted for inflation, it's a decent sum of money for a few minutes of work. It's a nice motivator. Question: How much faster did this group solve the problem? Answer: It took them, on average, three and a half minutes longer. 3.5 min longer. This makes no sense, right? I mean, I'm an American. I believe in free markets. That's not how it's supposed to work, right? (Laughter) If you want people to perform better, you reward them. Right? Bonuses, commissions, their own reality show. Incentivize them. That's how business works. But that's not happening here. You've got an incentive designed to sharpen thinking and accelerate creativity, and it does just the opposite. It dulls thinking and blocks creativity. What's interesting about this experiment is that it's not an aberration. This has been replicated over and over again for nearly 40 years. These contingent motivators -- if you do this, then you get that -- work in some circumstances. But for a lot of tasks, they actually either don't work or, often, they do harm. This is one of the most robust findings in social science, and also one of the most ignored. I spent the last couple of years looking at the science of human motivation, particularly the dynamics of extrinsic motivators and intrinsic motivators. And I'm telling you, it's not even close. If you look at the science, there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. What's alarming here is that our business operating system -- think of the set of assumptions and protocols beneath our businesses, how we motivate people, how we apply our human resources-- it's built entirely around these extrinsic motivators, around carrots and sticks. That's actually fine for many kinds of 20th century tasks. But for 21st century tasks, that mechanistic, reward-and-punishment approach doesn't work, often doesn't work, and often does harm. Let me show you. Glucksberg did another similar experiment, he presented the problem in a slightly different way, like this up here. Attach the candle to the wall so the wax doesn't drip onto the table. Same deal. You: we're timing for norms. You: we're incentivizing. What happened this time? This time, the incentivized group kicked the other group's butt. Why? Because when the tacks are out of the box, it's pretty easy isn't it? (Laughter) If-then rewards work really well for those sorts of tasks, where there is a simple set of rules and a clear destination to go to. Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus, concentrate the mind; that's why they work in so many cases. So, for tasks like this, a narrow focus, where you just see the goal right there, zoom straight ahead to it, they work really well. But for the real candle problem, you don't want to be looking like this. The solution is on the periphery. You want to be looking around. That reward actually narrows our focus and restricts our possibility. Let me tell you why this is so important. In western Europe, in many parts of Asia, in North America, in Australia, white-collar workers are doing less of this kind of work, and more of this kind of work. That routine, rule-based, left-brain work -- certain kinds of accounting, financial analysis, computer programming -- has become fairly easy to outsource, fairly easy to automate. Software can do it faster. Low-cost providers can do it cheaper. So what really matters are the more right-brained creative, conceptual kinds of abilities. Think about your own work. Think about your own work. Are the problems that you face, or even the problems we've been talking about here, do they have a clear set of rules, and a single solution? No. The rules are mystifying. The solution, if it exists at all, is surprising and not obvious. Everybody in this room is dealing with their own version of the candle problem. And for candle problems of any kind, in any field, those if-then rewards, the things around which we've built so many of our businesses, don't work! It makes me crazy. And here's the thing. This is not a feeling. Okay? I'm a lawyer; I don't believe in feelings. This is not a philosophy. I'm an American; I don't believe in philosophy. (Laughter) This is a fact -- or, as we say in my hometown of Washington, D.C., a true fact. (Laughter) (Applause) Let me give you an example. Let me marshal the evidence here. I'm not telling a story, I'm making a case. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, some evidence: Dan Ariely, one of the great economists of our time, he and three colleagues did a study of some MIT students. They gave these MIT students a bunch of games, games that involved creativity, and motor skills, and concentration. And the offered them, for performance, three levels of rewards: small reward, medium reward, large reward. If you do really well you get the large reward, on down. What happened? As long as the task involved only mechanical skill bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance. Okay? But once the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward led to poorer performance. Then they said, "Let's see if there's any cultural bias here. Let's go to Madurai, India and test it." Standard of living is lower. In Madurai, a reward that is modest in North American standards, is more meaningful there. Same deal. A bunch of games, three levels of rewards. What happens? People offered the medium level of rewards did no better than people offered the small rewards. But this time, people offered the highest rewards, they did the worst of all. In eight of the nine tasks we examined across three experiments, higher incentives led to worse performance. Is this some kind of touchy-feely socialist conspiracy going on here? No, these are economists from MIT, from Carnegie Mellon, from the University of Chicago. Do you know who sponsored this research? The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States. That's the American experience. Let's go across the pond to the London School of Economics, LSE, London School of Economics, alma mater of eleven Nobel Laureates in economics. Training ground for great economic thinkers like George Soros, and Friedrich Hayek, and Mick Jagger. (Laughter) Last month, just last month, economists at LSE looked at 51 studies of pay-for-performance plans, inside of companies. Here's what they said: "We find that financial incentives can result in a negative impact on overall performance." There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And what worries me, as we stand here in the rubble of the economic collapse, is that too many organizations are making their decisions, their policies about talent and people, based on assumptions that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science. And if we really want to get out of this economic mess, if we really want high performance on those definitional tasks of the 21st century, the solution is not to do more of the wrong things, to entice people with a sweeter carrot, or threaten them with a sharper stick. We need a whole new approach. The good news is that the scientists who've been studying motivation have given us this new approach. It's built much more around intrinsic motivation. Around the desire to do things because they matter, because we like it, they're interesting, or part of something important. And to my mind, that new operating system for our businesses revolves around three elements: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives. Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters. Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves. These are the building blocks of an entirely new operating system for our businesses. I want to talk today only about autonomy. In the 20th century, we came up with this idea of management. Management did not emanate from nature. Management is not a tree, it's a television set. Somebody invented it. It doesn't mean it's going to work forever. Management is great. Traditional notions of management are great if you want compliance. But if you want engagement, self-direction works better. Some examples of some kind of radical notions of self-direction. You don't see a lot of it, but you see the first stirrings of something really interesting going on, what it means is paying people adequately and fairly, absolutely -- getting the issue of money off the table, and then giving people lots of autonomy. Some examples. How many of you have heard of the company Atlassian? It looks like less than half. (Laughter) Atlassian is an Australian software company. And they do something incredibly cool. A few times a year they tell their engineers, "Go for the next 24 hours and work on anything you want, as long as it's not part of your regular job. Work on anything you want." Engineers use this time to come up with a cool patch for code, come up with an elegant hack. Then they present all of the stuff that they've developed to their teammates, to the rest of the company, in this wild and woolly all-hands meeting at the end of the day. Being Australians, everybody has a beer. They call them FedEx Days. Why? Because you have to deliver something overnight. It's pretty; not bad. It's a huge trademark violation, but it's pretty clever. (Laughter) That one day of intense autonomy has produced a whole array of software fixes that might never have existed. It's worked so well that Atlassian has taken it to the next level with 20% time -- done, famously, at Google -- where engineers can spend 20% of their time working on anything they want. They have autonomy over their time, their task, their team, their technique. Radical amounts of autonomy. And at Google, as many of you know, about half of the new products in a typical year are birthed during that 20% time: things like Gmail, Orkut, Google News. Let me give you an even more radical example of it: something called the Results Only Work Environment (the ROWE), created by two American consultants, in place at a dozen companies around North America. In a ROWE people don't have schedules. They show up when they want. They don't have to be in the office at a certain time, or any time. They just have to get their work done. How they do it, when they do it, where they do it, is totally up to them. Meetings in these kinds of environments are optional. What happens? Almost across the board, productivity goes up, worker engagement goes up, worker satisfaction goes up, turnover goes down. Autonomy, mastery and purpose, the building blocks of a new way of doing things. Some of you might look at this and say, "Hmm, that sounds nice, but it's Utopian." And I say, "Nope. I have proof." The mid-1990s, Microsoft started an encyclopedia called Encarta. They had deployed all the right incentives, They paid professionals to write and edit thousands of articles. Well-compensated managers oversaw the whole thing to make sure it came in on budget and on time. A few years later, another encyclopedia got started. Different model, right? Do it for fun. No one gets paid a cent, or a euro or a yen. Do it because you like to do it. Just 10 years ago, if you had gone to an economist, anywhere, "Hey, I've got these two different models for creating an encyclopedia. If they went head to head, who would win?" 10 years ago you could not have found a single sober economist anywhere on planet Earth who would have predicted the Wikipedia model. This is the titanic battle between these two approaches. This is the Ali-Frazier of motivation, right? This is the Thrilla in Manila. Intrinsic motivators versus extrinsic motivators. Autonomy, mastery and purpose, versus carrot and sticks, and who wins? Intrinsic motivation, autonomy, mastery and purpose, in a knockout. Let me wrap up. There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. Here is what science knows. One: Those 20th century rewards, those motivators we think are a natural part of business, do work, but only in a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances. Two: Those if-then rewards often destroy creativity. Three: The secret to high performance isn't rewards and punishments, but that unseen intrinsic drive-- the drive to do things for their own sake. The drive to do things cause they matter. And here's the best part. We already know this. The science confirms what we know in our hearts. So, if we repair this mismatch between science and business, if we bring our motivation, notions of motivation into the 21st century, if we get past this lazy, dangerous, ideology of carrots and sticks, we can strengthen our businesses, we can solve a lot of those candle problems, and maybe, maybe -- we can change the world. I rest my case. (Applause)

One of the problems of writing, and working, and looking at the Internet is that it's very hard to separate fashion from deep change. And so, to start helping that, I want to take us back to 1835. In 1835, James Gordon Bennett founded the first mass-circulation newspaper in New York City. And it cost about 500 dollars to start it, which was about the equivalent of 10,000 dollars of today. By 15 years later, by 1850, doing the same thing -- starting what was experienced as a mass--circulation daily paper -- would come to cost two and a half million dollars. 10,000, two and a half million, 15 years. That's the critical change that is being inverted by the Net. And that's what I want to talk about today, and how that relates to the emergence of social production. Starting with newspapers, what we saw was high cost as an initial requirement for making information, knowledge and culture, which led to a stark bifurcation between producers -- who had to be able to raise financial capital, just like any other industrial organization -- and passive consumers that could choose from a certain set of things that this industrial model could produce. Now, the term "information society," "information economy," for a very long time has been used as the thing that comes after the industrial revolution. But in fact, for purposes of understanding what's happening today, that's wrong. Because for 150 years, we've had an information economy. It's just been industrial, which means those who were producing had to have a way of raising money to pay those two and a half million dollars, and later, more for the telegraph, and the radio transmitter, and the television, and eventually the mainframe. And that meant they were market based, or they were government owned, depending on what kind of system they were in. And this characterized and anchored the way information and knowledge were produced for the next 150 years. Now, let me tell you a different story. Around June 2002, the world of supercomputers had a bombshell. The Japanese had, for the first time, created the fastest supercomputer -- the NEC Earth Simulator -- taking the primary from the U.S., and about two years later -- this, by the way, is measuring the trillion floating-point operations per second that the computer's capable of running -- sigh of relief: IBM [Blue Gene] has just edged ahead of the NEC Earth Simulator. All of this completely ignores the fact that throughout this period, there's another supercomputer running in the world -- SETI@home. Four and a half million users around the world, contributing their leftover computer cycles, whenever their computer isn't working, by running a screen saver, and together sharing their resources to create a massive supercomputer that NASA harnesses to analyze the data coming from radio telescopes. What this picture suggests to us is that we've got a radical change in the way information production and exchange is capitalized. Not that it's become less capital intensive -- that there's less money that's required -- but that the ownership of this capital, the way the capitalization happens, is radically distributed. Each of us, in these advanced economies, has one of these, or something rather like it -- a computer. They're not radically different from routers inside the middle of the network. And computation, storage and communications capacity are in the hands of practically every connected person -- and these are the basic physical capital means necessary for producing information, knowledge and culture, in the hands of something like 600 million to a billion people around the planet. What this means is that for the first time since the industrial revolution, the most important means, the most important components of the core economic activities -- remember, we are in an information economy -- of the most advanced economies, and there more than anywhere else, are in the hands of the population at large. This is completely different than what we've seen since the industrial revolution. So we've got communications and computation capacity in the hands of the entire population, and we've got human creativity, human wisdom, human experience -- the other major experience, the other major input -- which unlike simple labor -- stand here turning this lever all day long -- is not something that's the same or fungible among people. Any one of you who has taken someone else's job, or tried to give yours to someone else, no matter how detailed the manual, you cannot transmit what you know, what you will intuit under a certain set of circumstances. In that we're unique, and each of us holds this critical input into production as we hold this machine. What's the effect of this? So, the story that most people know is the story of free or open source software. This is market share of Apache Web server -- one of the critical applications in Web-based communications. In 1995, two groups of people said, "Wow, this is really important, the Web! We need a much better Web server!" One was a motley collection of volunteers who just decided, you know, we really need this, we should write one, and what are we going to do with what -- well, we're gonna share it! And other people will be able to develop it. The other was Microsoft. Now, if I told you that 10 years later, the motley crew of people, who didn't control anything that they produced, acquired 20 percent of the market and was the red line, it would be amazing! Right? Think of it in minivans. A group of automobile engineers on their weekends are competing with Toyota. Right? But, in fact, of course, the story is it's the 70 percent, including the major e-commerce site -- 70 percent of a critical application on which Web-based communications and applications work is produced in this form, in direct competition with Microsoft. Not in a side issue -- in a central strategic decision to try to capture a component of the Net. Software has done this in a way that's been very visible, because it's measurable. But the thing to see is that this actually happens throughout the Web. So, NASA, at some point, did an experiment where they took images of Mars that they were mapping, and they said, instead of having three or four fully trained Ph.D.s doing this all the time, let's break it up into small components, put it up on the Web, and see if people, using a very simple interface, will actually spend five minutes here, 10 minutes there, clicking. After six months, 85,000 people used this to generate mapping at a faster rate than the images were coming in, which was, quote, "practically indistinguishable from the markings of a fully-trained Ph.D.," once you showed it to a number of people and computed the average. Now, if you have a little girl, and she goes and writes to -- well, not so little, medium little -- tries to do research on Barbie. And she'll come to Encarta, one of the main online encyclopedias. This is what you'll find out about Barbie. This is it, there's nothing more to the definition, including, "manufacturers" -- plural -- "now more commonly produce ethnically diverse dolls, like this black Barbie." Which is vastly better than what you'll find in the encyclopedia.com, which is Barbie, Klaus. (Laughter) On the other hand, if they go to Wikipedia, they'll find a genuine article -- and I won't talk a lot about Wikipedia, because Jimmy Wales is here -- but roughly equivalent to what you would find in the Britannica, differently written, including the controversies over body image and commercialization, the claims about the way in which she's a good role model, etc. Another portion is not only how content is produced, but how relevance is produced. The claim to fame of Yahoo! was, we hire people to look -- originally, not anymore -- we hire people to look at websites and tell you -- if they're in the index, they're good. This, on the other hand, is what 60,000 passionate volunteers produce in the Open Directory Project, each one willing to spend an hour or two on something they really care about, to say, this is good. So, this is the Open Directory Project, with 60,000 volunteers, each one spending a little bit of time, as opposed to a few hundred fully paid employees. No one owns it, no one owns the output, it's free for anyone to use and it's the output of people acting out of social and psychological motivations to do something interesting. This is not only outside of businesses. When you think of what is the critical innovation of Google, the critical innovation is outsourcing the one most important thing -- the decision about what's relevant -- to the community of the Web as a whole, doing whatever they want to do: so, page rank. The critical innovation here is instead of our engineers, or our people saying which is the most relevant, we're going to go out and count what you, people out there on the Web, for whatever reason -- vanity, pleasure -- produced links, and tied to each other. We're going to count those, and count them up. And again, here, you see Barbie.com, but also, very quickly, Adiosbarbie.com, the body image for every size. A contested cultural object, which you won't find anywhere soon on Overture, which is the classic market-based mechanism: whoever pays the most is highest on the list. So, all of that is in the creation of content, of relevance, basic human expression. But remember, the computers were also physical. Just physical materials -- our PCs -- we share them together. We also see this in wireless. It used to be wireless was one person owned the license, they transmitted in an area, and it had to be decided whether they would be licensed or based on property. What we're seeing now is that computers and radios are becoming so sophisticated that we're developing algorithms to let people own machines, like Wi-Fi devices, and overlay them with a sharing protocol that would allow a community like this to build its own wireless broadband network simply from the simple principle: When I'm listening, when I'm not using, I can help you transfer your messages; and when you're not using, you'll help me transfer yours. And this is not an idealized version. These are working models that at least in some places in the United States are being implemented, at least for public security. If in 1999 I told you, let's build a data storage and retrieval system. It's got to store terabytes. It's got to be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It's got to be available from anywhere in the world. It has to support over 100 million users at any given moment. It's got to be robust to attack, including closing the main index, injecting malicious files, armed seizure of some major nodes. You'd say that would take years. It would take millions. But of course, what I'm describing is P2P file sharing. Right? We always think of it as stealing music, but fundamentally, it's a distributed data storage and retrieval system, where people, for very obvious reasons, are willing to share their bandwidth and their storage to create something. So, essentially what we're seeing is the emergence of a fourth transactional framework. It used to be that there were two primary dimensions along which you could divide things. They could be market based, or non-market based; they could be decentralized, or centralized. The price system was a market-based and decentralized system. If things worked better because you actually had somebody organizing them, you had firms, if you wanted to be in the market -- or you had governments or sometimes larger non-profits in the non-market. It was too expensive to have decentralized social production, to have decentralized action in society. That was not about society itself. That was, in fact, economic. But what we're seeing now is the emergence of this fourth system of social sharing and exchange. Not that it's the first time that we do nice things to each other, or for each other, as social beings. We do it all the time. It's that it's the first time that it's having major economic impact. What characterizes them is decentralized authority. You don't have to ask permission, as you do in a property-based system. May I do this? It's open for anyone to create and innovate and share, if they want to, by themselves or with others, because property is one mechanism of coordination. But it's not the only one. Instead, what we see are social frameworks for all of the critical things that we use property and contract in the market: information flows to decide what are interesting problems; who's available and good for something; motivation structures -- remember, money isn't always the best motivator. If you leave a $50 check after dinner with friends, you don't increase the probability of being invited back. And if dinner isn't entirely obvious, think of sex. (Laughter) It also requires certain new organizational approaches. And in particular, what we've seen is task organization. You have to hire people who know what they're doing. You have to hire them to spend a lot of time. Now, take the same problem, chunk it into little modules, and motivations become trivial. Five minutes, instead of watching TV? Five minutes I'll spend just because it's interesting. Just because it's fun. Just because it gives me a certain sense of meaning, or, in places that are more involved, like Wikipedia, gives me a certain set of social relations. So, a new social phenomenon is emerging. It's creating, and it's most visible when we see it as a new form of competition. Peer-to-peer networks assaulting the recording industry; free and open source software taking market share from Microsoft; Skype potentially threatening traditional telecoms; Wikipedia competing with online encyclopedias. But it's also a new source of opportunities for businesses. As you see a new set of social relations and behaviors emerging, you have new opportunities. Some of them are toolmakers. Instead of building well-behaved appliances -- things that you know what they'll do in advance -- you begin to build more open tools. There's a new set of values, a new set of things people value. You build platforms for self-expression and collaboration. Like Wikipedia, like the Open Directory Project, you're beginning to build platforms, and you see that as a model. And you see surfers, people who see this happening, and in some sense build it into a supply chain, which is a very curious one. Right? You have a belief: stuff will flow out of connected human beings. That'll give me something I can use, and I'm going to contract with someone. I will deliver something based on what happens. It's very scary -- that's what Google does, essentially. That's what IBM does in software services, and they've done reasonably well. So, social production is a real fact, not a fad. It is the critical long-term shift caused by the Internet. Social relations and exchange become significantly more important than they ever were as an economic phenomenon. In some contexts, it's even more efficient because of the quality of the information, the ability to find the best person, the lower transaction costs. It's sustainable and growing fast. But -- and this is the dark lining -- it is threatened by -- in the same way that it threatens -- the incumbent industrial systems. So next time you open the paper, and you see an intellectual property decision, a telecoms decision, it's not about something small and technical. It is about the future of the freedom to be as social beings with each other, and the way information, knowledge and culture will be produced. Because it is in this context that we see a battle over how easy or hard it will be for the industrial information economy to simply go on as it goes, or for the new model of production to begin to develop alongside that industrial model, and change the way we begin to see the world and report what it is that we see. Thank you.

Lauren Hodge: If you were going to a restaurant and wanted a healthier option, which would you choose, grilled or fried chicken? Now most people would answer grilled, and it's true that grilled chicken does contain less fat and fewer calories. However, grilled chicken poses a hidden danger. The hidden danger is heterocyclic amines -- specifically phenomethylimidazopyridine, or PhIP -- (laughter) which is the immunogenic or carcinogenic compound. A carcinogen is any substance or agent that causes abnormal growth of cells, which can also cause them to metastasize or spread. They are also organic compounds in which one or more of the hydrogens in ammonia is replaced with a more complex group. Studies show that antioxidants are known to decrease these heterocyclic amines. However, no studies exist yet that show how or why. These here are five different organizations that classify carcinogens. And as you can see, none of the organizations consider the compounds to be safe, which justifies the need to decrease them in our diet. Now you might wonder how a 13 year-old girl could come up with this idea. And I was led to it through a series of events. I first learned about it through a lawsuit I read about in my doctor's office -- (Laughter) which was between the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine and seven different fast food restaurants. They weren't sued because there was carcinogens in the chicken, but they were sued because of California's Proposition 65, which stated that if there's anything dangerous in the products then the companies had to give a clear warning. So I was very surprised about this. And I was wondering why nobody knew more about this dangerous grilled chicken, which doesn't seem very harmful. But then one night, my mom was cooking grilled chicken for dinner, and I noticed that the edges of the chicken, which had been marinated in lemon juice, turned white. And later in biology class, I learned that it's due to a process called denaturing, which is where the proteins will change shape and lose their ability to chemically function. So I combined these two ideas and I formulated a hypothesis, saying that, could possibly the carcinogens be decreased due to a marinade and could it be due to the differences in PH? So my idea was born, and I had the project set up and a hypothesis, so what was my next step? Well obviously I had to find a lab to work at because I didn't have the equipment in my school. I thought this would be easy, but I emailed about 200 different people within a five-hour radius of where I lived, and I got one positive response that said that they could work with me. Most of the others either never responded back, said they didn't have the time or didn't have the equipment and couldn't help me. So it was a big commitment to drive to the lab to work multiple times. However, it was a great opportunity to work in a real lab -- so I could finally start my project. The first stage was completed at home, which consisted of marinating the chicken, grilling the chicken, amassing it and preparing it to be transported to the lab. The second stage was completed at the Penn State University main campus lab, which is where I extracted the chemicals, changed the PH so I could run it through the equipment and separated the compounds I needed from the rest of the chicken. The final stages, when I ran the samples through a high-pressure liquid chromatography mass spectrometer, which separated the compounds and analyzed the chemicals and told me exactly how much carcinogens I had in my chicken. So when I went through the data, I had very surprising results, because I found that four out of the five marinating ingredients actually inhibited the carcinogen formation. When compared with the unmarinated chicken, which is what I used as my control, I found that lemon juice worked by far the best, which decreased the carcinogens by about 98 percent. The saltwater marinade and the brown sugar marinade also worked very well, decreasing the carcinogens by about 60 percent. Olive oil slightly decreased the PhIP formation, but it was nearly negligible. And the soy sauce results were inconclusive because of the large data range, but it seems like soy sauce actually increased the potential carcinogens. Another important factor that I didn't take into account initially was the time cooked. And I found that if you increase the time cooked, the amount of carcinogens rapidly increases. So the best way to marinate chicken, based on this, is to, not under-cook, but definitely don't over-cook and char the chicken, and marinate in either lemon juice, brown sugar or saltwater. (Applause) Based on these findings, I have a question for you. Would you be willing to make a simple change in your diet that could potentially save your life? Now I'm not saying that if you eat grilled chicken that's not marinated, you're definitely going to catch cancer and die. However, anything you can do to decrease the risk of potential carcinogens can definitely increase the quality of lifestyle. Is it worth it to you? How will you cook your chicken now? (Applause) Shree Bose: Hi everyone. I'm Shree Bose. I was the 17-18 year-old age category winner and then the grand prize winner. And I want all of you to imagine a little girl holding a dead blue spinach plant. And she's standing in front of you and she's explaining to you that little kids will eat their vegetables if they're different colors. Sounds ridiculous, right. But that was me years ago. And that was my first science fair project. It got a bit more complicated from there. My older brother Panaki Bose spent hours of his time explaining atoms to me when I barely understood basic algebra. My parents suffered through many more of my science fair projects, including a remote controlled garbage can. (Laughter) And then came the summer after my freshman year, when my grandfather passed away due to cancer. And I remember watching my family go through that and thinking that I never wanted another family to feel that kind of loss. So, armed with all the wisdom of freshman year biology, I decided I wanted to do cancer research at 15. Good plan. So I started emailing all of these professors in my area asking to work under their supervision in a lab. Got rejected by all except one. And then went on, my next summer, to work under Dr. Basu at the UNT Health Center at Fort Worth, Texas. And that is where the research began. So ovarian cancer is one of those cancers that most people don't know about, or at least don't pay that much attention to. But yet, it's the fifth leading cause of cancer deaths among women in the United States. In fact, one in 70 women will be diagnosed with ovarian cancer. One in 100 will die from it. Chemotherapy, one of the most effective ways used to treat cancer today, involves giving patients really high doses of chemicals to try and kill off cancer cells. Cisplatin is a relatively common ovarian cancer chemotherapy drug -- a relatively simple molecule made in the lab that messes with the DNA of cancer cells and causes them to kill themselves. Sounds great, right? But here's the problem: sometimes patients become resistant to the drug, and then years after they've been declared to be cancer free, they come back. And this time, they no longer respond to the drug. It's a huge problem. In fact, it's one of the biggest problems with chemotherapy today. So we wanted to figure out how these ovarian cancer cells are becoming resistant to this drug called Cisplatin. And we wanted to figure this out, because if we could figure that out, then we might be able to prevent that resistance from ever happening. So that's what we set out to do. And we thought it had something to do with this protein called AMP kinase, an energy protein. So we ran all of these tests blocking the protein, and we saw this huge shift. I mean, on the slide, you can see that on our sensitive side, these cells that are responding to the drug, when we start blocking the protein, the number of dying cells -- those colored dots -- they're going down. But then on this side, with the same treatment, they're going up -- interesting. But those are dots on a screen for you; what exactly does that mean? Well basically that means that this protein is changing from the sensitive cell to the resistant cell. And in fact, it might be changing the cells themselves to make the cells resistant. And that's huge. In fact, it means that if a patient comes in and they're resistant to this drug, then if we give them a chemical to block this protein, then we can treat them again with the same drug. And that's huge for chemotherapy effectiveness -- possibly for many different types of cancer. So that was my work, and it was my way of reimagining the future for future research, with figuring out exactly what this protein does, but also for the future of chemotherapy effectiveness -- so maybe all grandfathers with cancer have a little bit more time to spend with their grandchildren. But my work wasn't just about the research. It was about finding my passion. That's why being the grand prize winner of the Google Global Science Fair -- cute picture, right -- it was so exciting to me and it was such an amazing honor. And ever since then, I've gotten to do some pretty cool stuff -- from getting to meet the president to getting to be on this stage to talk to all of you guys. But like I said, my journey wasn't just about the research, it was about finding my passion, and it was about making my own opportunities when I didn't even know what I was doing. It was about inspiration and determination and never giving up on my interest for science and learning and growing. After all, my story begins with a dried, withered spinach plant and it's only getting better from there. Thank you. (Applause) Naomi Shah: Hi everyone. I'm Naomi Shah, and today I'll be talking to you about my research involving indoor air quality and asthmatic patients. 1.6 million deaths worldwide. One death every 20 seconds. People spend over 90 percent of their lives indoors. And the economic burden of asthma exceeds that of HIV and tuberculosis combined. Now these statistics had a huge impact on me, but what really sparked my interest in my research was watching both my dad and my brother suffer from chronic allergies year-round. It confused me; why did these allergy symptoms persist well past the pollen season? With this question in mind, I started researching, and I soon found that indoor air pollutants were the culprit. As soon as I realized this, I investigated the underlying relationship between four prevalent air pollutants and their affect on the lung health of asthmatic patients. At first, I just wanted to figure out which of these four pollutants have the largest negative health impact on the lung health of asthmatic patients. But soon after, I developed a novel mathematical model that essentially quantifies the effect of these environmental pollutants on the lung health of asthmatic patients. And it surprises me that no model currently exists that quantifies the effect of environmental factors on human lung health, because that relationship seems so important. So with that in mind, I started researching more, I started investigating more, and I became very passionate. Because I realized that if we could find a way to target remediation, we could also find a way to treat asthmatic patients more effectively. For example, volatile organic compounds are chemical pollutants that are found in our schools, homes and workplaces. They're everywhere. These chemical pollutants are currently not a criteria air pollutant, as defined by the U.S. Clean Air Act. Which is surprising to me, because these chemical pollutants, through my research, I show that they had a very large negative impact on the lung health of asthmatic patients and thus should be regulated. So today I want to show you my interactive software model that I created. I'm going to show it to you on my laptop. And I have a volunteer subject in the audience today, Julie. And all of Julie's data has been pre-entered into my interactive software model. And this can be used by anyone. So I want you to imagine that you're in Julie's shoes, or someone who's really close to you who suffers from asthma or another lung disorder. So Julie's going to her doctor's office to get treated for her asthma. And the doctor has her sit down, and he takes her peak expiratory flow rate -- which is essentially her exhalation rate, or the amount of air that she can breathe out in one breath. So that peak expiratory flow rate, I've entered it up into the interactive software model. I've also entered in her age, her gender and her height. I've assumed that she lives in an average household with average air pollutant levels. So any user can come in here and click on "lung function report" and it'll take them to this report that I created. And this report really drives home the crux of my research. So what it shows -- if you want to focus on that top graph in the right-hand corner -- it shows Julie's actual peak expiratory flow rate in the yellow bar. This is the measurement that she took in her doctor's office. In the blue bar at the bottom of the graph, it shows what her peak expiratory flow rate, what her exhalation rate or lung health, should be based on her age, gender and height. So the doctor sees this difference between the yellow bar and the blue bar, and he says, "Wow, we need to give her steroids, medication and inhalers." But I want everyone here to reimagine a world where instead of prescribing steroids, inhalers and medication, the doctor turns to Julie and says, "Why don't you go home and clean out your air filters. Clean out the air ducts in your home, in your workplace, in your school. Stop the use of incense and candles. And if you're remodeling your house, take out all the carpeting and put in hardwood flooring." Because these solutions are natural, these solutions are sustainable, and these solutions are long-term investments -- long-term investments that we're making for our generation and for future generations. Because these environmental solutions that Julie can make in her home, her workplace and her school are impacting everyone that lives around her. So I'm very passionate about this research and I really want to continue it and expand it to more disorders besides asthma, more respiratory disorders, as well as more pollutants. But before I end my talk today, I want to leave you with one saying. And that saying is that genetics loads the gun, but the environment pulls the trigger. And that made a huge impact on me when I was doing this research. Because what I feel, is a lot of us think that the environment is at a macro level, that we can't do anything to change our air quality or to change the climate or anything. But if each one of us takes initiative in our own home, in our own school and in our own workplace, we can make a huge difference in air quality. Because remember, we spend 90 percent of our lives indoors. And air quality and air pollutants have a huge impact on the lung health of asthmatic patients, anyone with a respiratory disorder and really all of us in general. So I want you to reimagine a world with better air quality, better quality of life and better quality of living for everyone including our future generations. Thank you. (Applause) Lisa Ling: Right. Can I have Shree and Lauren come up really quickly? Your Google Science Fair champions. Your winners. (Applause)

I'd like to start with a couple of quick examples. These are spinneret glands on the abdomen of a spider. They produce six different types of silk, which is spun together into a fiber, tougher than any fiber humans have ever made. The nearest we've come is with aramid fiber. And to make that, it involves extremes of temperature, extremes of pressure and loads of pollution. And yet the spider manages to do it at ambient temperature and pressure with raw materials of dead flies and water. It does suggest we've still got a bit to learn. This beetle can detect a forest fire at 80 kilometers away. That's roughly 10,000 times the range of man-made fire detectors. And what's more, this guy doesn't need a wire connected all the way back to a power station burning fossil fuels. So these two examples give a sense of what biomimicry can deliver. If we could learn to make things and do things the way nature does, we could achieve factor 10, factor 100, maybe even factor 1,000 savings in resource and energy use. And if we're to make progress with the sustainability revolution, I believe there are three really big changes we need to bring about. Firstly, radical increases in resource efficiency. Secondly, shifting from a linear, wasteful, polluting way of using resources to a closed-loop model. And thirdly, changing from a fossil fuel economy to a solar economy. And for all three of these, I believe, biomimicry has a lot of the solutions that we're going to need. You could look at nature as being like a catalog of products, and all of those have benefited from a 3.8-billion-year research and development period. And given that level of investment, it makes sense to use it. So I'm going to talk about some projects that have explored these ideas. And let's start with radical increases in resource efficiency. When we were working on the Eden Project, we had to create a very large greenhouse in a site that was not only irregular, but it was continually changing because it was still being quarried. It was a hell of a challenge, and it was actually examples from biology that provided a lot of the clues. So for instance, it was soap bubbles that helped us generate a building form that would work regardless of the final ground levels. Studying pollen grains and radiolaria and carbon molecules helped us devise the most efficient structural solution using hexagons and pentagons. The next move was that we wanted to try and maximize the size of those hexagons. And to do that we had to find an alternative to glass, which is really very limited in terms of its unit sizes. And in nature there are lots of examples of very efficient structures based on pressurized membranes. So we started exploring this material called ETFE. It's a high-strength polymer. And what you do is you put it together in three layers, you weld it around the edge, and then you inflate it. And the great thing about this stuff is you can make it in units of roughly seven times the size of glass, and it was only one percent of the weight of double-glazing. So that was a factor-100 saving. And what we found is that we got into a positive cycle in which one breakthrough facilitated another. So with such large, lightweight pillows, we had much less steel. With less steel we were getting more sunlight in, which meant we didn't have to put as much extra heat in winter. And with less overall weight in the superstructure, there were big savings in the foundations. And at the end of the project we worked out that the weight of that superstructure was actually less than the weight of the air inside the building. So I think the Eden Project is a fairly good example of how ideas from biology can lead to radical increases in resource efficiency -- delivering the same function, but with a fraction of the resource input. And actually there are loads of examples in nature that you could turn to for similar solutions. So for instance, you could develop super-efficient roof structures based on giant Amazon water lilies, whole buildings inspired by abalone shells, super-lightweight bridges inspired by plant cells. There's a world of beauty and efficiency to explore here using nature as a design tool. So now I want to go onto talking about the linear-to-closed-loop idea. The way we tend to use resources is we extract them, we turn them into short-life products and then dispose of them. Nature works very differently. In ecosystems, the waste from one organism becomes the nutrient for something else in that system. And there are some examples of projects that have deliberately tried to mimic ecosystems. And one of my favorites is called the Cardboard to Caviar Project by Graham Wiles. And in their area they had a lot of shops and restaurants that were producing lots of food, cardboard and plastic waste. It was ending up in landfills. Now the really clever bit is what they did with the cardboard waste. And I'm just going to talk through this animation. So they were paid to collect it from the restaurants. They then shredded the cardboard and sold it to equestrian centers as horse bedding. When that was soiled, they were paid again to collect it. They put it into worm recomposting systems, which produced a lot of worms, which they fed to Siberian sturgeon, which produced caviar, which they sold back to the restaurants. So it transformed a linear process into a closed-loop model, and it created more value in the process. Graham Wiles has continued to add more and more elements to this, turning waste streams into schemes that create value. And just as natural systems tend to increase in diversity and resilience over time, there's a real sense with this project that the number of possibilities just continue increasing. And I know it's a quirky example, but I think the implications of this are quite radical, because it suggests that we could actually transform a big problem -- waste -- into a massive opportunity. And particularly in cities -- we could look at the whole metabolism of cities, and look at those as opportunities. And that's what we're doing on the next project I'm going to talk about, the Mobius Project, where we're trying to bring together a number of activities, all within one building, so that the waste from one can be the nutrient for another. And the kind of elements I'm talking about are, firstly, we have a restaurant inside a productive greenhouse, a bit like this one in Amsterdam called De Kas. Then we would have an anaerobic digester, which could deal with all the biodegradable waste from the local area, turn that into heat for the greenhouse and electricity to feed back into the grid. We'd have a water treatment system treating wastewater, turning that into fresh water and generating energy from the solids using just plants and micro-organisms. We'd have a fish farm fed with vegetable waste from the kitchen and worms from the compost and supplying fish back to the restaurant. And we'd also have a coffee shop, and the waste grains from that could be used as a substrate for growing mushrooms. So you can see that we're bringing together cycles of food, energy and water and waste all within one building. And just for fun, we've proposed this for a roundabout in central London, which at the moment is a complete eyesore. Some of you may recognize this. And with just a little bit of planning, we could transform a space dominated by traffic into one that provides open space for people, reconnects people with food and transforms waste into closed loop opportunities. So the final project I want to talk about is the Sahara Forest Project, which we're working on at the moment. It may come as a surprise to some of you to hear that quite large areas of what are currently desert were actually forested a fairly short time ago. So for instance, when Julius Caesar arrived in North Africa, huge areas of North Africa were covered in cedar and cypress forests. And during the evolution of life on the Earth, it was the colonization of the land by plants that helped create the benign climate we currently enjoy. The converse is also true. The more vegetation we lose, the more that's likely to exacerbate climate change and lead to further desertification. And this animation, this shows photosynthetic activity over the course of a number of years, and what you can see is that the boundaries of those deserts shift quite a lot, and that raises the question of whether we can intervene at the boundary conditions to halt, or maybe even reverse, desertification. And if you look at some of the organisms that have evolved to live in deserts, there are some amazing examples of adaptations to water scarcity. This is the Namibian fog-basking beetle, and it's evolved a way of harvesting its own fresh water in a desert. The way it does this is it comes out at night, crawls to the top of a sand dune, and because it's got a matte black shell, is able to radiate heat out to the night sky and become slightly cooler than its surroundings. So when the moist breeze blows in off the sea, you get these droplets of water forming on the beetle's shell. Just before sunrise, he tips his shell up, the water runs down into his mouth, has a good drink, goes off and hides for the rest of the day. And the ingenuity, if you could call it that, goes even further. Because if you look closely at the beetle's shell, there are lots of little bumps on that shell. And those bumps are hydrophilic; they attract water. Between them there's a waxy finish which repels water. And the effect of this is that as the droplets start to form on the bumps, they stay in tight, spherical beads, which means they're much more mobile than they would be if it was just a film of water over the whole beetle's shell. So even when there's only a small amount of moisture in the air, it's able to harvest that very effectively and channel it down to its mouth. So amazing example of an adaptation to a very resource-constrained environment -- and in that sense, very relevant to the kind of challenges we're going to be facing over the next few years, next few decades. We're working with the guy who invented the Seawater Greenhouse. This is a greenhouse designed for arid coastal regions, and the way it works is that you have this whole wall of evaporator grills, and you trickle seawater over that so that wind blows through, it picks up a lot of moisture and is cooled in the process. So inside it's cool and humid, which means the plants need less water to grow. And then at the back of the greenhouse, it condenses a lot of that humidity as freshwater in a process that is effectively identical to the beetle. And what they found with the first Seawater Greenhouse that was built was it was producing slightly more freshwater than it needed for the plants inside. So they just started spreading this on the land around, and the combination of that and the elevated humidity had quite a dramatic effect on the local area. This photograph was taken on completion day, and just one year later, it looked like that. So it was like a green inkblot spreading out from the building turning barren land back into biologically productive land -- and in that sense, going beyond sustainable design to achieve restorative design. So we were keen to scale this up and apply biomimicry ideas to maximize the benefits. And when you think about nature, often you think about it as being all about competition. But actually in mature ecosystems, you're just as likely to find examples of symbiotic relationships. So an important biomimicry principle is to find ways of bringing technologies together in symbiotic clusters. And the technology that we settled on as an ideal partner for the Seawater Greenhouse is concentrated solar power, which uses solar-tracking mirrors to focus the sun's heat to create electricity. And just to give you some sense of the potential of CSP, consider that we receive 10,000 times as much energy from the sun every year as we use in energy from all forms -- 10,000 times. So our energy problems are not intractable. It's a challenge to our ingenuity. And the kind of synergies I'm talking about are, firstly, both these technologies work very well in hot, sunny deserts. CSP needs a supply of demineralized freshwater. That's exactly what the Seawater Greenhouse produces. CSP produces a lot of waste heat. We'll be able to make use of all that to evaporate more seawater and enhance the restorative benefits. And finally, in the shade under the mirrors, it's possible to grow all sorts of crops that would not grow in direct sunlight. So this is how this scheme would look. The idea is we create this long hedge of greenhouses facing the wind. We'd have concentrated solar power plants at intervals along the way. Some of you might be wondering what we would do with all the salts. And with biomimicry, if you've got an underutilized resource, you don't think, "How am I going to dispose of this?" You think, "What can I add to the system to create more value?" And it turns out that different things crystallize out at different stages. When you evaporate seawater, the first thing to crystallize out is calcium carbonate. And that builds up on the evaporators -- and that's what that image on the left is -- gradually getting encrusted with the calcium carbonate. So after a while, we could take that out, use it as a lightweight building block. And if you think about the carbon in that, that would have come out of the atmosphere, into the sea and then locked away in a building product. The next thing is sodium chloride. You can also compress that into a building block, as they did here. This is a hotel in Bolivia. And then after that, there are all sorts of compounds and elements that we can extract, like phosphates, that we need to get back into the desert soils to fertilize them. And there's just about every element of the periodic table in seawater. So it should be possible to extract valuable elements like lithium for high-performance batteries. And in parts of the Arabian Gulf, the seawater, the salinity is increasing steadily due to the discharge of waste brine from desalination plants. And it's pushing the ecosystem close to collapse. Now we would be able to make use of all that waste brine. We could evaporate it to enhance the restorative benefits and capture the salts, transforming an urgent waste problem into a big opportunity. Really the Sahara Forest Project is a model for how we could create zero-carbon food, abundant renewable energy in some of the most water-stressed parts of the planet as well as reversing desertification in certain areas. So returning to those big challenges that I mentioned at the beginning: radical increases in resource efficiency, closing loops and a solar economy. They're not just possible; they're critical. And I firmly believe that studying the way nature solves problems will provide a lot of the solutions. But perhaps more than anything, what this thinking provides is a really positive way of talking about sustainable design. Far too much of the talk about the environment uses very negative language. But here it's about synergies and abundance and optimizing. And this is an important point. Antoine de Saint-Exupery once said, "If you want to build a flotilla of ships, you don't sit around talking about carpentry. No, you need to set people's souls ablaze with visions of exploring distant shores." And that's what we need to do, so let's be positive, and let's make progress with what could be the most exciting period of innovation we've ever seen. Thank you. (Applause)

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