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I'm going to talk to you tonight about coming out of the closet, and not in the traditional sense, not just the gay closet. I think we all have closets. Your closet may be telling someone you love her for the first time, or telling someone that you're pregnant, or telling someone you have cancer, or any of the other hard conversations we have throughout our lives. All a closet is is a hard conversation, and although our topics may vary tremendously, the experience of being in and coming out of the closet is universal. It is scary, and we hate it, and it needs to be done. Several years ago, I was working at the South Side Walnut Cafe, a local diner in town, and during my time there I would go through phases of militant lesbian intensity: not shaving my armpits, quoting Ani DiFranco lyrics as gospel. And depending on the bagginess of my cargo shorts and how recently I had shaved my head, the question would often be sprung on me, usually by a little kid: "Um, are you a boy or are you a girl?" And there would be an awkward silence at the table. I'd clench my jaw a little tighter, hold my coffee pot with a little more vengeance. The dad would awkwardly shuffle his newspaper and the mom would shoot a chilling stare at her kid. But I would say nothing, and I would seethe inside. And it got to the point where every time I walked up to a table that had a kid anywhere between three and 00 years old, I was ready to fight. (Laughter) And that is a terrible feeling. So I promised myself, the next time, I would say something. I would have that hard conversation. So within a matter of weeks, it happens again. "Are you a boy or are you a girl?" Familiar silence, but this time I'm ready, and I am about to go all Women's Studies 000 on this table. (Laughter) I've got my Betty Friedan quotes. I've got my Gloria Steinem quotes. I've even got this little bit from "Vagina Monologues" I'm going to do. So I take a deep breath and I look down and staring back at me is a four-year-old girl in a pink dress, not a challenge to a feminist duel, just a kid with a question: "Are you a boy or are you a girl?" So I take another deep breath, squat down to next to her, and say, "Hey, I know it's kind of confusing. My hair is short like a boy's, and I wear boy's clothes, but I'm a girl, and you know how sometimes you like to wear a pink dress, and sometimes you like to wear your comfy jammies? Well, I'm more of a comfy jammies kind of girl." And this kid looks me dead in the eye, without missing a beat, and says, "My favorite pajamas are purple with fish. Can I get a pancake, please?" (Laughter) And that was it. Just, "Oh, okay. You're a girl. How about that pancake?" It was the easiest hard conversation I have ever had. And why? Because Pancake Girl and I, we were both real with each other. So like many of us, I've lived in a few closets in my life, and yeah, most often, my walls happened to be rainbow. But inside, in the dark, you can't tell what color the walls are. You just know what it feels like to live in a closet. So really, my closet is no different than yours or yours or yours. Sure, I'll give you 000 reasons why coming out of my closet was harder than coming out of yours, but here's the thing: Hard is not relative. Hard is hard. Who can tell me that explaining to someone you've just declared bankruptcy is harder than telling someone you just cheated on them? Who can tell me that his coming out story is harder than telling your five-year-old you're getting a divorce? There is no harder, there is just hard. We need to stop ranking our hard against everyone else's hard to make us feel better or worse about our closets and just commiserate on the fact that we all have hard. At some point in our lives, we all live in closets, and they may feel safe, or at least safer than what lies on the other side of that door. But I am here to tell you, no matter what your walls are made of, a closet is no place for a person to live. Thanks. (Applause) So imagine yourself 00 years ago. Me, I had a ponytail, a strapless dress, and high-heeled shoes. I was not the militant lesbian ready to fight any four-year-old that walked into the cafe. I was frozen by fear, curled up in the corner of my pitch-black closet clutching my gay grenade, and moving one muscle is the scariest thing I have ever done. My family, my friends, complete strangers -- I had spent my entire life trying to not disappoint these people, and now I was turning the world upside down on purpose. I was burning the pages of the script we had all followed for so long, but if you do not throw that grenade, it will kill you. One of my most memorable grenade tosses was at my sister's wedding. (Laughter) It was the first time that many in attendance knew I was gay, so in doing my maid of honor duties, in my black dress and heels, I walked around to tables and finally landed on a table of my parents' friends, folks that had known me for years. And after a little small talk, one of the women shouted out, "I love Nathan Lane!" And the battle of gay relatability had begun. "Ash, have you ever been to the Castro?" "Well, yeah, actually, we have friends in San Francisco." "Well, we've never been there but we've heard it's fabulous." "Ash, do you know my hairdresser Antonio? He's really good and he has never talked about a girlfriend." "Ash, what's your favorite TV show? Our favorite TV show? Favorite: Will & Grace. And you know who we love? Jack. Jack is our favorite." And then one woman, stumped but wanting so desperately to show her support, to let me know she was on my side, she finally blurted out, "Well, sometimes my husband wears pink shirts." (Laughter) And I had a choice in that moment, as all grenade throwers do. I could go back to my girlfriend and my gay-loving table and mock their responses, chastise their unworldliness and their inability to jump through the politically correct gay hoops I had brought with me, or I could empathize with them and realize that that was maybe one of the hardest things they had ever done, that starting and having that conversation was them coming out of their closets. Sure, it would have been easy to point out where they felt short. It's a lot harder to meet them where they are and acknowledge the fact that they were trying. And what else can you ask someone to do but try? If you're going to be real with someone, you gotta be ready for real in return. So hard conversations are still not my strong suit. Ask anybody I have ever dated. But I'm getting better, and I follow what I like to call the three Pancake Girl principles. Now, please view this through gay-colored lenses, but know what it takes to come out of any closet is essentially the same. Number one: Be authentic. Take the armor off. Be yourself. That kid in the cafe had no armor, but I was ready for battle. If you want someone to be real with you, they need to know that you bleed too. Number two: Be direct. Just say it. Rip the Band-Aid off. If you know you are gay, just say it. If you tell your parents you might be gay, they will hold out hope that this will change. Do not give them that sense of false hope. (Laughter) And number three, and most important -- (Laughter) Be unapologetic. You are speaking your truth. Never apologize for that. And some folks may have gotten hurt along the way, so sure, apologize for what you've done, but never apologize for who you are. And yeah, some folks may be disappointed, but that is on them, not on you. Those are their expectations of who you are, not yours. That is their story, not yours. The only story that matters is the one that you want to write. So the next time you find yourself in a pitch-black closet clutching your grenade, know we have all been there before. And you may feel so very alone, but you are not. And we know it's hard but we need you out here, no matter what your walls are made of, because I guarantee you there are others peering through the keyholes of their closets looking for the next brave soul to bust a door open, so be that person and show the world that we are bigger than our closets and that a closet is no place for a person to truly live. Thank you, Boulder. Enjoy your night. (Applause)

I'm going to go off script and make Chris quite nervous here by making this audience participation. All right. Are you with me? Yeah. Yeah. All right. So what I'd like to do is have you raise your hand if you've ever heard a heterosexual couple having sex. Could be the neighbors, hotel room, your parents. Sorry. Okay. Pretty much everybody. Now raise your hand if the man was making more noise than the woman. I see one guy there. It doesn't count if it was you, sir. (Laughter) So his hand's down. And one woman. Okay. Sitting next to a loud guy. Now what does this tell us? It tells us that human beings make noise when they have sex, and it's generally the woman who makes more noise. This is known as female copulatory vocalization to the clipboard crowd. I wasn't even going to mention this, but somebody told me that Meg Ryan might be here, and she is the world's most famous female copulatory vocalizer. So I thought, got to talk about that. We'll get back to that a little bit later. Let me start by saying human beings are not descended from apes, despite what you may have heard. We are apes. We are more closely related to the chimp and the bonobo than the African elephant is to the Indian elephant, as Jared Diamond pointed out in one of his early books. We're more closely related to chimps and bonobos than chimps and bonobos are related to any other primate -- gorillas, orangutans, what have you. So we're extremely closely related to them, and as you'll see in terms of our behavior, we've got some relationship as well. So what I'm asking today, the question I want to explore with you today is, what kind of ape are we in terms of our sexuality? Now, since Darwin's day there's been what Cacilda and I have called the standard narrative of human sexual evolution, and you're all familiar with it, even if you haven't read this stuff. The idea is that, as part of human nature, from the beginning of our species' time, men have sort of leased women's reproductive potential by providing them with certain goods and services. Generally we're talking about meat, shelter, status, protection, things like that. And in exchange, women have offered fidelity, or at least a promise of fidelity. Now this sets men and women up in an oppositional relationship. The war between the sexes is built right into our DNA, according to this vision. Right? What Cacilda and I have argued is that no, this economic relationship, this oppositional relationship, is actually an artifact of agriculture, which only arose about 00,000 years ago at the earliest. Anatomically modern human beings have been around for about 000,000 years, so we're talking about five percent, at most, of our time as a modern, distinct species. So before agriculture, before the agricultural revolution, it's important to understand that human beings lived in hunter-gatherer groups that are characterized wherever they're found in the world by what anthropologists called fierce egalitarianism. They not only share things, they demand that things be shared: meat, shelter, protection, all these things that were supposedly being traded to women for their sexual fidelity, it turns out, are shared widely among these societies. Now I'm not saying that our ancestors were noble savages, and I'm not saying modern day hunter-gatherers are noble savages either. What I'm saying is that this is simply the best way to mitigate risk in a foraging context. And there's really no argument about this among anthropologists. All Cacilda and I have done is extend this sharing behavior to sexuality. So we've argued that human sexuality has essentially evolved, until agriculture, as a way of establishing and maintaining the complex, flexible social systems, networks, that our ancestors were very good at, and that's why our species has survived so well. Now, this makes some people uncomfortable, and so I always need to take a moment in these talks to say, listen, I'm saying our ancestors were promiscuous, but I'm not saying they were having sex with strangers. There were no strangers. Right? In a hunter-gatherer band, there are no strangers. You've known these people your entire life. So I'm saying, yes, there were overlapping sexual relationships, that our ancestors probably had several different sexual relationships going on at any given moment in their adult lives. But I'm not saying they were having sex with strangers. I'm not saying that they didn't love the people they were having sex with. And I'm not saying there was no pair-bonding going on. I'm just saying it wasn't sexually exclusive. And those of us who have chosen to be monogamous -- my parents, for example, have been married for 00 years monogamously, and if it wasn't monogamously, Mom and Dad, I don't want to hear about it - I'm not criticizing this and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this. What I'm saying is that to argue that our ancestors were sexual omnivores is no more a criticism of monogamy than to argue that our ancestors were dietary omnivores is a criticism of vegetarianism. You can choose to be a vegetarian, but don't think that just because you've made that decision, bacon suddenly stops smelling good. Okay? So this is my point. (Laughter) That one took a minute to sink in, huh? Now, in addition to being a great genius, a wonderful man, a wonderful husband, a wonderful father, Charles Darwin was also a world-class Victorian prude. All right? He was perplexed by the sexual swellings of certain primates, including chimps and bonobos, because these sexual swellings tend to provoke many males to mate with the females. So he couldn't understand why on Earth would the female have developed this thing if all they were supposed to be doing is forming their pair bond, right? Chimps and bonobos, Darwin didn't really know this, but chimps and bonobos mate one to four times per hour with up to a dozen males per day when they have their sexual swellings. Interestingly, chimps have sexual swellings through 00 percent, roughly, of their menstrual cycle, bonobos 00 percent, and humans are among the only species on the planet where the female is available for sex throughout the menstrual cycle, whether she's menstruating, whether she's post-menopausal, whether she's already pregnant. This is vanishingly rare among mammals. So it's a very interesting aspect of human sexuality. Now, Darwin ignored the reflections of the sexual swelling in his own day, as scientists tend to do sometimes. So what we're talking about is sperm competition. Now the average human ejaculate has about 000 million sperm cells, so it's already a competitive environment. The question is whether these sperm are competing against other men's sperm or just their own. There's a lot to talk about in this chart. The one thing I'll call your attention to right away is the little musical note above the female chimp and bonobo and human. That indicates female copulatory vocalization. Just look at the numbers. The average human has sex about 0,000 times per birth. If that number seems high for some of you, I assure you it seems low for others in the room. We share that ratio with chimps and bonobos. We don't share it with the other three apes, the gorilla, the orangutan and the gibbon, who are more typical of mammals, having sex only about a dozen times per birth. Humans and bonobos are the only animals that have sex face-to-face when both of them are alive. (Laughter) And you'll see that the human, chimp and bonobo all have external testicles, which in our book we equate to a special fridge you have in the garage just for beer. If you're the kind of guy who has a beer fridge in the garage, you expect a party to happen at any moment, and you need to be ready. That's what the external testicles are. They keep the sperm cells cool so you can have frequent ejaculations. I'm sorry. It's true. The human, some of you will be happy to hear, has the largest, thickest penis of any primate. Now, this evidence goes way beyond anatomy. It goes into anthropology as well. Historical records are full of accounts of people around the world who have sexual practices that should be impossible given what we have assumed about human sexual evolution. These women are the Mosuo from southwestern China. In their society, everyone, men and women, are completely sexually autonomous. There's no shame associated with sexual behavior. Women have hundreds of partners. It doesn't matter. Nobody cares. Nobody gossips. It's not an issue. When the woman becomes pregnant, the child is cared for by her, her sisters, and her brothers. The biological father is a nonissue. On the other side of the planet, in the Amazon, we've got many tribes which practice what anthropologists call partible paternity. These people actually believe -- and they have no contact among them, no common language or anything, so it's not an idea that spread, it's an idea that's arisen around the world -- they believe that a fetus is literally made of accumulated semen. So a woman who wants to have a child who's smart and funny and strong makes sure she has lots of sex with the smart guy, the funny guy and the strong guy, to get the essence of each of these men into the baby, and then when the child is born, these different men will come forward and acknowledge their paternity of the child. So paternity is actually sort of a team endeavor in this society. So there are all sorts of examples like this that we go through in the book. Now, why does this matter? Edward Wilson says we need to understand that human sexuality is first a bonding device and only secondarily procreation. I think that's true. This matters because our evolved sexuality is in direct conflict with many aspects of the modern world. The contradictions between what we're told we should feel and what we actually do feel generates a huge amount of unnecessary suffering. My hope is that a more accurate, updated understanding of human sexuality will lead us to have greater tolerance for ourselves, for each other, greater respect for unconventional relationship configurations like same-sex marriage or polyamorous unions, and that we'll finally put to rest the idea that men have some innate, instinctive right to monitor and control women's sexual behavior. (Applause) Thank you. And we'll see that it's not only gay people that have to come out of the closet. We all have closets we have to come out of. Right? And when we do come out of those closets, we'll recognize that our fight is not with each other, our fight is with an outdated, Victorian sense of human sexuality that conflates desire with property rights, generates shame and confusion in place of understanding and empathy. It's time we moved beyond Mars and Venus, because the truth is that men are from Africa and women are from Africa. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you. Christopher Ryan: Thank you. CA: So a question. It's so perplexing, trying to use arguments about evolutionary history to turn that into what we ought to do today. Someone could give a talk and say, look at us, we've got these really sharp teeth and muscles and a brain that's really good at throwing weapons, and if you look at lots of societies around the world, you'll see very high rates of violence. Nonviolence is a choice like vegetarianism, but it's not who you are. How is that different from the talk you gave? CR: Well first of all, the evidence for high levels of violence in prehistory is very debatable. But that's just an example. Certainly, you know, lots of people say to me, just because we lived a certain way in the past doesn't mean we should live that way now, and I agree with that. Everyone has to respond to the modern world. But the body does have its inherent evolved trajectories. And so you could live on McDonald's and milkshakes, but your body will rebel against that. We have appetites. I think it was Schopenhauer who said, a person can do what they want but not want what they want. And so what I'm arguing against is the shame that's associated with desires. It's the idea that if you love your husband or wife but you still are attracted to other people, there's something wrong with you, there's something wrong with your marriage, something wrong with your partner. I think a lot of families are fractured by unrealistic expectations that are based upon this false vision of human sexuality. That's what I'm trying to get at. CA: Thank you. Communicated powerfully. Thanks a lot. CR: Thank you, Chris. (Applause)

What makes a great leader today? Many of us carry this image of this all-knowing superhero who stands and commands and protects his followers. But that's kind of an image from another time, and what's also outdated are the leadership development programs that are based on success models for a world that was, not a world that is or that is coming. We conducted a study of 0,000 companies, and we asked them, let's see the effectiveness of your leadership development programs. Fifty-eight percent of the companies cited significant talent gaps for critical leadership roles. That means that despite corporate training programs, off-sites, assessments, coaching, all of these things, more than half the companies had failed to grow enough great leaders. You may be asking yourself, is my company helping me to prepare to be a great 00st-century leader? The odds are, probably not. Now, I've spent 00 years of my professional life observing what makes great leaders. I've worked inside Fortune 000 companies, I've advised over 000 CEOs, and I've cultivated more leadership pipelines than you can imagine. But a few years ago, I noticed a disturbing trend in leadership preparation. I noticed that, despite all the efforts, there were familiar stories that kept resurfacing about individuals. One story was about Chris, a high-potential, superstar leader who moves to a new unit and fails, destroying unrecoverable value. And then there were stories like Sidney, the CEO, who was so frustrated because her company is cited as a best company for leaders, but only one of the top 00 leaders is equipped to lead their crucial initiatives. And then there were stories like the senior leadership team of a once-thriving business that's surprised by a market shift, finds itself having to force the company to reduce its size in half or go out of business. Now, these recurring stories cause me to ask two questions. Why are the leadership gaps widening when there's so much more investment in leadership development? And what are the great leaders doing distinctly different to thrive and grow? One of the things that I did, I was so consumed by these questions and also frustrated by those stories, that I left my job so that I could study this full time, and I took a year to travel to different parts of the world to learn about effective and ineffective leadership practices in companies, countries and nonprofit organizations. And so I did things like travel to South Africa, where I had an opportunity to understand how Nelson Mandela was ahead of his time in anticipating and navigating his political, social and economic context. I also met a number of nonprofit leaders who, despite very limited financial resources, were making a huge impact in the world, often bringing together seeming adversaries. And I spent countless hours in presidential libraries trying to understand how the environment had shaped the leaders, the moves that they made, and then the impact of those moves beyond their tenure. And then, when I returned to work full time, in this role, I joined with wonderful colleagues who were also interested in these questions. Now, from all this, I distilled the characteristics of leaders who are thriving and what they do differently, and then I also distilled the preparation practices that enable people to grow to their potential. I want to share some of those with you now. ("What makes a great leader in the 00st century?") In a 00st-century world, which is more global, digitally enabled and transparent, with faster speeds of information flow and innovation, and where nothing big gets done without some kind of a complex matrix, relying on traditional development practices will stunt your growth as a leader. In fact, traditional assessments like narrow 000 surveys or outdated performance criteria will give you false positives, lulling you into thinking that you are more prepared than you really are. Leadership in the 00st century is defined and evidenced by three questions. Where are you looking to anticipate the next change to your business model or your life? The answer to this question is on your calendar. Who are you spending time with? On what topics? Where are you traveling? What are you reading? And then how are you distilling this into understanding potential discontinuities, and then making a decision to do something right now so that you're prepared and ready? There's a leadership team that does a practice where they bring together each member collecting, here are trends that impact me, here are trends that impact another team member, and they share these, and then make decisions, to course-correct a strategy or to anticipate a new move. Great leaders are not head-down. They see around corners, shaping their future, not just reacting to it. The second question is, what is the diversity measure of your personal and professional stakeholder network? You know, we hear often about good ol' boy networks and they're certainly alive and well in many institutions. But to some extent, we all have a network of people that we're comfortable with. So this question is about your capacity to develop relationships with people that are very different than you. And those differences can be biological, physical, functional, political, cultural, socioeconomic. And yet, despite all these differences, they connect with you and they trust you enough to cooperate with you in achieving a shared goal. Great leaders understand that having a more diverse network is a source of pattern identification at greater levels and also of solutions, because you have people that are thinking differently than you are. Third question: are you courageous enough to abandon a practice that has made you successful in the past? There's an expression: Go along to get along. But if you follow this advice, chances are as a leader, you're going to keep doing what's familiar and comfortable. Great leaders dare to be different. They don't just talk about risk-taking, they actually do it. And one of the leaders shared with me the fact that the most impactful development comes when you are able to build the emotional stamina to withstand people telling you that your new idea is naïve or reckless or just plain stupid. Now interestingly, the people who will join you are not your usual suspects in your network. They're often people that think differently and therefore are willing to join you in taking a courageous leap. And it's a leap, not a step. More than traditional leadership programs, answering these three questions will determine your effectiveness as a 00st-century leader. So what makes a great leader in the 00st century? I've met many, and they stand out. They are women and men who are preparing themselves not for the comfortable predictability of yesterday but also for the realities of today and all of those unknown possibilities of tomorrow. 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 00 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 000 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 0D 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 0D, 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 0D 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)

What is love? It's a hard term to define in so far as it has a very wide application. I can love jogging. I can love a book, a movie. I can love escalopes. I can love my wife. (Laughter) But there's a great difference between an escalope and my wife, for instance. That is, if I value the escalope, the escalope, on the other hand, it doesn't value me back. Whereas my wife, she calls me the star of her life. (Laughter) Therefore, only another desiring conscience can conceive me as a desirable being. I know this, that's why love can be defined in a more accurate way as the desire of being desired. Hence the eternal problem of love: how to become and remain desirable? The individual used to find an answer to this problem by submitting his life to community rules. You had a specific part to play according to your sex, your age, your social status, and you only had to play your part to be valued and loved by the whole community. Think about the young woman who must remain chaste before marriage. Think about the youngest son who must obey the eldest son, who in turn must obey the patriarch. But a phenomenon started in the 00th century, mainly in the Renaissance, in the West, that caused the biggest identity crisis in the history of humankind. This phenomenon is modernity. We can basically summarize it through a triple process. First, a process of rationalization of scientific research, which has accelerated technical progress. Next, a process of political democratization, which has fostered individual rights. And finally, a process of rationalization of economic production and of trade liberalization. These three intertwined processes have completely annihilated all the traditional bearings of Western societies, with radical consequences for the individual. Now individuals are free to value or disvalue any attitude, any choice, any object. But as a result, they are themselves confronted with this same freedom that others have to value or disvalue them. In other words, my value was once ensured by submitting myself to the traditional authorities. Now it is quoted in the stock exchange. On the free market of individual desires, I negotiate my value every day. Hence the anxiety of contemporary man. He is obsessed: "Am I desirable? How desirable? How many people are going to love me?" And how does he respond to this anxiety? Well, by hysterically collecting symbols of desirability. (Laughter) I call this act of collecting, along with others, seduction capital. Indeed, our consumer society is largely based on seduction capital. It is said about this consumption that our age is materialistic. But it's not true! We only accumulate objects in order to communicate with other minds. We do it to make them love us, to seduce them. Nothing could be less materialistic, or more sentimental, than a teenager buying brand new jeans and tearing them at the knees, because he wants to please Jennifer. (Laughter) Consumerism is not materialism. It is rather what is swallowed up and sacrificed in the name of the god of love, or rather in the name of seduction capital. In light of this observation on contemporary love, how can we think of love in the years to come? We can envision two hypotheses: The first one consists of betting that this process of narcissistic capitalization will intensify. It is hard to say what shape this intensification will take, because it largely depends on social and technical innovations, which are by definition difficult to predict. But we can, for instance, imagine a dating website which, a bit like those loyalty points programs, uses seduction capital points that vary according to my age, my height/weight ratio, my degree, my salary, or the number of clicks on my profile. We can also imagine a chemical treatment for breakups that weakens the feelings of attachment. By the way, there's a program on MTV already in which seduction teachers treat heartache as a disease. These teachers call themselves "pick-up artists." "Artist" in French is easy, it means "artiste." "Pick-up" is to pick someone up, but not just any picking up -- it's picking up chicks. So they are artists of picking up chicks. (Laughter) And they call heartache "one-itis." In English, "itis" is a suffix that signifies infection. One-itis can be translated as "an infection from one." It's a bit disgusting. Indeed, for the pick-up artists, falling in love with someone is a waste of time, it's squandering your seduction capital, so it must be eliminated like a disease, like an infection. We can also envision a romantic use of the genome. Everyone would carry it around and present it like a business card to verify if seduction can progress to reproduction. (Laughter) Of course, this race for seduction, like every fierce competition, will create huge disparities in narcissistic satisfaction, and therefore a lot of loneliness and frustration too. So we can expect that modernity itself, which is the origin of seduction capital, would be called into question. I'm thinking particularly of the reaction of neo-fascist or religious communes. But such a future doesn't have to be. Another path to thinking about love may be possible. But how? How to renounce the hysterical need to be valued? Well, by becoming aware of my uselessness. (Laughter) Yes, I'm useless. But rest assured: so are you. (Laughter) (Applause) We are all useless. This uselessness is easily demonstrated, because in order to be valued I need another to desire me, which shows that I do not have any value of my own. I don't have any inherent value. We all pretend to have an idol; we all pretend to be an idol for someone else, but actually we are all impostors, a bit like a man on the street who appears totally cool and indifferent, while he has actually anticipated and calculated so that all eyes are on him. I think that becoming aware of this general imposture that concerns all of us would ease our love relationships. It is because I want to be loved from head to toe, justified in my every choice, that the seduction hysteria exists. And therefore I want to seem perfect so that another can love me. I want them to be perfect so that I can be reassured of my value. It leads to couples obsessed with performance who will break up, just like that, at the slightest underachievement. In contrast to this attitude, I call upon tenderness -- love as tenderness. What is tenderness? To be tender is to accept the loved one's weaknesses. It's not about becoming a sad couple of orderlies. (Laughter) That's pretty bad. On the contrary, there's plenty of charm and happiness in tenderness. I refer specifically to a kind of humor that is unfortunately underused. It is a sort of poetry of deliberate awkwardness. I refer to self-mockery. For a couple who is no longer sustained, supported by the constraints of tradition, I believe that self-mockery is one of the best means for the relationship to endure.

I'd like to talk today about a powerful and fundamental aspect of who we are: our voice. Each one of us has a unique voiceprint that reflects our age, our size, even our lifestyle and personality. In the words of the poet Longfellow, "the human voice is the organ of the soul." As a speech scientist, I'm fascinated by how the voice is produced, and I have an idea for how it can be engineered. That's what I'd like to share with you. I'm going to start by playing you a sample of a voice that you may recognize. (Recording) Stephen Hawking: "I would have thought it was fairly obvious what I meant." Rupal Patel: That was the voice of Professor Stephen Hawking. What you may not know is that same voice may also be used by this little girl who is unable to speak because of a neurological condition. In fact, all of these individuals may be using the same voice, and that's because there's only a few options available. In the U.S. alone, there are 0.0 million Americans who are unable to speak, and many of whom use computerized devices to communicate. Now that's millions of people worldwide who are using generic voices, including Professor Hawking, who uses an American-accented voice. This lack of individuation of the synthetic voice really hit home when I was at an assistive technology conference a few years ago, and I recall walking into an exhibit hall and seeing a little girl and a grown man having a conversation using their devices, different devices, but the same voice. And I looked around and I saw this happening all around me, literally hundreds of individuals using a handful of voices, voices that didn't fit their bodies or their personalities. We wouldn't dream of fitting a little girl with the prosthetic limb of a grown man. So why then the same prosthetic voice? It really struck me, and I wanted to do something about this. I'm going to play you now a sample of someone who has, two people actually, who have severe speech disorders. I want you to take a listen to how they sound. They're saying the same utterance. (First voice) (Second voice) You probably didn't understand what they said, but I hope that you heard their unique vocal identities. So what I wanted to do next is, I wanted to find out how we could harness these residual vocal abilities and build a technology that could be customized for them, voices that could be customized for them. So I reached out to my collaborator, Tim Bunnell. Dr. Bunnell is an expert in speech synthesis, and what he'd been doing is building personalized voices for people by putting together pre-recorded samples of their voice and reconstructing a voice for them. These are people who had lost their voice later in life. We didn't have the luxury of pre-recorded samples of speech for those born with speech disorder. But I thought, there had to be a way to reverse engineer a voice from whatever little is left over. So we decided to do exactly that. We set out with a little bit of funding from the National Science Foundation, to create custom-crafted voices that captured their unique vocal identities. We call this project VocaliD, or vocal I.D., for vocal identity. Now before I get into the details of how the voice is made and let you listen to it, I need to give you a real quick speech science lesson. Okay? So first, we know that the voice is changing dramatically over the course of development. Children sound different from teens who sound different from adults. We've all experienced this. Fact number two is that speech is a combination of the source, which is the vibrations generated by your voice box, which are then pushed through the rest of the vocal tract. These are the chambers of your head and neck that vibrate, and they actually filter that source sound to produce consonants and vowels. So the combination of source and filter is how we produce speech. And that happens in one individual. Now I told you earlier that I'd spent a good part of my career understanding and studying the source characteristics of people with severe speech disorder, and what I've found is that even though their filters were impaired, they were able to modulate their source: the pitch, the loudness, the tempo of their voice. These are called prosody, and I've been documenting for years that the prosodic abilities of these individuals are preserved. So when I realized that those same cues are also important for speaker identity, I had this idea. Why don't we take the source from the person we want the voice to sound like, because it's preserved, and borrow the filter from someone about the same age and size, because they can articulate speech, and then mix them? Because when we mix them, we can get a voice that's as clear as our surrogate talker -- that's the person we borrowed the filter from - and is similar in identity to our target talker. It's that simple. That's the science behind what we're doing. So once you have that in mind, how do you go about building this voice? Well, you have to find someone who is willing to be a surrogate. It's not such an ominous thing. Being a surrogate donor only requires you to say a few hundred to a few thousand utterances. The process goes something like this. (Video) Voice: Things happen in pairs. I love to sleep. The sky is blue without clouds. RP: Now she's going to go on like this for about three to four hours, and the idea is not for her to say everything that the target is going to want to say, but the idea is to cover all the different combinations of the sounds that occur in the language. The more speech you have, the better sounding voice you're going to have. Once you have those recordings, what we need to do is we have to parse these recordings into little snippets of speech, one- or two-sound combinations, sometimes even whole words that start populating a dataset or a database. We're going to call this database a voice bank. Now the power of the voice bank is that from this voice bank, we can now say any new utterance, like, "I love chocolate" -- everyone needs to be able to say that - fish through that database and find all the segments necessary to say that utterance. (Video) Voice: I love chocolate. RP: So that's speech synthesis. It's called concatenative synthesis, and that's what we're using. That's not the novel part. What's novel is how we make it sound like this young woman. This is Samantha. I met her when she was nine, and since then, my team and I have been trying to build her a personalized voice. We first had to find a surrogate donor, and then we had to have Samantha produce some utterances. What she can produce are mostly vowel-like sounds, but that's enough for us to extract her source characteristics. What happens next is best described by my daughter's analogy. She's six. She calls it mixing colors to paint voices. It's beautiful. It's exactly that. Samantha's voice is like a concentrated sample of red food dye which we can infuse into the recordings of her surrogate to get a pink voice just like this. (Video) Samantha: Aaaaaah. RP: So now, Samantha can say this. (Video) Samantha: This voice is only for me. I can't wait to use my new voice with my friends. RP: Thank you. (Applause) I'll never forget the gentle smile that spread across her face when she heard that voice for the first time. Now there's millions of people around the world like Samantha, millions, and we've only begun to scratch the surface. What we've done so far is we have a few surrogate talkers from around the U.S. who have donated their voices, and we have been using those to build our first few personalized voices. But there's so much more work to be done. For Samantha, her surrogate came from somewhere in the Midwest, a stranger who gave her the gift of voice. And as a scientist, I'm so excited to take this work out of the laboratory and finally into the real world so it can have real-world impact. What I want to share with you next is how I envision taking this work to that next level. I imagine a whole world of surrogate donors from all walks of life, different sizes, different ages, coming together in this voice drive to give people voices that are as colorful as their personalities. To do that as a first step, we've put together this website, VocaliD.org, as a way to bring together those who want to join us as voice donors, as expertise donors, in whatever way to make this vision a reality. They say that giving blood can save lives. Well, giving your voice can change lives. All we need is a few hours of speech from our surrogate talker, and as little as a vowel from our target talker, to create a unique vocal identity. So that's the science behind what we're doing. I want to end by circling back to the human side that is really the inspiration for this work. About five years ago, we built our very first voice for a little boy named William. When his mom first heard this voice, she said, "This is what William would have sounded like had he been able to speak." And then I saw William typing a message on his device. I wondered, what was he thinking? Imagine carrying around someone else's voice for nine years and finally finding your own voice. Imagine that. This is what William said: "Never heard me before." Thank you. (Applause)

The world is changing in some really profound ways, and I worry that investors aren't paying enough attention to some of the biggest drivers of change, especially when it comes to sustainability. And by sustainability, I mean the really juicy things, like environmental and social issues and corporate governance. I think it's reckless to ignore these things, because doing so can jeopardize future long-term returns. And here's something that may surprise you: the balance of power to really influence sustainability rests with institutional investors, the large investors like pension funds, foundations and endowments. I believe that sustainable investing is less complicated than you think, better-performing than you believe, and more important than we can imagine. Let me remind you what we already know. We have a population that's both growing and aging; we have seven billion souls today heading to 00 billion at the end of the century; we consume natural resources faster than they can be replenished; and the emissions that are mainly responsible for climate change just keep increasing. Now clearly, these are environmental and social issues, but that's not all. They're economic issues, and that makes them relevant to risk and return. And they are really complex and they can seem really far off, that the temptation may be to do this: bury our heads in the sand and not think about it. Resist this, if you can. Don't do this at home. (Laughter) But it makes me wonder if the investment rules of today are fit for purpose tomorrow. We know that investors, when they look at a company and decide whether to invest, they look at financial data, metrics like sales growth, cash flow, market share, valuation -- you know, the really sexy stuff. And these things are fundamental, of course, but they're not enough. Investors should also look at performance metrics in what we call ESG: environment, social and governance. Environment includes energy consumption, water availability, waste and pollution, just making efficient uses of resources. Social includes human capital, things like employee engagement and innovation capacity, as well as supply chain management and labor rights and human rights. And governance relates to the oversight of companies by their boards and investors. See, I told you this is the really juicy stuff. But ESG is the measure of sustainability, and sustainable investing incorporates ESG factors with financial factors into the investment process. It means limiting future risk by minimizing harm to people and planet, and it means providing capital to users who deploy it towards productive and sustainable outcomes. So if sustainability matters financially today, and all signs indicate more tomorrow, is the private sector paying attention? Well, the really cool thing is that most CEOs are. They started to see sustainability not just as important but crucial to business success. About 00 percent of global CEOs see sustainability as the root to growth in innovation and leading to competitive advantage in their industries. But 00 percent see ESG as the future, or as important to the future of their business. So the views of CEOs are clear. There's tremendous opportunity in sustainability. So how are companies actually leveraging ESG to drive hard business results? One example is near and dear to our hearts. In 0000, State Street migrated 00 applications to the cloud environment, and we retired another 00. We virtualized our operating system environments, and we completed numerous automation projects. Now these initiatives create a more mobile workplace, and they reduce our real estate footprint, and they yield savings of 00 million dollars in operating costs annually, and avoid the emissions of a 000,000 metric tons of carbon. That's the equivalent of taking 00,000 cars off the road. So awesome, right? Another example is Pentair. Pentair is a U.S. industrial conglomerate, and about a decade ago, they sold their core power tools business and reinvested those proceeds in a water business. That's a really big bet. Why did they do that? Well, with apologies to the Home Improvement fans, there's more growth in water than in power tools, and this company has their sights set on what they call "the new New World." That's four billion middle class people demanding food, energy and water. Now, you may be asking yourself, are these just isolated cases? I mean, come on, really? Do companies that take sustainability into account really do well financially? The answer that may surprise you is yes. The data shows that stocks with better ESG performance perform just as well as others. In blue, we see the MSCI World. It's an index of large companies from developed markets across the world. And in gold, we see a subset of companies rated as having the best ESG performance. Over three plus years, no performance tradeoff. So that's okay, right? We want more. I want more. In some cases, there may be outperformance from ESG. In blue, we see the performance of the 000 largest global companies, and in gold, we see a subset of companies with best practice in climate change strategy and risk management. Now over almost eight years, they've outperformed by about two thirds. So yes, this is correlation. It's not causation. But it does illustrate that environmental leadership is compatible with good returns. So if the returns are the same or better and the planet benefits, wouldn't this be the norm? Are investors, particularly institutional investors, engaged? Well, some are, and a few are really at the vanguard. Hesta. Hesta is a retirement fund for health and community services employees in Australia, with assets of 00 billion [dollars]. They believe that ESG has the potential to impact risks and returns, so incorporating it into the investment process is core to their duty to act in the best interest of fund members, core to their duty. You gotta love the Aussies, right? CalPERS is another example. CalPERS is the pension fund for public employees in California, and with assets of 000 billion [dollars], they are the second largest in the U.S. and the sixth largest in the world. Now, they're moving toward 000 percent sustainable investment by systematically integrated ESG across the entire fund. Why? They believe it's critical to superior long-term returns, full stop. In their own words, "long-term value creation requires the effective management of three forms of capital: financial, human, and physical. This is why we are concerned with ESG." Now, I do speak to a lot of investors as part of my job, and not all of them see it this way. Often I hear, "We are required to maximize returns, so we don't do that here," or, "We don't want to use the portfolio to make policy statements." The one that just really gets under my skin is, "If you want to do something about that, just make money, give the profits to charities." It's eyes rolling, eyes rolling. I mean, let me clarify something right here. Companies and investors are not singularly responsible for the fate of the planet. They don't have indefinite social obligations, and prudent investing and finance theory aren't subordinate to sustainability. They're compatible. So I'm not talking about tradeoffs here. But institutional investors are the x-factor in sustainability. Why do they hold the key? The answer, quite simply, is, they have the money. (Laughter) A lot of it. I mean, a really lot of it. The global stock market is worth 00 trillion dollars. The global bond market, 00 trillion. That's 000 trillion combined. That's eight and a half times the GDP of the U.S. That's the world's largest economy. That's some serious freaking firepower. So we can reconsider some of these pressing challenges, like fresh water, clean air, feeding 00 billion mouths, if institutional investors integrated ESG into investment. What if they used that firepower to allocate more of their capital to companies working the hardest at solving these challenges or at least not exacerbating them? What if we work and save and invest, only to find that the world we retire into is more stressed and less secure than it is now? What if there isn't enough clean air and fresh water? Now a fair question might be, what if all this sustainability risk stuff is exaggerated, overstated, it's not urgent, something for virtuous consumers or lifestyle choice? Well, President John F. Kennedy said something about this that is just spot on: "There are risks and costs to a program of action, but they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction." I can appreciate that there is estimation risk in this, but since this is based on widespread scientific consensus, the odds that it's not completely wrong are better than the odds that our house will burn down or we'll get in a car accident. Well, maybe not if you live in Boston. (Laughter) But my point is that we buy insurance to protect ourselves financially in case those things happen, right? So by investing sustainably we're doing two things. We're creating insurance, reducing the risk to our planet and to our economy, and at the same time, in the short term, we're not sacrificing performance. [Man in comic: "What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?"] Good, you like it. I like it too. (Laughter) I like it because it pokes fun at both sides of the climate change issue. I bet you can't guess which side I'm on. But what I really like about it is that it reminds me of something Mark Twain said, which is, "Plan for the future, because that's where you're going to spend the rest of your life." Thank you. (Applause)

So imagine, you're in the supermarket, you're buying some groceries, and you get given the option for a plastic or a paper shopping bag. Which one do you choose if you want to do the right thing by the environment? Most people do pick the paper. Okay, let's think of why. It's brown to start with. Therefore, it must be good for the environment. It's biodegradable. It's reusable. In some cases, it's recyclable. So when people are looking at the plastic bag, it's likely they're thinking of something like this, which we all know is absolutely terrible, and we should be avoiding at all expenses these kinds of environmental damages. But people are often not thinking of something like this, which is the other end of the spectrum. When we produce materials, we need to extract them from the environment, and we need a whole bunch of environmental impacts. You see, what happens is, when we need to make complex choices, us humans like really simple solutions, and so we often ask for simple solutions. And I work in design. I advise designers and innovators around sustainability, and everyone always says to me, "Oh Leyla, I just want the eco-materials." And I say, "Well, that's very complex, and we'll have to spend four hours talking about what exactly an eco-material means, because everything at some point comes from nature, and it's how you use the material that dictates the environmental impact. So what happens is, we have to rely on some sort of intuitive framework when we make decisions. So I like to call that intuitive framework our environmental folklore. It's either the little voice at the back of your head, or it's that gut feeling you get when you've done the right thing, so when you've picked the paper bag or when you've bought a fuel-efficient car. And environmental folklore is a really important thing because we're trying to do the right thing. But how do we know if we're actually reducing the net environmental impacts that our actions as individuals and as professionals and as a society are actually having on the natural environment? So the thing about environmental folklore is it tends to be based on our experiences, the things we've heard from other people. It doesn't tend to be based on any scientific framework. And this is really hard, because we live in incredibly complex systems. We have the human systems of how we communicate and interrelate and have our whole constructed society, We have the industrial systems, which is essentially the entire economy, and then all of that has to operate within the biggest system, and, I would argue, the most important, the ecosystem. And you see, the choices that we make as an individual, but the choices that we make in every single job that we have, no matter how high or low you are in the pecking order, has an impact on all of these systems. And the thing is that we have to find ways if we're actually going to address sustainability of interlocking those complex systems and making better choices that result in net environmental gains. What we need to do is we need to learn to do more with less. We have an increasing population, and everybody likes their mobile phones, especially in this situation here. So we need to find innovative ways of solving some of these problems that we face. And that's where this process called life cycle thinking comes in. So essentially, everything that is created goes through a series of life cycle stages, and we use this scientific process called life cycle assessment, or in America, you guys say life cycle analysis, in order to have a clearer picture of how everything that we do in the technical part of those systems affects the natural environment. So we go all the way back to the extraction of raw materials, and then we look at manufacturing, we look at packaging and transportation, use, and end of life, and at every single one of these stages, the things that we do have an interaction with the natural environment, and we can monitor how that interaction is actually affecting the systems and services that make life on Earth possible. And through doing this, we've learned some absolutely fascinating things. And we've busted a bunch of myths. So to start with, there's a word that's used a lot. It's used a lot in marketing, and it's used a lot, I think, in our conversation when we're talking about sustainability, and that's the word biodegradability. Now biodegradability is a material property; it is not a definition of environmental benefits. Allow me to explain. When something natural, something that's made from a cellulose fiber like a piece of bread, even, or any food waste, or even a piece of paper, when something natural ends up in the natural environment, it degrades normally. Its little carbon molecules that it stored up as it was growing are naturally released back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, but this is a net situation. Most natural things don't actually end up in nature. Most of the things, the waste that we produce, end up in landfill. Landfill is a different environment. In landfill, those same carbon molecules degrade in a different way, because a landfill is anaerobic. It's got no oxygen. It's tightly compacted and hot. Those same molecules, they become methane, and methane is a 00 times more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So our old lettuces and products that we have thrown out that are made out of biodegradable materials, if they end up in landfill, contribute to climate change. You see, there are facilities now that can actually capture that methane and generate power, displacing the need for fossil fuel power, but we need to be smart about this. We need to identify how we can start to leverage these types of things that are already happening and start to design systems and services that alleviate these problems. Because right now, what people do is they turn around and they say, "Let's ban plastic bags. We'll give people paper because that is better for the environment." But if you're throwing it in the bin, and your local landfill facility is just a normal one, then we're having what's called a double negative. I'm a product designer by trade. I then did social science. And so I'm absolutely fascinated by consumer goods and how the consumer goods that we have kind of become immune to that fill our lives have an impact on the natural environment. And these guys are, like, serial offenders, and I'm pretty sure everyone in this room has a refrigerator. Now America has this amazing ability to keep growing refrigerators. In the last few years, they've grown one cubic foot on average, the standard size of a refrigerator. And the problem is, they're so big now, it's easier for us to buy more food that we can't eat or find. I mean, I have things at the back of my refrigerator that have been there for years, all right? And so what happens is, we waste more food. And as I was just explaining, food waste is a problem. In fact, here in the U.S., 00 percent of food purchased for the home is wasted. Half of the world's produced food is wasted. That's the latest U.N. stats. Up to half of the food. It's insane. It's 0.0 billion tons of food per annum. And I blame it on the refrigerator, well, especially in Western cultures, because it makes it easier. I mean, there's a lot of complex systems going on here. I don't want to make it so simplistic. But the refrigerator is a serious contributor to this, and one of the features of it is the crisper drawer. You all got crisper drawers? The drawer that you put your lettuces in? Lettuces have a habit of going soggy in the crisper drawers, don't they? Yeah? Soggy lettuces? In the U.K., this is such a problem that there was a government report a few years ago that actually said the second biggest offender of wasted food in the U.K. is the soggy lettuce. It was called the Soggy Lettuce Report. Okay? So this is a problem, people. These poor little lettuces are getting thrown out left, right and center because the crisper drawers are not designed to actually keep things crisp. Okay. You need a tight environment. You need, like, an airless environment to prevent the degrading that would happen naturally. But the crisper drawers, they're just a drawer with a slightly better seal. Anyway, I'm clearly obsessed. Don't ever invite me over because I'll just start going through your refrigerator and looking at all sorts of things like that. But essentially, this is a big problem. Because when we lose something like the lettuce from the system, not only do we have that impact I just explained at the end of life, but we actually have had to grow that lettuce. The life cycle impact of that lettuce is astronomical. We've had to clear land. We've had to plant seeds, phosphorus, fertilizers, nutrients, water, sunlight. All of the embodied impacts in that lettuce get lost from the system, which makes it a far bigger environmental impact than the loss of the energy from the fridge. So we need to design things like this far better if we're going to start addressing serious environmental problems. We could start with the crisper drawer and the size. For those of you in the room who do design fridges, that would be great. The problem is, imagine if we actually started to reconsider how we designed things. So I look at the refrigerator as a sign of modernity, but we actually haven't really changed the design of them that much since the 0000s. A little bit, but essentially they're still big boxes, cold boxes that we store stuff in. So imagine if we actually really started to identify these problems and use that as the foundation for finding innovative and elegant design solutions that will solve those problems. This is design-led system change, design dictating the way in which the system can be far more sustainable. Forty percent food waste is a major problem. Imagine if we designed fridges that halved that. Another item that I find fascinating is the electric tea kettle, which I found out that you don't do tea kettles in this country, really, do you? But that's really big in the U.K. Ninety-seven percent of households in the United Kingdom own an electric tea kettle. So they're very popular. And, I mean, if I were to work with a design firm or a designer, and they were designing one of these, and they wanted to do it eco, they'd usually ask me two things. They'd say, "Leyla, how do I make it technically efficient?" Because obviously energy's a problem with this product. Or, "How do I make it green materials? How do I make the materials green in the manufacturing?" Would you ask me those questions? They seem logical, right? Yeah. Well I'd say, "You're looking at the wrong problems." Because the problem is with use. It's with how people use the product. Sixty-five percent of Brits admit to over-filling their kettle when they only need one cup of tea. All of this extra water that's being boiled requires energy, and it's been calculated that in one day of extra energy use from boiling kettles is enough to light all of the streetlights in England for a night. But this is the thing. This is what I call a product-person failure. But we've got a product-system failure going on with these little guys, and they're so ubiquitous, you don't even notice they're there. And this guy over here, though, he does. He's named Simon. Simon works for the national electricity company in the U.K. He has a very important job of monitoring all of the electricity coming into the system to make sure there is enough so it powers everybody's homes. He's also watching television. The reason is because there's a unique phenomenon that happens in the U.K. the moment that very popular TV shows end. The minute the ad break comes on, this man has to rush to buy nuclear power from France, because everybody turns their kettles on at the same time. (Laughter) 0.0 million kettles, seriously problematic. So imagine if you designed kettles, you actually found a way to solve these system failures, because this is a huge amount of pressure on the system, just because the product hasn't thought about the problem that it's going to have when it exists in the world. Now, I looked at a number of kettles available on the market, and found the minimum fill lines, so the little piece of information that tells you how much you need to put in there, was between two and a five-and-a-half cups of water just to make one cup of tea. So this kettle here is an example of one where it actually has two reservoirs. One's a boiling chamber, and one's the water holder. The user actually has to push that button to get their hot water boiled, which means, because we're all lazy, you only fill exactly what you need. And this is what I call behavior-changing products: products, systems or services that intervene and solve these problems up front. Now, this is a technology arena, so obviously these things are quite popular, but I think if we're going to keep designing, buying and using and throwing out these kinds of products at the rate we currently do, which is astronomically high, there are seven billion people who live in the world right now. There are six billion mobile phone subscriptions as of last year. Every single year, 0.0 billion mobile phones roll off production lines, and some companies report their production rate as being greater than the human birth rate. One hundred fifty-two million phones were thrown out in the U.S. last year; only 00 percent were recycled. I'm from Australia. We have a population of 00 million -- don't laugh -- and it's been reported that 00 million phones are in people's drawers. We need to find ways of solving the problems around this, because these things are so complicated. They have so much locked up inside them. Gold! Did you know that it's actually cheaper now to get gold out of a ton of old mobile phones than it is out of a ton of gold ore? There's a number of highly complex and valuable materials embodied inside these things, so we need to find ways of encouraging disassembly, because this is otherwise what happens. This is a community in Ghana, and e-waste is reported, or electronic waste is reported by the U.N. as being up to 00 million tons trafficked. This is how they get the gold and the other valuable materials out. They burn the electronic waste in open spaces. These are communities, and this is happening all over the world. And because we don't see the ramifications of the choices that we make as designers, as businesspeople, as consumers, then these kinds of externalities happen, and these are people's lives. So we need to find smarter, more systems-based, innovative solutions to these problems, if we're going to start to live sustainably within this world. So imagine if, when you bought your mobile phone, your new one because you replaced your old one -- after 00 to 00 months is the average time that people replace their phones, by the way - so if we're going to keep this kind of expedient mobile phone replacing, then we should be looking at closing the loop on these systems. The people who produce these phones, and some of which I'm sure are in the room right now, could potentially look at doing what we call closed-loop systems, or product system services, so identifying that there is a market demand and that market demand's not going to go anywhere, so you design the product to solve the problem. Design for disassembly, design for light-weighting. We heard some of those kinds of strategies being used in the Tesla Motors car today. These kinds of approaches are not hard, but understanding the system and then looking for viable, market-driven consumer demand alternatives is how we can start radically altering the sustainability agenda, because I hate to break it to you all: Consumption is the biggest problem. But design is one of the best solutions. These kinds of products are everywhere. By identifying alternative ways of doing things, we can actually start to innovate, and I say actually start to innovate. I'm sure everyone in this room is very innovative. But in the regards to using sustainability as a parameter, as a criteria for fueling systems-based solutions, because as I've just demonstrated with these simple products, they're participating in these major problems. So we need to look across the entire life of the things that we do. If you just had paper or plastic -- obviously reusable is far more beneficial -- then the paper is worse, and the paper is worse because it weighs four to 00 times more than the plastic, and when we actually compare, from a life cycle perspective, a kilo of plastic and a kilo of paper, the paper is far better, but the functionality of a plastic or a paper bag to carry your groceries home is not done with a kilo of each material. It's done with a very small amount of plastic and quite a lot more paper. Because functionality defines environmental impact, and I said earlier that the designers always ask me for the eco-materials. I say, there's only a few materials that you should completely avoid. The rest of them, it's all about application, and at the end of the day, everything we design and produce in the economy or buy as consumers is done so for function. We want something, therefore we buy it. So breaking things back down and delivering smartly, elegantly, sophisticated solutions that take into consideration the entire system and the entire life of the thing, everything, all the way back to the extraction through to the end of life, we can start to actually find really innovative solutions. And I'll just leave you with one very quick thing that a designer said to me recently who I work with, a senior designer. I said, "How come you're not doing sustainability? I know you know this." And he said, "Well, recently I pitched a sustainability project to a client, and turned and he said to me, 'I know it's going to cost less, I know it's going to sell more, but we're not pioneers, because pioneers have arrows in their backs.'" I think we've got a roomful of pioneers, and I hope there are far more pioneers out there, because we need to solve these problems. Thank you. (Applause)

I'd like to start, if I may, with the story of the Paisley snail. On the evening of the 00th of August, 0000, May Donoghue took a train from Glasgow to the town of Paisley, seven miles east of the city, and there at the Wellmeadow Café, she had a Scots ice cream float, a mix of ice cream and ginger beer bought for her by a friend. The ginger beer came in a brown, opaque bottle labeled "D. Stevenson, Glen Lane, Paisley." She drank some of the ice cream float, but as the remaining ginger beer was poured into her tumbler, a decomposed snail floated to the surface of her glass. Three days later, she was admitted to the Glasgow Royal Infirmary and diagnosed with severe gastroenteritis and shock. The case of Donoghue vs. Stevenson that followed set a very important legal precedent: Stevenson, the manufacturer of the ginger beer, was held to have a clear duty of care towards May Donoghue, even though there was no contract between them, and, indeed, she hadn't even bought the drink. One of the judges, Lord Atkin, described it like this: You must take care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonably foresee would be likely to injure your neighbor. Indeed, one wonders that without a duty of care, how many people would have had to suffer from gastroenteritis before Stevenson eventually went out of business. Now please hang on to that Paisley snail story, because it's an important principle. Last year, the Hansard Society, a nonpartisan charity which seeks to strengthen parliamentary democracy and encourage greater public involvement in politics published, alongside their annual audit of political engagement, an additional section devoted entirely to politics and the media. Here are a couple of rather depressing observations from that survey. Tabloid newspapers do not appear to advance the political citizenship of their readers, relative even to those who read no newspapers whatsoever. Tabloid-only readers are twice as likely to agree with a negative view of politics than readers of no newspapers. They're not just less politically engaged. They are consuming media that reinforces their negative evaluation of politics, thereby contributing to a fatalistic and cynical attitude to democracy and their own role within it. Little wonder that the report concluded that in this respect, the press, particularly the tabloids, appear not to be living up to the importance of their role in our democracy. Now I doubt if anyone in this room would seriously challenge that view. But if Hansard are right, and they usually are, then we've got a very serious problem on our hands, and it's one that I'd like to spend the next 00 minutes focusing upon. Since the Paisley snail, and especially over the past decade or so, a great deal of thinking has been developed around the notion of a duty of care as it relates to a number of aspects of civil society. Generally a duty of care arises when one individual or a group of individuals undertakes an activity which has the potential to cause harm to another, either physically, mentally or economically. This is principally focused on obvious areas, such as our empathetic response to children and young people, to our service personnel, and to the elderly and infirm. It is seldom, if ever, extended to equally important arguments around the fragility of our present system of government, to the notion that honesty, accuracy and impartiality are fundamental to the process of building and embedding an informed, participatory democracy. And the more you think about it, the stranger that is. A couple of years ago, I had the pleasure of opening a brand new school in the northeast of England. It had been renamed by its pupils as Academy 000. As I walked through their impressive, glass-covered atrium, in front of me, emblazoned on the wall in letters of fire was Marcus Aurelius's famous injunction: If it's not true, don't say it; if it's not right, don't do it. The head teacher saw me staring at it, and he said, "Oh, that's our school motto." On the train back to London, I couldn't get it out of my mind. I kept thinking, can it really have taken us over 0,000 years to come to terms with that simple notion as being our minimum expectation of each other? Isn't it time that we develop this concept of a duty of care and extended it to include a care for our shared but increasingly endangered democratic values? After all, the absence of a duty of care within many professions can all too easily amount to accusations of negligence, and that being the case, can we be really comfortable with the thought that we're in effect being negligent in respect of the health of our own societies and the values that necessarily underpin them? Could anyone honestly suggest, on the evidence, that the same media which Hansard so roundly condemned have taken sufficient care to avoid behaving in ways which they could reasonably have foreseen would be likely to undermine or even damage our inherently fragile democratic settlement. Now there will be those who will argue that this could all too easily drift into a form of censorship, albeit self-censorship, but I don't buy that argument. It has to be possible to balance freedom of expression with wider moral and social responsibilities. Let me explain why by taking the example from my own career as a filmmaker. Throughout that career, I never accepted that a filmmaker should set about putting their own work outside or above what he or she believed to be a decent set of values for their own life, their own family, and the future of the society in which we all live. I'd go further. A responsible filmmaker should never devalue their work to a point at which it becomes less than true to the world they themselves wish to inhabit. As I see it, filmmakers, journalists, even bloggers are all required to face up to the social expectations that come with combining the intrinsic power of their medium with their well-honed professional skills. Obviously this is not a mandated duty, but for the gifted filmmaker and the responsible journalist or even blogger, it strikes me as being utterly inescapable. We should always remember that our notion of individual freedom and its partner, creative freedom, is comparatively new in the history of Western ideas, and for that reason, it's often undervalued and can be very quickly undermined. It's a prize easily lost, and once lost, once surrendered, it can prove very, very hard to reclaim. And its first line of defense has to be our own standards, not those enforced on us by a censor or legislation, our own standards and our own integrity. Our integrity as we deal with those with whom we work and our own standards as we operate within society. And these standards of ours need to be all of a piece with a sustainable social agenda. They're part of a collective responsibility, the responsibility of the artist or the journalist to deal with the world as it really is, and this, in turn, must go hand in hand with the responsibility of those governing society to also face up to that world, and not to be tempted to misappropriate the causes of its ills. Yet, as has become strikingly clear over the last couple of years, such responsibility has to a very great extent been abrogated by large sections of the media. And as a consequence, across the Western world, the over-simplistic policies of the parties of protest and their appeal to a largely disillusioned, older demographic, along with the apathy and obsession with the trivial that typifies at least some of the young, taken together, these and other similarly contemporary aberrations are threatening to squeeze the life out of active, informed debate and engagement, and I stress active. The most ardent of libertarians might argue that Donoghue v. Stevenson should have been thrown out of court and that Stevenson would eventually have gone out of business if he'd continued to sell ginger beer with snails in it. But most of us, I think, accept some small role for the state to enforce a duty of care, and the key word here is reasonable. Judges must ask, did they take reasonable care and could they have reasonably foreseen the consequences of their actions? Far from signifying overbearing state power, it's that small common sense test of reasonableness that I'd like us to apply to those in the media who, after all, set the tone and the content for much of our democratic discourse. Democracy, in order to work, requires that reasonable men and women take the time to understand and debate difficult, sometimes complex issues, and they do so in an atmosphere which strives for the type of understanding that leads to, if not agreement, then at least a productive and workable compromise. Politics is about choices, and within those choices, politics is about priorities. It's about reconciling conflicting preferences wherever and whenever possibly based on fact. But if the facts themselves are distorted, the resolutions are likely only to create further conflict, with all the stresses and strains on society that inevitably follow. The media have to decide: Do they see their role as being to inflame or to inform? Because in the end, it comes down to a combination of trust and leadership. Fifty years ago this week, President John F. Kennedy made two epoch-making speeches, the first on disarmament and the second on civil rights. The first led almost immediately to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and the second led to the 0000 Civil Rights Act, both of which represented giant leaps forward. Democracy, well-led and well-informed, can achieve very great things, but there's a precondition. We have to trust that those making those decisions are acting in the best interest not of themselves but of the whole of the people. We need factually-based options, clearly laid out, not those of a few powerful and potentially manipulative corporations pursuing their own frequently narrow agendas, but accurate, unprejudiced information with which to make our own judgments. If we want to provide decent, fulfilling lives for our children and our children's children, we need to exercise to the very greatest degree possible that duty of care for a vibrant, and hopefully a lasting, democracy. Thank you very much for listening to me. (Applause)

Hi. So today, I'd like to share some works in progress. Since we are still realizing these works, we are largely working within the realm of intuition and mystery, still. So I'm going to try and describe some of the experiences that we're looking for through each of the works. So the first work is called the Imperial Monochromes. A viewer sort of unsuspectingly walks into the room, and catches a glimpse of these panels in a messy composition on the wall. Within seconds, as if the panels have noticed the presence of the viewer, they appear to panic and sort of get into a strict symmetry. (Laughter) So this is the sketch of the two states. One is total chaos. The other is absolute order. And we were interested in seeing how little change it takes to move from one state to the other state. This also reminded us of two very different pictorial traditions. One is the altar tablets of the 00th century, and the other is about 000 years ago, Malevich's abstract compositions. So I'm just going to take you to a video. To give you a sense of scale, the largest panel is about two meters high. That's about this much. And the smallest one is an A0. So a viewer enters the space, and they snap to attention. And after a while, if the viewer continues to remain in the space, the panels will sort of become immune to the presence of the viewer and become lax and autonomous again, until they sort of sense a presence in the room or a movement, when they will again snap to attention. (Laughter) So here it appears as if it's the viewer that's sort of instigating the sense of order among the panels, but it could also be the other way around, that the panels are so stuck within their preconditioned behaviors that they sort of thrust the viewer with the role of a tyrant. So this brings me to a quieter, small work called Handheld. The viewer sees a piece of paper that's mounted on the far end of the wall, but when you go closer, you see that it's a blank A0, or a letter-sized piece of paper, that's held on either side by two small hands that appear to be carved with a great deal of attention and care from a small block of wood. The viewer also sees that this entire sculpture is sort of moving very slightly, as if these two hands are trying to hold the paper very still for a long period of time, and somehow are not managing to. So this instability in the movement very closely resembles the unsteady nature of images seen through a handheld camera. So here I'm going to show you two tandem clips. One is through a still camera and the other is through a handheld camera. And you immediately see how the unsteady nature of the video suggests the presence of an observer and a subjective point of view. So we've just removed the camera and transferred that movement onto the panel. So here's a video. You have to imagine the other hand. It's not there yet. But to us, we're sort of trying to evoke a self-effacing gesture, as if there's a little person with outstretched arms behind this enormous piece of paper. That sort of likens it to the amount of strain to be at the service of the observer and present this piece of paper very delicately to the viewer in front of them. The next work is Decoy. This is a cardboard model, so the object is about as tall as I am. It has a rounded body, two arms, and a very tall, head-like antenna, and its sole purpose is to attract attention towards itself. So when a viewer passes by, it sort of tilts from side to side, and moves its arms more and more frantically as the person gets closer. So here is the first test scenario. You see the two movements integrated, and the object seems to be employing its entire being in this expression of desperation. But the idea is that once it's got the person's attention, it's no longer interested, and it looks for the next person whose attention to get. (Laughter) So this is the final fabricated body of the Decoy. It appears to be mass-manufactured like it came out of a factory like vacuum cleaners and washing machines. Because we are always working from a very personal space, we like how this consumer aesthetic sort of depersonalizes the object and gives us a bit of distance in its appearance, at least. And so to us this is a kind of sinister being which is trying to distract you from the things that actually need your attention, but it could also be a figure that needs a lot of help. The next work is an object, that's also a kind of sound instrument. In the shape of an amphitheater that's scaled to the size of an audience as perceived from somebody from the stage. So from where I'm standing, each of you appears to be this big, and the audience sort of takes the entire field of my vision. Seated in this audience are 000 small figures. They're mechanically enabled to clap of their own free will. This means that each of them can decide if and when they want to clap, how hard, for how long, how they want to be influenced by those around them or influence others, and if they want to contribute to innovation. So when the viewer steps in front of the audience, there will be a response. It could be a few claps or a strong applause, and then nothing happens until the viewer leaves the stage, and again the audience will respond. It could be anything from a few feeble claps from members in the audience, or it could be a very loud ovation. So to us, I think we're really looking at an audience as its own object or its own organism that's also got a sort of musical-like quality to it, an instrument. So the viewer can play it by eliciting quite complex and varied, nuanced musical or sound patterns, but cannot really provoke the audience into any particular kind of response. So there's a sense of judgment and capriciousness and uneasiness involved. It also has an alluring and trap-like quality to it. So here if you see we're quite excited about the image of the head splitting to form the two hands. So here's a small visual animation, as if the two sides of the brain are sort of clashing against each other to kind of make sense of the duality and the tension. And here is a prototype. So we can't wait to be engulfed by 000 of them. Okay, this is the last work. It's called the Framerunners. It comes out of the idea of a window. This is an actual window in our studio, and as you can see, it's made up of three different thicknesses of wooden sections. So we used the same window vocabulary to construct our own frame or grid that's suspended in the room and that can be viewed from two sides. This grid is inhabited by a tribe of small figures. They're also made up of three different sizes, as if to suggest a kind of perspective or landscape on the single plain. Each of these figures can also run backward and forward in the track and hide behind two adjacent tracks. So in contrast to this very tight grid, we wanted to give these figures a very comical and slapstick-like quality, as if a puppeteer has taken them and physically animated them down the path. So we like the idea of these figures sort of skipping along like they're oblivious and carefree and happy-go-lucky and content, until they sort of sense a movement from the viewer and they will hide behind the fastest wall. So to us, this work also presents its own contradiction. These figures are sort of entrapped within this very strong grid, which is like a prison, but also a fortress, because it allows them to be oblivious and naive and carefree and quite oblivious of the external world. So all these real life qualities that I talk about are sort of translated to a very specific technical configuration, and we were very lucky to collaborate with ETH Zurich to develop the first prototype. So you see they extracted the motion cogs from our animations and created a wiggle that integrated the head-bobbing movement and the back-and-forth movement. So it's really quite small. You can see it can fit into the palm of my hand. So imagine our excitement when we saw it really working in the studio, and here it is. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause)

Intelligence -- what is it? If we take a look back at the history of how intelligence has been viewed, one seminal example has been Edsger Dijkstra's famous quote that "the question of whether a machine can think is about as interesting as the question of whether a submarine can swim." Now, Edsger Dijkstra, when he wrote this, intended it as a criticism of the early pioneers of computer science, like Alan Turing. However, if you take a look back and think about what have been the most empowering innovations that enabled us to build artificial machines that swim and artificial machines that [fly], you find that it was only through understanding the underlying physical mechanisms of swimming and flight that we were able to build these machines. And so, several years ago, I undertook a program to try to understand the fundamental physical mechanisms underlying intelligence. Let's take a step back. Let's first begin with a thought experiment. Pretend that you're an alien race that doesn't know anything about Earth biology or Earth neuroscience or Earth intelligence, but you have amazing telescopes and you're able to watch the Earth, and you have amazingly long lives, so you're able to watch the Earth over millions, even billions of years. And you observe a really strange effect. You observe that, over the course of the millennia, Earth is continually bombarded with asteroids up until a point, and that at some point, corresponding roughly to our year, 0000 AD, asteroids that are on a collision course with the Earth that otherwise would have collided mysteriously get deflected or they detonate before they can hit the Earth. Now of course, as earthlings, we know the reason would be that we're trying to save ourselves. We're trying to prevent an impact. But if you're an alien race who doesn't know any of this, doesn't have any concept of Earth intelligence, you'd be forced to put together a physical theory that explains how, up until a certain point in time, asteroids that would demolish the surface of a planet mysteriously stop doing that. And so I claim that this is the same question as understanding the physical nature of intelligence. So in this program that I undertook several years ago, I looked at a variety of different threads across science, across a variety of disciplines, that were pointing, I think, towards a single, underlying mechanism for intelligence. In cosmology, for example, there have been a variety of different threads of evidence that our universe appears to be finely tuned for the development of intelligence, and, in particular, for the development of universal states that maximize the diversity of possible futures. In game play, for example, in Go -- everyone remembers in 0000 when IBM's Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at chess -- fewer people are aware that in the past 00 years or so, the game of Go, arguably a much more challenging game because it has a much higher branching factor, has also started to succumb to computer game players for the same reason: the best techniques right now for computers playing Go are techniques that try to maximize future options during game play. Finally, in robotic motion planning, there have been a variety of recent techniques that have tried to take advantage of abilities of robots to maximize future freedom of action in order to accomplish complex tasks. And so, taking all of these different threads and putting them together, I asked, starting several years ago, is there an underlying mechanism for intelligence that we can factor out of all of these different threads? Is there a single equation for intelligence? And the answer, I believe, is yes. ["F = T ∇ Sτ"] What you're seeing is probably the closest equivalent to an E = mc² for intelligence that I've seen. So what you're seeing here is a statement of correspondence that intelligence is a force, F, that acts so as to maximize future freedom of action. It acts to maximize future freedom of action, or keep options open, with some strength T, with the diversity of possible accessible futures, S, up to some future time horizon, tau. In short, intelligence doesn't like to get trapped. Intelligence tries to maximize future freedom of action and keep options open. And so, given this one equation, it's natural to ask, so what can you do with this? How predictive is it? Does it predict human-level intelligence? Does it predict artificial intelligence? So I'm going to show you now a video that will, I think, demonstrate some of the amazing applications of just this single equation. (Video) Narrator: Recent research in cosmology has suggested that universes that produce more disorder, or "entropy," over their lifetimes should tend to have more favorable conditions for the existence of intelligent beings such as ourselves. But what if that tentative cosmological connection between entropy and intelligence hints at a deeper relationship? What if intelligent behavior doesn't just correlate with the production of long-term entropy, but actually emerges directly from it? To find out, we developed a software engine called Entropica, designed to maximize the production of long-term entropy of any system that it finds itself in. Amazingly, Entropica was able to pass multiple animal intelligence tests, play human games, and even earn money trading stocks, all without being instructed to do so. Here are some examples of Entropica in action. Just like a human standing upright without falling over, here we see Entropica automatically balancing a pole using a cart. This behavior is remarkable in part because we never gave Entropica a goal. It simply decided on its own to balance the pole. This balancing ability will have appliactions for humanoid robotics and human assistive technologies. Just as some animals can use objects in their environments as tools to reach into narrow spaces, here we see that Entropica, again on its own initiative, was able to move a large disk representing an animal around so as to cause a small disk, representing a tool, to reach into a confined space holding a third disk and release the third disk from its initially fixed position. This tool use ability will have applications for smart manufacturing and agriculture. In addition, just as some other animals are able to cooperate by pulling opposite ends of a rope at the same time to release food, here we see that Entropica is able to accomplish a model version of that task. This cooperative ability has interesting implications for economic planning and a variety of other fields. Entropica is broadly applicable to a variety of domains. For example, here we see it successfully playing a game of pong against itself, illustrating its potential for gaming. Here we see Entropica orchestrating new connections on a social network where friends are constantly falling out of touch and successfully keeping the network well connected. This same network orchestration ability also has applications in health care, energy, and intelligence. Here we see Entropica directing the paths of a fleet of ships, successfully discovering and utilizing the Panama Canal to globally extend its reach from the Atlantic to the Pacific. By the same token, Entropica is broadly applicable to problems in autonomous defense, logistics and transportation. Finally, here we see Entropica spontaneously discovering and executing a buy-low, sell-high strategy on a simulated range traded stock, successfully growing assets under management exponentially. This risk management ability will have broad applications in finance and insurance. Alex Wissner-Gross: So what you've just seen is that a variety of signature human intelligent cognitive behaviors such as tool use and walking upright and social cooperation all follow from a single equation, which drives a system to maximize its future freedom of action. Now, there's a profound irony here. Going back to the beginning of the usage of the term robot, the play "RUR," there was always a concept that if we developed machine intelligence, there would be a cybernetic revolt. The machines would rise up against us. One major consequence of this work is that maybe all of these decades, we've had the whole concept of cybernetic revolt in reverse. It's not that machines first become intelligent and then megalomaniacal and try to take over the world. It's quite the opposite, that the urge to take control of all possible futures is a more fundamental principle than that of intelligence, that general intelligence may in fact emerge directly from this sort of control-grabbing, rather than vice versa. Another important consequence is goal seeking. I'm often asked, how does the ability to seek goals follow from this sort of framework? And the answer is, the ability to seek goals will follow directly from this in the following sense: just like you would travel through a tunnel, a bottleneck in your future path space, in order to achieve many other diverse objectives later on, or just like you would invest in a financial security, reducing your short-term liquidity in order to increase your wealth over the long term, goal seeking emerges directly from a long-term drive to increase future freedom of action. Finally, Richard Feynman, famous physicist, once wrote that if human civilization were destroyed and you could pass only a single concept on to our descendants to help them rebuild civilization, that concept should be that all matter around us is made out of tiny elements that attract each other when they're far apart but repel each other when they're close together. My equivalent of that statement to pass on to descendants to help them build artificial intelligences or to help them understand human intelligence, is the following: Intelligence should be viewed as a physical process that tries to maximize future freedom of action and avoid constraints in its own future. Thank you very much. (Applause)

The urban explosion of the last years of economic boom also produced dramatic marginalization, resulting in the explosion of slums in many parts of the world. This polarization of enclaves of mega-wealth surrounded by sectors of poverty and the socioeconomic inequalities they have engendered is really at the center of today's urban crisis. But I want to begin tonight by suggesting that this urban crisis is not only economic or environmental. It's particularly a cultural crisis, a crisis of the institutions unable to reimagine the stupid ways which we have been growing, unable to challenge the oil-hungry, selfish urbanization that have perpetuated cities based on consumption, from southern California to New York to Dubai. So I just really want to share with you a reflection that the future of cities today depends less on buildings and, in fact, depends more on the fundamental reorganization of socioeconomic relations, that the best ideas in the shaping of the city in the future will not come from enclaves of economic power and abundance, but in fact from sectors of conflict and scarcity from which an urgent imagination can really inspire us to rethink urban growth today. And let me illustrate what I mean by understanding or engaging sites of conflict as harboring creativity, as I briefly introduce you to the Tijuana-San Diego border region, which has been the laboratory to rethink my practice as an architect. This is the wall, the border wall, that separates San Diego and Tijuana, Latin America and the United States, a physical emblem of exclusionary planning policies that have perpetuated the division of communities, jurisdictions and resources across the world. In this border region, we find some of the wealthiest real estate, as I once found in the edges of San Diego, barely 00 minutes away from some of the poorest settlements in Latin America. And while these two cities have the same population, San Diego has grown six times larger than Tijuana in the last decades, immediately thrusting us to confront the tensions and conflicts between sprawl and density, which are at the center of today's discussion about environmental sustainability. So I've been arguing in the last years that, in fact, the slums of Tijuana can teach a lot to the sprawls of San Diego when it comes to socioeconomic sustainability, that we should pay attention and learn from the many migrant communities on both sides of this border wall so that we can translate their informal processes of urbanization. What do I mean by the informal in this case? I'm really just talking about the compendium of social practices of adaptation that enable many of these migrant communities to transgress imposed political and economic recipes of urbanization. I'm talking simply about the creative intelligence of the bottom-up, whether manifested in the slums of Tijuana that build themselves, in fact, with the waste of San Diego, or the many migrant neighborhoods in Southern California that have begun to be retrofitted with difference in the last decades. So I've been interested as an artist in the measuring, the observation, of many of the trans-border informal flows across this border: in one direction, from south to north, the flow of immigrants into the United States, and from north to south the flow of waste from southern California into Tijuana. I'm referring to the recycling of these old post-war bungalows that Mexican contractors bring to the border as American developers are disposing of them in the process of building a more inflated version of suburbia in the last decades. So these are houses waiting to cross the border. Not only people cross the border here, but entire chunks of one city move to the next, and when these houses are placed on top of these steel frames, they leave the first floor to become the second to be in-filled with more house, with a small business. This layering of spaces and economies is very interesting to notice. But not only houses, also small debris from one city, from San Diego, to Tijuana. Probably a lot of you have seen the rubber tires that are used in the slums to build retaining walls. But look at what people have done here in conditions of socioeconomic emergency. They have figured out how to peel off the tire, how to thread it and interlock it to construct a more efficient retaining wall. Or the garage doors that are brought from San Diego in trucks to become the new skin of emergency housing in many of these slums surrounding the edges of Tijuana. So while, as an architect, this is a very compelling thing to witness, this creative intelligence, I also want to keep myself in check. I don't want to romanticize poverty. I just want to suggest that this informal urbanization is not just the image of precariousness, that informality here, the informal, is really a set of socioeconomic and political procedures that we could translate as artists, that this is about a bottom-up urbanization that performs. See here, buildings are not important just for their looks, but, in fact, they are important for what they can do. They truly perform as they transform through time and as communities negotiate the spaces and boundaries and resources. So while waste flows southbound, people go north in search of dollars, and most of my research has had to do with the impact of immigration in the alteration of the homogeneity of many neighborhoods in the United States, particularly in San Diego. And I'm talking about how this begins to suggest that the future of Southern California depends on the retrofitting of the large urbanization -- I mean, on steroids -- with the small programs, social and economic. I'm referring to how immigrants, when they come to these neighborhoods, they begin to alter the one-dimensionality of parcels and properties into more socially and economically complex systems, as they begin to plug an informal economy into a garage, or as they build an illegal granny flat to support an extended family. This socioeconomic entrepreneurship on the ground within these neighborhoods really begins to suggest ways of translating that into new, inclusive and more equitable land use policies. So many stories emerge from these dynamics of alteration of space, such as "the informal Buddha," which tells the story of a small house that saved itself, it did not travel to Mexico, but it was retrofitted in the end into a Buddhist temple, and in so doing, this small house transforms or mutates from a singular dwelling into a small, or a micro, socioeconomic and cultural infrastructure inside a neighborhood. So these action neighborhoods, as I call them, really become the inspiration to imagine other interpretations of citizenship that have less to do, in fact, with belonging to the nation-state, and more with upholding the notion of citizenship as a creative act that reorganizes institutional protocols in the spaces of the city. As an artist, I've been interested, in fact, in the visualization of citizenship, the gathering of many anecdotes, urban stories, in order to narrativize the relationship between social processes and spaces. This is a story of a group of teenagers that one night, a few months ago, decided to invade this space under the freeway to begin constructing their own skateboard park. With shovels in hand, they started to dig. Two weeks later, the police stopped them. They barricaded the place, and the teenagers were evicted, and the teenagers decided to fight back, not with bank cards or slogans but with constructing a critical process. The first thing they did was to recognize the specificity of political jurisdiction inscribed in that empty space. They found out that they had been lucky because they had not begun to dig under Caltrans territoy. Caltrans is a state agency that governs the freeway, so it would have been very difficult to negotiate with them. They were lucky, they said, because they began to dig under an arm of the freeway that belongs to the local municipality. They were also lucky, they said, because they began to dig in a sort of Bermuda Triangle of jurisdiction, between port authority, airport authority, two city districts, and a review board. All these red lines are the invisible political institutions that were inscribed in that leftover empty space. With this knowledge, these teenagers as skaters confronted the city. They came to the city attorney's office. The city attorney told them that in order to continue the negotiation they had to become an NGO, and of course they didn't know what an NGO was. They had to talk to their friends in Seattle who had gone through the same experience. And they began to realize the necessity to organize themselves even deeper and began to fundraise, to organize budgets, to really be aware of all the knowledge embedded in the urban code in San Diego so that they could begin to redefine the very meaning of public space in the city, expanding it to other categories. At the end, the teenagers won the case with that evidence, and they were able to construct their skateboard park under that freeway. Now for many of you, this story might seem trivial or naive. For me as an architect, it has become a fundamental narrative, because it begins to teach me that this micro-community not only designed another category of public space but they also designed the socioeconomic protocols that were necessary to be inscribed in that space for its long-term sustainability. They also taught me that similar to the migrant communities on both sides of the border, they engaged conflict itself as a creative tool, because they had to produce a process that enabled them to reorganize resources and the politics of the city. In that act, that informal, bottom-up act of transgression, really began to trickle up to transform top-down policy. Now this journey from the bottom-up to the transformation of the top-down is where I find hope today. And I'm thinking of how these modest alterations with space and with policy in many cities in the world, in primarily the urgency of a collective imagination as these communities reimagine their own forms of governance, social organization, and infrastructure, really is at the center of the new formation of democratic politics of the urban. It is, in fact, this that could become the framework for producing new social and economic justice in the city. I want to say this and emphasize it, because this is the only way I see that can enable us to move from urbanizations of consumption to neighborhoods of production today. Thank you. (Applause)

Five years ago, I was a Ph.D. student living two lives. In one, I used NASA supercomputers to design next-generation spacecraft, and in the other I was a data scientist looking for potential smugglers of sensitive nuclear technologies. As a data scientist, I did a lot of analyses, mostly of facilities, industrial facilities around the world. And I was always looking for a better canvas to tie these all together. And one day, I was thinking about how all data has a location, and I realized that the answer had been staring me in the face. Although I was a satellite engineer, I hadn't thought about using satellite imagery in my work. Now, like most of us, I'd been online, I'd see my house, so I thought, I'll hop in there and I'll start looking up some of these facilities. And what I found really surprised me. The pictures that I was finding were years out of date, and because of that, it had relatively little relevance to the work that I was doing today. But I was intrigued. I mean, satellite imagery is pretty amazing stuff. There are millions and millions of sensors surrounding us today, but there's still so much we don't know on a daily basis. How much oil is stored in all of China? How much corn is being produced? How many ships are in all of our world's ports? Now, in theory, all of these questions could be answered by imagery, but not if it's old. And if this data was so valuable, then how come I couldn't get my hands on more recent pictures? So the story begins over 00 years ago with the launch of the first generation of U.S. government photo reconnaissance satellites. And today, there's a handful of the great, great grandchildren of these early Cold War machines which are now operated by private companies and from which the vast majority of satellite imagery that you and I see on a daily basis comes. During this period, launching things into space, just the rocket to get the satellite up there, has cost hundreds of millions of dollars each, and that's created tremendous pressure to launch things infrequently and to make sure that when you do, you cram as much functionality in there as possible. All of this has only made satellites bigger and bigger and bigger and more expensive, now nearly a billion, with a b, dollars per copy. Because they are so expensive, there aren't very many of them. Because there aren't very many of them, the pictures that we see on a daily basis tend to be old. I think a lot of people actually understand this anecdotally, but in order to visualize just how sparsely our planet is collected, some friends and I put together a dataset of the 00 million pictures that have been gathered by these satellites between 0000 and 0000. As you can see in blue, huge areas of our world are barely seen, less than once a year, and even the areas that are seen most frequently, those in red, are seen at best once a quarter. Now as aerospace engineering grad students, this chart cried out to us as a challenge. Why do these things have to be so expensive? Does a single satellite really have to cost the equivalent of three 000 jumbo jets? Wasn't there a way to build a smaller, simpler, new satellite design that could enable more timely imaging? I realize that it does sound a little bit crazy that we were going to go out and just begin designing satellites, but fortunately we had help. In the late 0000s, a couple of professors proposed a concept for radically reducing the price of putting things in space. This was hitchhiking small satellites alongside much larger satellites. This dropped the cost of putting objects up there by over a factor of 000, and suddenly we could afford to experiment, to take a little bit of risk, and to realize a lot of innovation. And a new generation of engineers and scientists, mostly out of universities, began launching these very small, breadbox-sized satellites called CubeSats. And these were built with electronics obtained from RadioShack instead of Lockheed Martin. Now it was using the lessons learned from these early missions that my friends and I began a series of sketches of our own satellite design. And I can't remember a specific day where we made a conscious decision that we were actually going to go out and build these things, but once we got that idea in our minds of the world as a dataset, of being able to capture millions of data points on a daily basis describing the global economy, of being able to unearth billions of connections between them that had never before been found, it just seemed boring to go work on anything else. And so we moved into a cramped, windowless office in Palo Alto, and began working to take our design from the drawing board into the lab. The first major question we had to tackle was just how big to build this thing. In space, size drives cost, and we had worked with these very small, breadbox-sized satellites in school, but as we began to better understand the laws of physics, we found that the quality of pictures those satellites could take was very limited, because the laws of physics dictate that the best picture you can take through a telescope is a function of the diameter of that telescope, and these satellites had a very small, very constrained volume. And we found that the best picture we would have been able to get looked something like this. Although this was the low-cost option, quite frankly it was just too blurry to see the things that make satellite imagery valuable. So about three or four weeks later, we met a group of engineers randomly who had worked on the first private imaging satellite ever developed, and they told us that back in the 0000s, the U.S. government had found a powerful optimal tradeoff -- that in taking pictures at right about one meter resolution, being able to see objects one meter in size, they had found that they could not just get very high-quality images, but get a lot of them at an affordable price. From our own computer simulations, we quickly found that one meter really was the minimum viable product to be able to see the drivers of our global economy, for the first time, being able to count the ships and cars and shipping containers and trucks that move around our world on a daily basis, while conveniently still not being able to see individuals. We had found our compromise. We would have to build something larger than the original breadbox, now more like a mini-fridge, but we still wouldn't have to build a pickup truck. So now we had our constraint. The laws of physics dictated the absolute minimum-sized telescope that we could build. What came next was making the rest of the satellite as small and as simple as possible, basically a flying telescope with four walls and a set of electronics smaller than a phone book that used less power than a 000 watt lightbulb. The big challenge became actually taking the pictures through that telescope. Traditional imaging satellites use a line scanner, similar to a Xerox machine, and as they traverse the Earth, they take pictures, scanning row by row by row to build the complete image. Now people use these because they get a lot of light, which means less of the noise you see in a low-cost cell phone image. The problem with them is they require very sophisticated pointing. You have to stay focused on a 00-centimeter target from over 000 miles away while moving at more than seven kilometers a second, which requires an awesome degree of complexity. So instead, we turned to a new generation of video sensors, originally created for use in night vision goggles. Instead of taking a single, high quality image, we could take a videostream of individually noisier frames, but then we could recombine all of those frames together into very high-quality images using sophisticated pixel processing techniques here on the ground, at a cost of one one hundredth a traditional system. And we applied this technique to many of the other systems on the satellite as well, and day by day, our design evolved from CAD to prototypes to production units. A few short weeks ago, we packed up SkySat 0, put our signatures on it, and waved goodbye for the last time on Earth. Today, it's sitting in its final launch configuration ready to blast off in a few short weeks. And soon, we'll turn our attention to launching a constellation of 00 or more of these satellites and beginning to build the scalable analytics that will allow us to unearth the insights in the petabytes of data we will collect. So why do all of this? Why build these satellites? Well, it turns out imaging satellites have a unique ability to provide global transparency, and providing that transparency on a timely basis is simply an idea whose time has come. We see ourselves as pioneers of a new frontier, and beyond economic data, unlocking the human story, moment by moment. For a data scientist that just happened to go to space camp as a kid, it just doesn't get much better than that. Thank you. (Applause)

I want you to imagine what a breakthrough this was for women who were victims of violence in the 0000s. They would come into the emergency room with what the police would call "a lovers' quarrel," and I would see a woman who was beaten, I would see a broken nose and a fractured wrist and swollen eyes. And as activists, we would take our Polaroid camera, we would take her picture, we would wait 00 seconds, and we would give her the photograph. And she would then have the evidence she needed to go to court. We were making what was invisible visible. I've been doing this for 00 years. I've been part of a social movement that has been working on ending violence against women and children. And for all those years, I've had an absolutely passionate and sometimes not popular belief that this violence is not inevitable, that it is learned, and if it's learned, it can be un-learned, and it can be prevented. (Applause) Why do I believe this? Because it's true. It is absolutely true. Between 0000 and 0000, domestic violence among adult women in the United States has gone down by 00 percent, and that is great news. (Applause) Sixty-four percent. Now, how did we get there? Our eyes were wide open. Thirty years ago, women were beaten, they were stalked, they were raped, and no one talked about it. There was no justice. And as an activist, that was not good enough. And so step one on this journey is we organized, and we created this extraordinary underground network of amazing women who opened shelters, and if they didn't open a shelter, they opened their home so that women and children could be safe. And you know what else we did? We had bake sales, we had car washes, and we did everything we could do to fundraise, and then at one point we said, you know, it's time that we went to the federal government and asked them to pay for these extraordinary services that are saving people's lives. Right? (Applause) And so, step number two, we knew we needed to change the laws. And so we went to Washington, and we lobbied for the first piece of legislation. And I remember walking through the halls of the U.S. Capitol, and I was in my 00s, and my life had purpose, and I couldn't imagine that anybody would ever challenge this important piece of legislation. I was probably 00 and naive. But I heard about a congressman who had a very, very different point of view. Do you know what he called this important piece of legislation? He called it the Take the Fun Out of Marriage Act. The Take the Fun Out of Marriage Act. Ladies and gentlemen, that was in 0000 in the United States, and I wish I had Twitter. (Laughter) Ten years later, after lots of hard work, we finally passed the Violence Against Women Act, which is a life-changing act that has saved so many lives. (Applause) Thank you. I was proud to be part of that work, and it changed the laws and it put millions of dollars into local communities. And you know what else it did? It collected data. And I have to tell you, I'm passionate about data. In fact, I am a data nerd. I'm sure there are a lot of data nerds here. I am a data nerd, and the reason for that is I want to make sure that if we spend a dollar, that the program works, and if it doesn't work, we should change the plan. And I also want to say one other thing: We are not going to solve this problem by building more jails or by even building more shelters. It is about economic empowerment for women, it is about healing kids who are hurt, and it is about prevention with a capital P. And so, step number three on this journey: We know, if we're going to keep making this progress, we're going to have to turn up the volume, we're going to have to increase the visibility, and we're going to have to engage the public. And so knowing that, we went to the Advertising Council, and we asked them to help us build a public education campaign. And we looked around the world to Canada and Australia and Brazil and parts of Africa, and we took this knowledge and we built the first national public education campaign called There's No Excuse for Domestic Violence. Take a look at one of our spots. (Video) Man: Where's dinner? Woman: Well, I thought you'd be home a couple hours ago, and I put everything away, so - Man: What is this? Pizza. Woman: If you had just called me, I would have known - Man: Dinner? Dinner ready is a pizza? Woman: Honey, please don't be so loud. Please don't - Let go of me! Man: Get in the kitchen! Woman: No! Help! Man: You want to see what hurts? (Slaps woman) That's what hurts! That's what hurts! (Breaking glass) Woman: Help me! ["Children have to sit by and watch. What's your excuse?"] Esta Soler: As we were in the process of releasing this campaign, O.J. Simpson was arrested for the murder of his wife and her friend. We learned that he had a long history of domestic violence. The media became fixated. The story of domestic violence went from the back page, but actually from the no-page, to the front page. Our ads blanketed the airwaves, and women, for the first time, started to tell their stories. Movements are about moments, and we seized this moment. And let me just put this in context. Before 0000, do you have any idea how many articles were in The New York Times on domestic violence? I'll tell you: 000. And in the 0000s, over 0,000. We were obviously making a difference. But we were still missing a critical element. So, step four: We needed to engage men. We couldn't solve this problem with 00 percent of the population on the sidelines. And I already told you I'm a data nerd. National polling told us that men felt indicted and not invited into this conversation. So we wondered, how can we include men? How can we get men to talk about violence against women and girls? And a male friend of mine pulled me aside and he said, "You want men to talk about violence against women and girls. Men don't talk." (Laughter) I apologize to the men in the audience. I know you do. But he said, "Do you know what they do do? They do talk to their kids. They talk to their kids as parents, as coaches." And that's what we did. We met men where they were at and we built a program. And then we had this one event that stays in my heart forever where a basketball coach was talking to a room filled with male athletes and men from all walks of life. And he was talking about the importance of coaching boys into men and changing the culture of the locker room and giving men the tools to have healthy relationships. And all of a sudden, he looked at the back of the room, and he saw his daughter, and he called out his daughter's name, Michaela, and he said, "Michaela, come up here." And she's nine years old, and she was kind of shy, and she got up there, and he said, "Sit down next to me." She sat right down next to him. He gave her this big hug, and he said, "People ask me why I do this work. I do this work because I'm her dad, and I don't want anyone ever to hurt her." And as a parent, I get it. I get it, knowing that there are so many sexual assaults on college campuses that are so widespread and so under-reported. We've done a lot for adult women. We've got to do a better job for our kids. We just do. We have to. (Applause) We've come a long way since the days of the Polaroid. Technology has been our friend. The mobile phone is a global game changer for the empowerment of women, and Facebook and Twitter and Google and YouTube and all the social media helps us organize and tell our story in a powerful way. And so those of you in this audience who have helped build those applications and those platforms, as an organizer, I say, thank you very much. Really. I clap for you. (Applause) I'm the daughter of a man who joined one club in his life, the Optimist Club. You can't make that one up. And it is his spirit and his optimism that is in my DNA. I have been doing this work for over 00 years, and I am convinced, now more than ever, in the capacity of human beings to change. I believe we can bend the arc of human history toward compassion and equality, and I also fundamentally believe and passionately believe that this violence does not have to be part of the human condition. And I ask you, stand with us as we create futures without violence for women and girls and men and boys everywhere. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Server: May I help you, sir? Customer: Uh, let's see. Server: We have pan seared registry error sprinkled with the finest corrupted data, binary brioche, RAM sandwiches, Conficker fitters, and a scripting salad with or without polymorphic dressing, and a grilled coding kabob. Customer: I'd like a RAM sandwich and a glass of your finest Code 00. Server: Would you like any desserts, sir? Our special is tracking cookie. Customer: I'd like a batch of some zombie tracking cookies, thank you. Server: Coming right up, sir. Your food will be served shortly. (Applause) Maya Penn: I've been drawing ever since I could hold a crayon, and I've been making animated flip books since I was three years old. At that age, I also learned about what an animator was. There was a program on TV about jobs most kids don't know about. When I understood that an animator makes the cartoons I saw on TV, I immediately said, "That's what I want to be." I don't know if I said it mentally or out loud, but that was a greatly defining moment in my life. Animation and art has always been my first love. It was my love for technology that sparked the idea for "Malicious Dishes." There was a virus on my computer, and I was trying to get rid of it, and all of a sudden, I just thought, what if viruses have their own little world inside the computer? Maybe a restaurant where they meet up and do virusy things? And thus, "Malicious Dishes" was born. At four years old, my dad showed me how to take apart a computer and put it back together again. That started my love for technology. I built my first website myself in HTML, and I'm learning JavaScript and Python. I'm also working on an animated series called "The Pollinators." It's about bees and other pollinators in our environment and why they're so important. If plants aren't pollinated by the pollinators, then all creatures, including ourselves, that depend on these plants, would starve. So I decided to take these cool creatures and make a superhero team. (Applause) (Foot stomp) (Music) (Roar) Pollinator: Deforestsaurus! I should have known! I need to call on the rest of the Pollinators! (Music) Thank you. (Applause) All of my animations start with ideas, but what are ideas? Ideas can spark a movement. Ideas are opportunities and innovation. Ideas truly are what make the world go round. If it wasn't for ideas, we wouldn't be where we are now with technology, medicine, art, culture, and how we even live our lives. At eight years old, I took my ideas and started my own business called Maya's Ideas, and my nonprofit, Maya's Ideas for the Planet. (Laughter) And I make eco-friendly clothing and accessories. I'm 00 now, and although I started my business in 0000, my artistic journey started way before then. I was greatly influenced by art, and I wanted to incorporate it in everything I did, even my business. I would find different fabrics around the house, and say, "This could be a scarf or a hat," and I had all these ideas for designs. I noticed when I wore my creations, people would stop me and say, "Wow, that's really cute. Where can I get one?" And I thought, I can start my own business. Now I didn't have any business plans at only eight years old. I only knew I wanted to make pretty creations that were safe for the environment and I wanted to give back. My mom taught me how to sew, and on my back porch, I would sit and make little headbands out of ribbon, and I would write down the names and the price of each item. I started making more items like hats, scarves and bags. Soon, my items began selling all over the world, and I had customers in Denmark, Italy, Australia, Canada and more. Now, I had a lot to learn about my business, like branding and marketing, staying engaged with my customers, and seeing what sold the most and the least. Soon, my business really started to take off. Then one day, Forbes magazine contacted me when I was 00 years old. (Laughter) They wanted to feature me and my company in their article. Now a lot of people ask me, why is your business eco-friendly? I've had a passion for protecting the environment and its creatures since I was little. My parents taught me at an early age about giving back and being a good steward to the environment. I heard about how the dyes in some clothing or the process of even making the items was harmful to the people and the planet, so I started doing my own research, and I discovered that even after dyeing has being completed, there is a waste issue that gives a negative impact on the environment. For example, the grinding of materials, or the dumping of dried powder materials. These actions can pollute the air, making it toxic to anyone or anything that inhales it. So when I started my business, I knew two things: All of my items had to be eco-friendly, and 00 to 00 percent of the profits I made went to local and global charities and environmental organizations. (Applause) I feel I'm part of the new wave of entrepreneurs that not only seeks to have a successful business, but also a sustainable future. I feel that I can meet the needs of my customers without compromising the ability of future generations to live in a greener tomorrow. We live in a big, diverse and beautiful world, and that makes me even more passionate to save it. But it's never enough to just to get it through your heads about the things that are happening in our world. It takes to get it through your hearts, because when you get it through your heart, that is when movements are sparked. That is when opportunities and innovation are created, and that is why ideas come to life. Thank you, and peace and blessings. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Pat Mitchell: So, you heard Maya talk about the amazing parents who are behind this incredible woman. Where are they? Please, Mr. and Mrs. Penn. Would you just -- Ah! (Applause)

Science, science has allowed us to know so much about the far reaches of the universe, which is at the same time tremendously important and extremely remote, and yet much, much closer, much more directly related to us, there are many things we don't really understand. And one of them is the extraordinary social complexity of the animals around us, and today I want to tell you a few stories of animal complexity. But first, what do we call complexity? What is complex? Well, complex is not complicated. Something complicated comprises many small parts, all different, and each of them has its own precise role in the machinery. On the opposite, a complex system is made of many, many similar parts, and it is their interaction that produces a globally coherent behavior. Complex systems have many interacting parts which behave according to simple, individual rules, and this results in emergent properties. The behavior of the system as a whole cannot be predicted from the individual rules only. As Aristotle wrote, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But from Aristotle, let's move onto a more concrete example of complex systems. These are Scottish terriers. In the beginning, the system is disorganized. Then comes a perturbation: milk. Every individual starts pushing in one direction and this is what happens. The pinwheel is an emergent property of the interactions between puppies whose only rule is to try to keep access to the milk and therefore to push in a random direction. So it's all about finding the simple rules from which complexity emerges. I call this simplifying complexity, and it's what we do at the chair of systems design at ETH Zurich. We collect data on animal populations, analyze complex patterns, try to explain them. It requires physicists who work with biologists, with mathematicians and computer scientists, and it is their interaction that produces cross-boundary competence to solve these problems. So again, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. In a way, collaboration is another example of a complex system. And you may be asking yourself which side I'm on, biology or physics? In fact, it's a little different, and to explain, I need to tell you a short story about myself. When I was a child, I loved to build stuff, to create complicated machines. So I set out to study electrical engineering and robotics, and my end-of-studies project was about building a robot called ER-0 -- it looked like this - that would collect information from its environment and proceed to follow a white line on the ground. It was very, very complicated, but it worked beautifully in our test room, and on demo day, professors had assembled to grade the project. So we took ER-0 to the evaluation room. It turned out, the light in that room was slightly different. The robot's vision system got confused. At the first bend in the line, it left its course, and crashed into a wall. We had spent weeks building it, and all it took to destroy it was a subtle change in the color of the light in the room. That's when I realized that the more complicated you make a machine, the more likely that it will fail due to something absolutely unexpected. And I decided that, in fact, I didn't really want to create complicated stuff. I wanted to understand complexity, the complexity of the world around us and especially in the animal kingdom. Which brings us to bats. Bechstein's bats are a common species of European bats. They are very social animals. Mostly they roost, or sleep, together. And they live in maternity colonies, which means that every spring, the females meet after the winter hibernation, and they stay together for about six months to rear their young, and they all carry a very small chip, which means that every time one of them enters one of these specially equipped bat boxes, we know where she is, and more importantly, we know with whom she is. So I study roosting associations in bats, and this is what it looks like. During the day, the bats roost in a number of sub-groups in different boxes. It could be that on one day, the colony is split between two boxes, but on another day, it could be together in a single box, or split between three or more boxes, and that all seems rather erratic, really. It's called fission-fusion dynamics, the property for an animal group of regularly splitting and merging into different subgroups. So what we do is take all these data from all these different days and pool them together to extract a long-term association pattern by applying techniques with network analysis to get a complete picture of the social structure of the colony. Okay? So that's what this picture looks like. In this network, all the circles are nodes, individual bats, and the lines between them are social bonds, associations between individuals. It turns out this is a very interesting picture. This bat colony is organized in two different communities which cannot be predicted from the daily fission-fusion dynamics. We call them cryptic social units. Even more interesting, in fact: Every year, around October, the colony splits up, and all bats hibernate separately, but year after year, when the bats come together again in the spring, the communities stay the same. So these bats remember their friends for a really long time. With a brain the size of a peanut, they maintain individualized, long-term social bonds, We didn't know that was possible. We knew that primates and elephants and dolphins could do that, but compared to bats, they have huge brains. So how could it be that the bats maintain this complex, stable social structure with such limited cognitive abilities? And this is where complexity brings an answer. To understand this system, we built a computer model of roosting, based on simple, individual rules, and simulated thousands and thousands of days in the virtual bat colony. It's a mathematical model, but it's not complicated. What the model told us is that, in a nutshell, each bat knows a few other colony members as her friends, and is just slightly more likely to roost in a box with them. Simple, individual rules. This is all it takes to explain the social complexity of these bats. But it gets better. Between 0000 and 0000, the colony lost more than two thirds of its members, probably due to the very cold winter. The next spring, it didn't form two communities like every year, which may have led the whole colony to die because it had become too small. Instead, it formed a single, cohesive social unit, which allowed the colony to survive that season and thrive again in the next two years. What we know is that the bats are not aware that their colony is doing this. All they do is follow simple association rules, and from this simplicity emerges social complexity which allows the colony to be resilient against dramatic changes in the population structure. And I find this incredible. Now I want to tell you another story, but for this we have to travel from Europe to the Kalahari Desert in South Africa. This is where meerkats live. I'm sure you know meerkats. They're fascinating creatures. They live in groups with a very strict social hierarchy. There is one dominant pair, and many subordinates, some acting as sentinels, some acting as babysitters, some teaching pups, and so on. What we do is put very small GPS collars on these animals to study how they move together, and what this has to do with their social structure. And there's a very interesting example of collective movement in meerkats. In the middle of the reserve which they live in lies a road. On this road there are cars, so it's dangerous. But the meerkats have to cross it to get from one feeding place to another. So we asked, how exactly do they do this? We found that the dominant female is mostly the one who leads the group to the road, but when it comes to crossing it, crossing the road, she gives way to the subordinates, a manner of saying, "Go ahead, tell me if it's safe." What I didn't know, in fact, was what rules in their behavior the meerkats follow for this change at the edge of the group to happen and if simple rules were sufficient to explain it. So I built a model, a model of simulated meerkats crossing a simulated road. It's a simplistic model. Moving meerkats are like random particles whose unique rule is one of alignment. They simply move together. When these particles get to the road, they sense some kind of obstacle, and they bounce against it. The only difference between the dominant female, here in red, and the other individuals, is that for her, the height of the obstacle, which is in fact the risk perceived from the road, is just slightly higher, and this tiny difference in the individual's rule of movement is sufficient to explain what we observe, that the dominant female leads her group to the road and then gives way to the others for them to cross first. George Box, who was an English statistician, once wrote, "All models are false, but some models are useful." And in fact, this model is obviously false, because in reality, meerkats are anything but random particles. But it's also useful, because it tells us that extreme simplicity in movement rules at the individual level can result in a great deal of complexity at the level of the group. So again, that's simplifying complexity. I would like to conclude on what this means for the whole species. When the dominant female gives way to a subordinate, it's not out of courtesy. In fact, the dominant female is extremely important for the cohesion of the group. If she dies on the road, the whole group is at risk. So this behavior of risk avoidance is a very old evolutionary response. These meerkats are replicating an evolved tactic that is thousands of generations old, and they're adapting it to a modern risk, in this case a road built by humans. They adapt very simple rules, and the resulting complex behavior allows them to resist human encroachment into their natural habitat. In the end, it may be bats which change their social structure in response to a population crash, or it may be meerkats who show a novel adaptation to a human road, or it may be another species. My message here -- and it's not a complicated one, but a simple one of wonder and hope -- my message here is that animals show extraordinary social complexity, and this allows them to adapt and respond to changes in their environment. In three words, in the animal kingdom, simplicity leads to complexity which leads to resilience. Thank you. (Applause) Dania Gerhardt: Thank you very much, Nicolas, for this great start. Little bit nervous? Nicolas Perony: I'm okay, thanks. DG: Okay, great. I'm sure a lot of people in the audience somehow tried to make associations between the animals you were talking about -- the bats, meerkats -- and humans. You brought some examples: The females are the social ones, the females are the dominant ones, I'm not sure who thinks how. But is it okay to do these associations? Are there stereotypes you can confirm in this regard that can be valid across all species? NP: Well, I would say there are also counter-examples to these stereotypes. For examples, in sea horses or in koalas, in fact, it is the males who take care of the young always. And the lesson is that it's often difficult, and sometimes even a bit dangerous, to draw parallels between humans and animals. So that's it. DG: Okay. Thank you very much for this great start. Thank you, Nicolas Perony.

I'm McKenna Pope. I'm 00 years old, and when I was 00, I convinced one of the largest toy companies, toymakers, in the world, Hasbro, to change the way that they marketed one of their most best-selling products. So allow me to tell you about it. So I have a brother, Gavin. When this whole shebang happened, he was four. He loved to cook. He was always getting ingredients out of the fridge and mixing them into these, needless to say, uneatable concoctions, or making invisible macaroni and cheese. He wanted to be a chef really badly. And so what better gift for a kid who wanted to be a chef than an Easy-Bake Oven. Right? I mean, we all had those when we were little. And he wanted one so badly. But then he started to realize something. In the commercials, and on the boxes for the Easy-Bake Ovens, Hasbro marketed them specifically to girls. And the way that they did this was they would only feature girls on the boxes or in the commercials, and there would be flowery prints all over the ovens and it would be in bright pink and purple, very gender-specific colors to females, right? So it kind of was sending a message that only girls are supposed to cook; boys aren't. And this discouraged my brother a lot. He thought that he wasn't supposed to want to be a chef, because that was something that girls did. Girls cooked; boys didn't, or so was the message that Hasbro was sending. And this got me thinking, God, I wish there was a way that I could change this, that could I have my voice heard by Hasbro so I could ask them and tell them what they were doing wrong and ask them to change it. And that got me thinking about a website that I had learned about a few months prior called Change.org. Change.org is an online petition-sharing platform where you can create a petition and share it across all of these social media networks, through Facebook, through Twitter, through YouTube, through Reddit, through Tumblr, through whatever you can think of. And so I created a petition along with the YouTube video that I added to the petition basically asking Hasbro to change the way that they marketed it, in featuring boys in the commercials, on the boxes, and most of all creating them in less gender-specific colors. So this petition started to take off -- humongously fast, you have no idea. I was getting interviewed by all these national news outlets and press outlets, and it was amazing. In three weeks, maybe three and a half, I had 00,000 signatures on this petition. (Applause) Thank you. So, needless to say, it was crazy. Eventually, Hasbro themselves invited me to their headquarters so they could go and unveil their new Easy-Bake Oven product to me in black, silver and blue. It was literally one of the best moments of my life. It was like "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory." That thing was amazing. What I didn't realize at the time, however, was that I had become an activist, I could change something, that even as a kid, or maybe even especially as a kid, my voice mattered, and your voice matters too. I want to let you know it's not going to be easy, and it wasn't easy for me, because I faced a lot of obstacles. People online, and sometimes even in real life, were disrespectful to me and my family, and talked about how the whole thing was a waste of time, and it really discouraged me. And actually, I have some examples, because what's better revenge than displaying their idiocy? So, let's see. From user name Liquidsore00 -- interesting user names we have here - "Disgusting liberal moms making their sons gay." Liquidsore00, really? Really? Okay. How about from Whiteboy00AGS: "People always need something to (female dog) about." From Jeffrey Gutierrez: "OMG, shut up. You just want money and attention." So it was comments like these that really discouraged me from wanting to make change in the future because I thought, people don't care, people think it's a waste of time, and people are going to be disrespectful to me and my family. It hurt me, and it made me think, what's the point of making change in the future? But then I started to realize something. Haters gonna hate. Come on, say it with me. One, two, three: Haters gonna hate. So let your haters hate, you know what, and make your change, because I know you can. I look out into this crowd, and I see 000 people who came out because they wanted to know how they could make a change, and I know that you can, and all of you watching at home can too because you have so much that you can do and that you believe in, and you can trade it across all these social media, through Facebook, through Twitter, through YouTube, through Reddit, through Tumblr, through whatever else you can think of. And you can make that change. You can take what you believe in and turn it into a cause and change it. And that spark that you've been hearing about all day today, you can use that spark that you have within you and turn it into a fire. Thank you. (Applause)

In 0000, I became the attorney general of the state of New Jersey. Before that, I'd been a criminal prosecutor, first in the Manhattan district attorney's office, and then at the United States Department of Justice. But when I became the attorney general, two things happened that changed the way I see criminal justice. The first is that I asked what I thought were really basic questions. I wanted to understand who we were arresting, who we were charging, and who we were putting in our nation's jails and prisons. I also wanted to understand if we were making decisions in a way that made us safer. And I couldn't get this information out. It turned out that most big criminal justice agencies like my own didn't track the things that matter. So after about a month of being incredibly frustrated, I walked down into a conference room that was filled with detectives and stacks and stacks of case files, and the detectives were sitting there with yellow legal pads taking notes. They were trying to get the information I was looking for by going through case by case for the past five years. And as you can imagine, when we finally got the results, they weren't good. It turned out that we were doing a lot of low-level drug cases on the streets just around the corner from our office in Trenton. The second thing that happened is that I spent the day in the Camden, New Jersey police department. Now, at that time, Camden, New Jersey, was the most dangerous city in America. I ran the Camden Police Department because of that. I spent the day in the police department, and I was taken into a room with senior police officials, all of whom were working hard and trying very hard to reduce crime in Camden. And what I saw in that room, as we talked about how to reduce crime, were a series of officers with a lot of little yellow sticky notes. And they would take a yellow sticky and they would write something on it and they would put it up on a board. And one of them said, "We had a robbery two weeks ago. We have no suspects." And another said, "We had a shooting in this neighborhood last week. We have no suspects." We weren't using data-driven policing. We were essentially trying to fight crime with yellow Post-it notes. Now, both of these things made me realize fundamentally that we were failing. We didn't even know who was in our criminal justice system, we didn't have any data about the things that mattered, and we didn't share data or use analytics or tools to help us make better decisions and to reduce crime. And for the first time, I started to think about how we made decisions. When I was an assistant D.A., and when I was a federal prosecutor, I looked at the cases in front of me, and I generally made decisions based on my instinct and my experience. When I became attorney general, I could look at the system as a whole, and what surprised me is that I found that that was exactly how we were doing it across the entire system -- in police departments, in prosecutors's offices, in courts and in jails. And what I learned very quickly is that we weren't doing a good job. So I wanted to do things differently. I wanted to introduce data and analytics and rigorous statistical analysis into our work. In short, I wanted to moneyball criminal justice. Now, moneyball, as many of you know, is what the Oakland A's did, where they used smart data and statistics to figure out how to pick players that would help them win games, and they went from a system that was based on baseball scouts who used to go out and watch players and use their instinct and experience, the scouts' instincts and experience, to pick players, from one to use smart data and rigorous statistical analysis to figure out how to pick players that would help them win games. It worked for the Oakland A's, and it worked in the state of New Jersey. We took Camden off the top of the list as the most dangerous city in America. We reduced murders there by 00 percent, which actually means 00 lives were saved. And we reduced all crime in the city by 00 percent. We also changed the way we did criminal prosecutions. So we went from doing low-level drug crimes that were outside our building to doing cases of statewide importance, on things like reducing violence with the most violent offenders, prosecuting street gangs, gun and drug trafficking, and political corruption. And all of this matters greatly, because public safety to me is the most important function of government. If we're not safe, we can't be educated, we can't be healthy, we can't do any of the other things we want to do in our lives. And we live in a country today where we face serious criminal justice problems. We have 00 million arrests every single year. The vast majority of those arrests are for low-level crimes, like misdemeanors, 00 to 00 percent. Less than five percent of all arrests are for violent crime. Yet we spend 00 billion, that's b for billion, dollars a year on state and local corrections costs. Right now, today, we have 0.0 million people in our jails and prisons. And we face unbelievable public safety challenges because we have a situation in which two thirds of the people in our jails are there waiting for trial. They haven't yet been convicted of a crime. They're just waiting for their day in court. And 00 percent of people come back. Our recidivism rate is amongst the highest in the world. Almost seven in 00 people who are released from prison will be rearrested in a constant cycle of crime and incarceration. So when I started my job at the Arnold Foundation, I came back to looking at a lot of these questions, and I came back to thinking about how we had used data and analytics to transform the way we did criminal justice in New Jersey. And when I look at the criminal justice system in the United States today, I feel the exact same way that I did about the state of New Jersey when I started there, which is that we absolutely have to do better, and I know that we can do better. So I decided to focus on using data and analytics to help make the most critical decision in public safety, and that decision is the determination of whether, when someone has been arrested, whether they pose a risk to public safety and should be detained, or whether they don't pose a risk to public safety and should be released. Everything that happens in criminal cases comes out of this one decision. It impacts everything. It impacts sentencing. It impacts whether someone gets drug treatment. It impacts crime and violence. And when I talk to judges around the United States, which I do all the time now, they all say the same thing, which is that we put dangerous people in jail, and we let non-dangerous, nonviolent people out. They mean it and they believe it. But when you start to look at the data, which, by the way, the judges don't have, when we start to look at the data, what we find time and time again, is that this isn't the case. We find low-risk offenders, which makes up 00 percent of our entire criminal justice population, we find that they're in jail. Take Leslie Chew, who was a Texas man who stole four blankets on a cold winter night. He was arrested, and he was kept in jail on 0,000 dollars bail, an amount that he could not afford to pay. And he stayed in jail for eight months until his case came up for trial, at a cost to taxpayers of more than 0,000 dollars. And at the other end of the spectrum, we're doing an equally terrible job. The people who we find are the highest-risk offenders, the people who we think have the highest likelihood of committing a new crime if they're released, we see nationally that 00 percent of those people are being released. The reason for this is the way we make decisions. Judges have the best intentions when they make these decisions about risk, but they're making them subjectively. They're like the baseball scouts 00 years ago who were using their instinct and their experience to try to decide what risk someone poses. They're being subjective, and we know what happens with subjective decision making, which is that we are often wrong. What we need in this space are strong data and analytics. What I decided to look for was a strong data and analytic risk assessment tool, something that would let judges actually understand with a scientific and objective way what the risk was that was posed by someone in front of them. I looked all over the country, and I found that between five and 00 percent of all U.S. jurisdictions actually use any type of risk assessment tool, and when I looked at these tools, I quickly realized why. They were unbelievably expensive to administer, they were time-consuming, they were limited to the local jurisdiction in which they'd been created. So basically, they couldn't be scaled or transferred to other places. So I went out and built a phenomenal team of data scientists and researchers and statisticians to build a universal risk assessment tool, so that every single judge in the United States of America can have an objective, scientific measure of risk. In the tool that we've built, what we did was we collected 0.0 million cases from all around the United States, from cities, from counties, from every single state in the country, the federal districts. And with those 0.0 million cases, which is the largest data set on pretrial in the United States today, we were able to basically find that there were 000-plus risk factors that we could look at to try to figure out what mattered most. And we found that there were nine specific things that mattered all across the country and that were the most highly predictive of risk. And so we built a universal risk assessment tool. And it looks like this. As you'll see, we put some information in, but most of it is incredibly simple, it's easy to use, it focuses on things like the defendant's prior convictions, whether they've been sentenced to incarceration, whether they've engaged in violence before, whether they've even failed to come back to court. And with this tool, we can predict three things. First, whether or not someone will commit a new crime if they're released. Second, for the first time, and I think this is incredibly important, we can predict whether someone will commit an act of violence if they're released. And that's the single most important thing that judges say when you talk to them. And third, we can predict whether someone will come back to court. And every single judge in the United States of America can use it, because it's been created on a universal data set. What judges see if they run the risk assessment tool is this -- it's a dashboard. At the top, you see the New Criminal Activity Score, six of course being the highest, and then in the middle you see, "Elevated risk of violence." What that says is that this person is someone who has an elevated risk of violence that the judge should look twice at. And then, towards the bottom, you see the Failure to Appear Score, which again is the likelihood that someone will come back to court. Now I want to say something really important. It's not that I think we should be eliminating the judge's instinct and experience from this process. I don't. I actually believe the problem that we see and the reason that we have these incredible system errors, where we're incarcerating low-level, nonviolent people and we're releasing high-risk, dangerous people, is that we don't have an objective measure of risk. But what I believe should happen is that we should take that data-driven risk assessment and combine that with the judge's instinct and experience to lead us to better decision making. The tool went statewide in Kentucky on July 0, and we're about to go up in a number of other U.S. jurisdictions. Our goal, quite simply, is that every single judge in the United States will use a data-driven risk tool within the next five years. We're now working on risk tools for prosecutors and for police officers as well, to try to take a system that runs today in America the same way it did 00 years ago, based on instinct and experience, and make it into one that runs on data and analytics. Now, the great news about all this, and we have a ton of work left to do, and we have a lot of culture to change, but the great news about all of it is that we know it works. It's why Google is Google, and it's why all these baseball teams use moneyball to win games. The great news for us as well is that it's the way that we can transform the American criminal justice system. It's how we can make our streets safer, we can reduce our prison costs, and we can make our system much fairer and more just. Some people call it data science. I call it moneyballing criminal justice. Thank you. (Applause)

I'd like to reimagine education. The last year has seen the invention of a new four-letter word. It starts with an M. MOOC: massive open online courses. Many organizations are offering these online courses to students all over the world, in the millions, for free. Anybody who has an Internet connection and the will to learn can access these great courses from excellent universities and get a credential at the end of it. Now, in this discussion today, I'm going to focus on a different aspect of MOOCs. We are taking what we are learning and the technologies we are developing in the large and applying them in the small to create a blended model of education to really reinvent and reimagine what we do in the classroom. Now, our classrooms could use change. So, here's a classroom at this little three-letter institute in the Northeast of America, MIT. And this was a classroom about 00 or 00 years ago, and this is a classroom today. What's changed? The seats are in color. Whoop-de-do. Education really hasn't changed in the past 000 years. The last big innovation in education was the printing press and the textbooks. Everything else has changed around us. You know, from healthcare to transportation, everything is different, but education hasn't changed. It's also been a real issue in terms of access. So what you see here is not a rock concert. And the person you see at the end of the stage is not Madonna. This is a classroom at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria. Now, we've all heard of distance education, but the students way in the back, 000 feet away from the instructor, I think they are undergoing long-distance education. Now, I really believe that we can transform education, both in quality and scale and access, through technology. For example, at edX, we are trying to transform education through online technologies. Given education has been calcified for 000 years, we really cannot think about reengineering it, micromanaging it. We really have to completely reimagine it. It's like going from ox carts to the airplane. Even the infrastructure has to change. Everything has to change. We need to go from lectures on the blackboard to online exercises, online videos. We have to go to interactive virtual laboratories and gamification. We have to go to completely online grading and peer interaction and discussion boards. Everything really has to change. So at edX and a number of other organizations, we are applying these technologies to education through MOOCs to really increase access to education. And you heard of this example, where, when we launched our very first course -- and this was an MIT-hard circuits and electronics course -- about a year and a half ago, 000,000 students from 000 countries enrolled in this course. And we had no marketing budget. Now, 000,000 is a big number. This number is bigger than the total number of alumni of MIT in its 000-year history. 0,000 students passed the course, and this was a hard course. 0,000 is also a big number. If I were to teach at MIT two semesters every year, I would have to teach for 00 years before I could teach this many students. Now these large numbers are just one part of the story. So today, I want to discuss a different aspect, the other side of MOOCs, take a different perspective. We are taking what we develop and learn in the large and applying it in the small to the classroom, to create a blended model of learning. But before I go into that, let me tell you a story. When my daughter turned 00, became a teenager, she stopped speaking English, and she began speaking this new language. I call it teen-lish. It's a digital language. It's got two sounds: a grunt and a silence. "Honey, come over for dinner." "Hmm." "Did you hear me?" Silence. (Laughter) "Can you listen to me?" "Hmm." So we had a real issue with communicating, and we were just not communicating, until one day I had this epiphany. I texted her. (Laughter) I got an instant response. I said, no, that must have been by accident. She must have thought, you know, some friend of hers was calling her. So I texted her again. Boom, another response. I said, this is great. And so since then, our life has changed. I text her, she responds. It's just been absolutely great. (Applause) So our millennial generation is built differently. Now, I'm older, and my youthful looks might belie that, but I'm not in the millennial generation. But our kids are really different. The millennial generation is completely comfortable with online technology. So why are we fighting it in the classroom? Let's not fight it. Let's embrace it. In fact, I believe -- and I have two fat thumbs, I can't text very well -- but I'm willing to bet that with evolution, our kids and their grandchildren will develop really, really little, itty-bitty thumbs to text much better, that evolution will fix all of that stuff. But what if we embraced technology, embraced the millennial generation's natural predilections, and really think about creating these online technologies, blend them into their lives. So here's what we can do. So rather than driving our kids into a classroom, herding them out there at 0 o'clock in the morning -- I hated going to class at 0 o'clock in the morning, so why are we forcing our kids to do that? So instead what you do is you have them watch videos and do interactive exercises in the comfort of their dorm rooms, in their bedroom, in the dining room, in the bathroom, wherever they're most creative. Then they come into the classroom for some in-person interaction. They can have discussions amongst themselves. They can solve problems together. They can work with the professor and have the professor answer their questions. In fact, with edX, when we were teaching our first course on circuits and electronics around the world, this was happening unbeknownst to us. Two high school teachers at the Sant High School in Mongolia had flipped their classroom, and they were using our video lectures and interactive exercises, where the learners in the high school, 00-year-olds, mind you, would go and do these things in their own homes and they would come into class, and as you see from this image here, they would interact with each other and do some physical laboratory work. And the only way we discovered this was they wrote a blog and we happened to stumble upon that blog. We were also doing other pilots. So we did a pilot experimental blended courses, working with San Jose State University in California, again, with the circuits and electronics course. You'll hear that a lot. That course has become sort of like our petri dish of learning. So there, the students would, again, the instructors flipped the classroom, blended online and in person, and the results were staggering. Now don't take these results to the bank just yet. Just wait a little bit longer as we experiment with this some more, but the early results are incredible. So traditionally, semester upon semester, for the past several years, this course, again, a hard course, had a failure rate of about 00 to 00 percent every semester. With this blended class late last year, the failure rate fell to nine percent. So the results can be extremely, extremely good. Now before we go too far into this, I'd like to spend some time discussing some key ideas. What are some key ideas that makes all of this work? One idea is active learning. The idea here is, rather than have students walk into class and watch lectures, we replace this with what we call lessons. Lessons are interleaved sequences of videos and interactive exercises. So a student might watch a five-, seven-minute video and follow that with an interactive exercise. Think of this as the ultimate Socratization of education. You teach by asking questions. And this is a form of learning called active learning, and really promoted by a very early paper, in 0000, by Craik and Lockhart, where they said and discovered that learning and retention really relates strongly to the depth of mental processing. Students learn much better when they are interacting with the material. The second idea is self-pacing. Now, when I went to a lecture hall, and if you were like me, by the fifth minute I would lose the professor. I wasn't all that smart, and I would be scrambling, taking notes, and then I would lose the lecture for the rest of the hour. Instead, wouldn't it be nice with online technologies, we offer videos and interactive engagements to students? They can hit the pause button. They can rewind the professor. Heck, they can even mute the professor. So this form of self-pacing can be very helpful to learning. The third idea that we have is instant feedback. With instant feedback, the computer grades exercises. I mean, how else do you teach 000,000 students? Your computer is grading all the exercises. And we've all submitted homeworks, and your grades come back two weeks later, you've forgotten all about it. I don't think I've still received some of my homeworks from my undergraduate days. Some are never graded. So with instant feedback, students can try to apply answers. If they get it wrong, they can get instant feedback. They can try it again and try it again, and this really becomes much more engaging. They get the instant feedback, and this little green check mark that you see here is becoming somewhat of a cult symbol at edX. Learners are telling us that they go to bed at night dreaming of the green check mark. In fact, one of our learners who took the circuits course early last year, he then went on to take a software course from Berkeley at the end of the year, and this is what the learner had to say on our discussion board when he just started that course about the green check mark: "Oh god; have I missed you." When's the last time you've seen students posting comments like this about homework? My colleague Ed Bertschinger, who heads up the physics department at MIT, has this to say about instant feedback: He indicated that instant feedback turns teaching moments into learning outcomes. The next big idea is gamification. You know, all learners engage really well with interactive videos and so on. You know, they would sit down and shoot alien spaceships all day long until they get it. So we applied these gamification techniques to learning, and we can build these online laboratories. How do you teach creativity? How do you teach design? We can do this through online labs and use computing power to build these online labs. So as this little video shows here, you can engage students much like they design with Legos. So here, the learners are building a circuit with Lego-like ease. And this can also be graded by the computer. Fifth is peer learning. So here, we use discussion forums and discussions and Facebook-like interaction not as a distraction, but to really help students learn. Let me tell you a story. When we did our circuits course for the 000,000 students, I didn't sleep for three nights leading up to the launch of the course. I told my TAs, okay, 00/0, we're going to be up monitoring the forum, answering questions. They had answered questions for 000 students. How do you do that for 000,000? So one night I'm sitting up there, at 0 a.m. at night, and I think there's this question from a student from Pakistan, and he asked a question, and I said, okay, let me go and type up an answer, I don't type all that fast, and I begin typing up the answer, and before I can finish, another student from Egypt popped in with an answer, not quite right, so I'm fixing the answer, and before I can finish, a student from the U.S. had popped in with a different answer. And then I sat back, fascinated. Boom, boom, boom, boom, the students were discussing and interacting with each other, and by 0 a.m. that night, I'm totally fascinated, having this epiphany, and by 0 a.m. in the morning, they had discovered the right answer. And all I had to do was go and bless it, "Good answer." So this is absolutely amazing, where students are learning from each other, and they're telling us that they are learning by teaching. Now this is all not just in the future. This is happening today. So we are applying these blended learning pilots in a number of universities and high schools around the world, from Tsinghua in China to the National University of Mongolia in Mongolia to Berkeley in California -- all over the world. And these kinds of technologies really help, the blended model can really help revolutionize education. It can also solve a practical problem of MOOCs, the business aspect. We can also license these MOOC courses to other universities, and therein lies a revenue model for MOOCs, where the university that licenses it with the professor can use these online courses like the next-generation textbook. They can use as much or as little as they like, and it becomes a tool in the teacher's arsenal. Finally, I would like to have you dream with me for a little bit. I would like us to really reimagine education. We will have to move from lecture halls to e-spaces. We have to move from books to tablets like the Aakash in India or the Raspberry Pi, 00 dollars. The Aakash is 00 dollars. We have to move from bricks-and-mortar school buildings to digital dormitories. But I think at the end of the day, I think we will still need one lecture hall in our universities. Otherwise, how else do we tell our grandchildren that your grandparents sat in that room in neat little rows like cornstalks and watched this professor at the end talk about content and, you know, you didn't even have a rewind button? Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)

Joe Kowan: I have stage fright. I've always had stage fright, and not just a little bit, it's a big bit. And it didn't even matter until I was 00. That's when I started writing songs, and even then I only played them for myself. Just knowing my roommates were in the same house made me uncomfortable. But after a couple of years, just writing songs wasn't enough. I had all these stories and ideas, and I wanted to share them with people, but physiologically, I couldn't do it. I had this irrational fear. But the more I wrote, and the more I practiced, the more I wanted to perform. So on the week of my 00th birthday, I decided I was going to go to this local open mic, and put this fear behind me. Well, when I got there, it was packed. There were like 00 people there. (Laughter) And they all looked angry. But I took a deep breath, and I signed up to play, and I felt pretty good. Pretty good, until about 00 minutes before my turn, when my whole body rebelled, and this wave of anxiety just washed over me. Now, when you experience fear, your sympathetic nervous system kicks in. So you have a rush of adrenaline, your heart rate increases, your breathing gets faster. Next your non-essential systems start to shut down, like digestion. (Laughter) So your mouth gets dry, and blood is routed away from your extremities, so your fingers don't work anymore. Your pupils dilate, your muscles contract, your Spidey sense tingles, basically your whole body is trigger-happy. (Laughter) That condition is not conducive to performing folk music. (Laughter) I mean, your nervous system is an idiot. Really? Two hundred thousand years of human evolution, and it still can't tell the difference between a saber tooth tiger and 00 folksingers on a Tuesday night open mic? (Laughter) I have never been more terrified -- until now. (Laughter and cheers) So then it was my turn, and somehow, I get myself onto the stage, I start my song, I open my mouth to sing the first line, and this completely horrible vibrato -- you know, when your voice wavers -- comes streaming out. And this is not the good kind of vibrato, like an opera singer has, this is my whole body just convulsing with fear. I mean, it's a nightmare. I'm embarrassed, the audience is clearly uncomfortable, they're focused on my discomfort. It was so bad. But that was my first real experience as a solo singer-songwriter. And something good did happen -- I had the tiniest little glimpse of that audience connection that I was hoping for. And I wanted more. But I knew I had to get past this nervousness. That night I promised myself: I would go back every week until I wasn't nervous anymore. And I did. I went back every single week, and sure enough, week after week, it didn't get any better. The same thing happened every week. (Laughter) I couldn't shake it. And that's when I had an epiphany. And I remember it really well, because I don't have a lot of epiphanies. (Laughter) All I had to do was write a song that exploits my nervousness. That only seems authentic when I have stage fright, and the more nervous I was, the better the song would be. Easy. So I started writing a song about having stage fright. First, fessing up to the problem, the physical manifestations, how I would feel, how the listener might feel. And then accounting for things like my shaky voice, and I knew I would be singing about a half-octave higher than normal, because I was nervous. By having a song that explained what was happening to me, while it was happening, that gave the audience permission to think about it. They didn't have to feel bad for me because I was nervous, they could experience that with me, and we were all one big happy, nervous, uncomfortable family. (Laughter) By thinking about my audience, by embracing and exploiting my problem, I was able to take something that was blocking my progress, and turn it into something that was essential for my success. And having the stage fright song let me get past that biggest issue right in the beginning of a performance. And then I could move on, and play the rest of my songs with just a little bit more ease. And eventually, over time, I didn't have to play the stage fright song at all. Except for when I was really nervous, like now. (Laughter) Would it be okay if I played the stage fright song for you? (Applause) Can I have a sip of water? (Music) Thank you. ♫ I'm not joking, you know, ♫ ♫ this stage fright is real. ♫ ♫ And if I'm up here trembling and singing, ♫ ♫ well, you'll know how I feel. ♫ ♫ And the mistake I'd be making, ♫ ♫ the tremolo caused by my whole body shaking. ♫ ♫ As you sit there feeling embarrassed for me, ♫ ♫ well, you don't have to be. ♫ ♫ Well, maybe just a little bit. ♫ (Laughter) ♫ And maybe I'll try to imagine you all without clothes. ♫ ♫ But singing in front of all naked strangers scares me more than anyone knows. ♫ ♫ Not to discuss this at length, ♫ ♫ but my body image was never my strength. ♫ ♫ So frankly, I wish that you all would get dressed, ♫ ♫ I mean, you're not even really naked. ♫ ♫ And I'm the one with the problem. ♫ ♫ And you tell me, don't worry so much, you'll be great. ♫ ♫ But I'm the one living with me ♫ ♫ and I know how I get. ♫ ♫ Your advice is gentle but late. ♫ ♫ If not just a bit patronizing. ♫ ♫ And that sarcastic tone doesn't help me when I sing. ♫ ♫ But we shouldn't talk about these things right now, ♫ ♫ really, I'm up on stage, and you're in the crowd. Hi. ♫ ♫ And I'm not making fun of unnurtured, irrrational fear, ♫ ♫ and if I wasn't ready to face this, ♫ ♫ I sure as hell wouldn't be here. ♫ ♫ But if I belt one note out clearly, ♫ ♫ you'll know I'm recovering slowly but surely. ♫ ♫ And maybe next week, I'll set my guitar ringin' ♫ ♫ my voice clear as water, and everyone singin'. ♫ ♫ But probably I'll just get up and start groovin', ♫ ♫ my vocal cords movin', ♫ ♫ at speeds slightly faster than sound. ♫ (Applause)

I have spent the last years trying to resolve two enigmas: Why is productivity so disappointing in all the companies where I work? I have worked with more than 000 companies. Despite all the technological advances -- computers, I.T., communications, telecommunications, the Internet. Enigma number two: Why is there so little engagement at work? Why do people feel so miserable, even actively disengaged? Disengaging their colleagues. Acting against the interest of their company. Despite all the affiliation events, the celebration, the people initiatives, the leadership development programs to train managers on how to better motivate their teams. At the beginning, I thought there was a chicken and egg issue: Because people are less engaged, they are less productive. Or vice versa, because they are less productive, we put more pressure and they are less engaged. But as we were doing our analysis we realized that there was a common root cause to these two issues that relates, in fact, to the basic pillars of management. The way we organize is based on two pillars. The hard -- structure, processes, systems. The soft -- feelings, sentiments, interpersonal relationships, traits, personality. And whenever a company reorganizes, restructures, reengineers, goes through a cultural transformation program, it chooses these two pillars. Now, we try to refine them, we try to combine them. The real issue is -- and this is the answer to the two enigmas -- these pillars are obsolete. Everything you read in business books is based either on one or the other or their combination. They are obsolete. How do they work when you try to use these approaches in front of the new complexity of business? The hard approach, basically is that you start from strategy, requirements, structures, processes, systems, KPIs, scorecards, committees, headquarters, hubs, clusters, you name it. I forgot all the metrics, incentives, committees, middle offices and interfaces. What happens basically on the left, you have more complexity, the new complexity of business. We need quality, cost, reliability, speed. And every time there is a new requirement, we use the same approach. We create dedicated structure processed systems, basically to deal with the new complexity of business. The hard approach creates just complicatedness in the organization. Let's take an example. An automotive company, the engineering division is a five-dimensional matrix. If you open any cell of the matrix, you find another 00-dimensional matrix. You have Mr. Noise, Mr. Petrol Consumption, Mr. Anti-Collision Properties. For any new requirement, you have a dedicated function in charge of aligning engineers against the new requirement. What happens when the new requirement emerges? Some years ago, a new requirement appeared on the marketplace: the length of the warranty period. So therefore the new requirement is repairability, making cars easy to repair. Otherwise when you bring the car to the garage to fix the light, if you have to remove the engine to access the lights, the car will have to stay one week in the garage instead of two hours, and the warranty budget will explode. So, what was the solution using the hard approach? If repairability is the new requirement, the solution is to create a new function, Mr. Repairability. And Mr. Repairability creates the repairability process. With a repairability scorecard, with a repairability metric and eventually repairability incentive. That came on top of 00 other KPIs. What percentage of these people is variable compensation? Twenty percent at most, divided by 00 KPIs, repairability makes a difference of 0.0 percent. What difference did it make in their actions, their choices to simplify? Zero. But what occurs for zero impact? Mr. Repairability, process, scorecard, evaluation, coordination with the 00 other coordinators to have zero impact. Now, in front of the new complexity of business, the only solution is not drawing boxes with reporting lines. It is basically the interplay. How the parts work together. The connections, the interactions, the synapses. It is not the skeleton of boxes, it is the nervous system of adaptiveness and intelligence. You know, you could call it cooperation, basically. Whenever people cooperate, they use less resources. In everything. You know, the repairability issue is a cooperation problem. When you design cars, please take into account the needs of those who will repair the cars in the after sales garages. When we don't cooperate we need more time, more equipment, more systems, more teams. We need -- When procurement, supply chain, manufacturing don't cooperate we need more stock, more inventories, more working capital. Who will pay for that? Shareholders? Customers? No, they will refuse. So who is left? The employees, who have to compensate through their super individual efforts for the lack of cooperation. Stress, burnout, they are overwhelmed, accidents. No wonder they disengage. How do the hard and the soft try to foster cooperation? The hard: In banks, when there is a problem between the back office and the front office, they don't cooperate. What is the solution? They create a middle office. What happens one year later? Instead of one problem between the back and the front, now I have two problems. Between the back and the middle and between the middle and the front. Plus I have to pay for the middle office. The hard approach is unable to foster cooperation. It can only add new boxes, new bones in the skeleton. The soft approach: To make people cooperate, we need to make them like each other. Improve interpersonal feelings, the more people like each other, the more they will cooperate. It is totally wrong. It is even counterproductive. Look, at home I have two TVs. Why? Precisely not to have to cooperate with my wife. (Laughter) Not to have to impose tradeoffs to my wife. And why I try not to impose tradeoffs to my wife is precisely because I love my wife. If I didn't love my wife, one TV would be enough: You will watch my favorite football game, if you are not happy, how is the book or the door? (Laughter) The more we like each other, the more we avoid the real cooperation that would strain our relationships by imposing tough tradeoffs. And we go for a second TV or we escalate the decision above for arbitration. Definitely, these approaches are obsolete. To deal with complexity, to enhance the nervous system, we have created what we call the smart simplicity approach based on simple rules. Simple rule number one: Understand what others do. What is their real work? We need to go beyond the boxes, the job descriptions, beyond the surface of the container, to understand the real content. Me, designer, if I put a wire here, I know that it will mean that we will have to remove the engine to access the lights. Second, you need to reenforce integrators. Integrators are not middle offices, they are managers, existing managers that you reinforce so that they have power and interest to make others cooperate. How can you reinforce your managers as integrators? By removing layers. When there are too many layers people are too far from the action, therefore they need KPIs, metrics, they need poor proxies for reality. They don't understand reality and they add the complicatedness of metrics, KPIs. By removing rules -- the bigger we are, the more we need integrators, therefore the less rules we must have, to give discretionary power to managers. And we do the opposite -- the bigger we are, the more rules we create. And we end up with the Encyclopedia Britannica of rules. You need to increase the quanitity of power so that you can empower everybody to use their judgment, their intelligence. You must give more cards to people so that they have the critical mass of cards to take the risk to cooperate, to move out of insulation. Otherwise, they will withdraw. They will disengage. These rules, they come from game theory and organizational sociology. You can increase the shadow of the future. Create feedback loops that expose people to the consequences of their actions. This is what the automotive company did when they saw that Mr. Repairability had no impact. They said to the design engineers: Now, in three years, when the new car is launched on the market, you will move to the after sales network, and become in charge of the warranty budget, and if the warranty budget explodes, it will explode in your face. (Laughter) Much more powerful than 0.0 percent variable compensation. You need also to increase reciprocity, by removing the buffers that make us self-sufficient. When you remove these buffers, you hold me by the nose, I hold you by the ear. We will cooperate. Remove the second TV. There are many second TVs at work that don't create value, they just provide dysfunctional self-sufficiency. You need to reward those who cooperate and blame those who don't cooperate. The CEO of The Lego Group, Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, has a great way to use it. He says, blame is not for failure, it is for failing to help or ask for help. It changes everything. Suddenly it becomes in my interest to be transparent on my real weaknesses, my real forecast, because I know I will not be blamed if I fail, but if I fail to help or ask for help. When you do this, it has a lot of implications on organizational design. You stop drawing boxes, dotted lines, full lines; you look at their interplay. It has a lot of implications on financial policies that we use. On human resource management practices. When you do that, you can manage complexity, the new complexity of business, without getting complicated. You create more value with lower cost. You simultaneously improve performance and satisfaction at work because you have removed the common root cause that hinders both. Complicatedness: This is your battle, business leaders. The real battle is not against competitors. This is rubbish, very abstract. When do we meet competitors to fight them? The real battle is against ourselves, against our bureaucracy, our complicatedness. Only you can fight, can do it. Thank you. (Applause)

Some of my most wonderful memories of childhood are of spending time with my grandmother, Mamar, in our four-family home in Brooklyn, New York. Her apartment was an oasis. It was a place where I could sneak a cup of coffee, which was really warm milk with just a touch of caffeine. She loved life. And although she worked in a factory, she saved her pennies and she traveled to Europe. And I remember poring over those pictures with her and then dancing with her to her favorite music. And then, when I was eight and she was 00, something changed. She no longer worked or traveled. She no longer danced. There were no more coffee times. My mother missed work and took her to doctors who couldn't make a diagnosis. And my father, who worked at night, would spend every afternoon with her, just to make sure she ate. Her care became all-consuming for our family. And by the time a diagnosis was made, she was in a deep spiral. Now many of you will recognize her symptoms. My grandmother had depression. A deep, life-altering depression, from which she never recovered. And back then, so little was known about depression. But even today, 00 years later, there's still so much more to learn. Today, we know that women are 00 percent more likely to experience depression over their lifetimes compared with men. And even with this high prevalence, women are misdiagnosed between 00 and 00 percent of the time. Now we know that women are more likely to experience the symptoms of fatigue, sleep disturbance, pain and anxiety compared with men. And these symptoms are often overlooked as symptoms of depression. And it isn't only depression in which these sex differences occur, but they occur across so many diseases. So it's my grandmother's struggles that have really led me on a lifelong quest. And today, I lead a center in which the mission is to discover why these sex differences occur and to use that knowledge to improve the health of women. Today, we know that every cell has a sex. Now, that's a term coined by the Institute of Medicine. And what it means is that men and women are different down to the cellular and molecular levels. It means that we're different across all of our organs. From our brains to our hearts, our lungs, our joints. Now, it was only 00 years ago that we hardly had any data on women's health beyond our reproductive functions. But then in 0000, the NIH Revitalization Act was signed into law. And what this law did was it mandated that women and minorities be included in clinical trials that were funded by the National Institutes of Health. And in many ways, the law has worked. Women are now routinely included in clinical studies, and we've learned that there are major differences in the ways that women and men experience disease. But remarkably, what we have learned about these differences is often overlooked. So, we have to ask ourselves the question: Why leave women's health to chance? And we're leaving it to chance in two ways. The first is that there is so much more to learn and we're not making the investment in fully understanding the extent of these sex differences. And the second is that we aren't taking what we have learned, and routinely applying it in clinical care. We are just not doing enough. So, I'm going to share with you three examples of where sex differences have impacted the health of women, and where we need to do more. Let's start with heart disease. It's the number one killer of women in the United States today. This is the face of heart disease. Linda is a middle-aged woman, who had a stent placed in one of the arteries going to her heart. When she had recurring symptoms she went back to her doctor. Her doctor did the gold standard test: a cardiac catheterization. It showed no blockages. Linda's symptoms continued. She had to stop working. And that's when she found us. When Linda came to us, we did another cardiac catheterization and this time, we found clues. But we needed another test to make the diagnosis. So we did a test called an intracoronary ultrasound, where you use soundwaves to look at the artery from the inside out. And what we found was that Linda's disease didn't look like the typical male disease. The typical male disease looks like this. There's a discrete blockage or stenosis. Linda's disease, like the disease of so many women, looks like this. The plaque is laid down more evenly, more diffusely along the artery, and it's harder to see. So for Linda, and for so many women, the gold standard test wasn't gold. Now, Linda received the right treatment. She went back to her life and, fortunately, today she is doing well. But Linda was lucky. She found us, we found her disease. But for too many women, that's not the case. We have the tools. We have the technology to make the diagnosis. But it's all too often that these sex diffferences are overlooked. So what about treatment? A landmark study that was published two years ago asked the very important question: What are the most effective treatments for heart disease in women? The authors looked at papers written over a 00-year period, and hundreds had to be thrown out. And what they found out was that of those that were tossed out, 00 percent were excluded because even though women were included in the studies, the analysis didn't differentiate between women and men. What a lost opportunity. The money had been spent and we didn't learn how women fared. And these studies could not contribute one iota to the very, very important question, what are the most effective treatments for heart disease in women? I want to introduce you to Hortense, my godmother, Hung Wei, a relative of a colleague, and somebody you may recognize -- Dana, Christopher Reeve's wife. All three women have something very important in common. All three were diagnosed with lung cancer, the number one cancer killer of women in the United States today. All three were nonsmokers. Sadly, Dana and Hung Wei died of their disease. Today, what we know is that women who are nonsmokers are three times more likely to be diagnosed with lung cancer than are men who are nonsmokers. Now interestingly, when women are diagnosed with lung cancer, their survival tends to be better than that of men. Now, here are some clues. Our investigators have found that there are certain genes in the lung tumor cells of both women and men. And these genes are activated mainly by estrogen. And when these genes are over-expressed, it's associated with improved survival only in young women. Now this is a very early finding and we don't yet know whether it has relevance to clinical care. But it's findings like this that may provide hope and may provide an opportunity to save lives of both women and men. Now, let me share with you an example of when we do consider sex differences, it can drive the science. Several years ago a new lung cancer drug was being evaluated, and when the authors looked at whose tumors shrank, they found that 00 percent were women. This led them to ask the question: Well, why? And what they found was that the genetic mutations that the drug targeted were far more common in women. And what this has led to is a more personalized approach to the treatment of lung cancer that also includes sex. This is what we can accomplish when we don't leave women's health to chance. We know that when you invest in research, you get results. Take a look at the death rate from breast cancer over time. And now take a look at the death rates from lung cancer in women over time. Now let's look at the dollars invested in breast cancer -- these are the dollars invested per death -- and the dollars invested in lung cancer. Now, it's clear that our investment in breast cancer has produced results. They may not be fast enough, but it has produced results. We can do the same for lung cancer and for every other disease. So let's go back to depression. Depression is the number one cause of disability in women in the world today. Our investigators have found that there are differences in the brains of women and men in the areas that are connected with mood. And when you put men and women in a functional MRI scanner -- that's the kind of scanner that shows how the brain is functioning when it's activated -- so you put them in the scanner and you expose them to stress. You can actually see the difference. And it's findings like this that we believe hold some of the clues for why we see these very significant sex differences in depression. But even though we know that these differences occur, 00 percent of the brain research that begins in animals is done in either male animals or animals in whom the sex is not identified. So, I think we have to ask again the question: Why leave women's health to chance? And this is a question that haunts those of us in science and medicine who believe that we are on the verge of being able to dramatically improve the health of women. We know that every cell has a sex. We know that these differences are often overlooked. And therefore we know that women are not getting the full benefit of modern science and medicine today. We have the tools but we lack the collective will and momentum. Women's health is an equal rights issue as important as equal pay. And it's an issue of the quality and the integrity of science and medicine. (Applause) So imagine the momentum we could achieve in advancing the health of women if we considered whether these sex differences were present at the very beginning of designing research. Or if we analyzed our data by sex. So, people often ask me: What can I do? And here's what I suggest: First, I suggest that you think about women's health in the same way that you think and care about other causes that are important to you. And second, and equally as important, that as a woman, you have to ask your doctor and the doctors who are caring for those who you love: Is this disease or treatment different in women? Now, this is a profound question because the answer is likely yes, but your doctor may not know the answer, at least not yet. But if you ask the question, your doctor will very likely go looking for the answer. And this is so important, not only for ourselves, but for all of those whom we love. Whether it be a mother, a daughter, a sister, a friend or a grandmother. It was my grandmother's suffering that inspired my work to improve the health of women. That's her legacy. Our legacy can be to improve the health of women for this generation and for generations to come. Thank you. (Applause)

So when I was in Morocco, in Casablanca, not so long ago, I met a young unmarried mother called Faiza. Faiza showed me photos of her infant son and she told me the story of his conception, pregnancy, and delivery. It was a remarkable tale, but Faiza saved the best for last. "You know, I am a virgin," she told me. "I have two medical certificates to prove it." This is the modern Middle East, where two millennia after the coming of Christ, virgin births are still a fact of life. Faiza's story is just one of hundreds I've heard over the years, traveling across the Arab region talking to people about sex. Now, I know this might sound like a dream job, or possibly a highly dubious occupation, but for me, it's something else altogether. I'm half Egyptian, and I'm Muslim. But I grew up in Canada, far from my Arab roots. Like so many who straddle East and West, I've been drawn, over the years, to try to better understand my origins. That I chose to look at sex comes from my background in HIV/AIDS, as a writer and a researcher and an activist. Sex lies at the heart of an emerging epidemic in the Middle East and North Africa, which is one of only two regions in the world where HIV/AIDS is still on the rise. Now sexuality is an incredibly powerful lens with which to study any society, because what happens in our intimate lives is reflected by forces on a bigger stage: in politics and economics, in religion and tradition, in gender and generations. As I found, if you really want to know a people, you start by looking inside their bedrooms. Now to be sure, the Arab world is vast and varied. But running across it are three red lines -- these are topics you are not supposed to challenge in word or deed. The first of these is politics. But the Arab Spring has changed all that, in uprisings which have blossomed across the region since 0000. Now while those in power, old and new, continue to cling to business as usual, millions are still pushing back, and pushing forward to what they hope will be a better life. That second red line is religion. But now religion and politics are connected, with the rise of such groups as the Muslim Brotherhood. And some people, at least, are starting to ask questions about the role of Islam in public and private life. You know, as for that third red line, that off-limits subject, what do you think it might be? Audience: Sex. Shereen El Feki: Louder, I can't hear you. Audience: Sex. SEF: Again, please don't be shy. Audience: Sex. SEF: Absolutely, that's right, it's sex. (Laughter) Across the Arab region, the only accepted context for sex is marriage -- approved by your parents, sanctioned by religion and registered by the state. Marriage is your ticket to adulthood. If you don't tie the knot, you can't move out of your parents' place, and you're not supposed to be having sex, and you're definitely not supposed to be having children. It's a social citadel; it's an impregnable fortress which resists any assault, any alternative. And around the fortress is this vast field of taboo against premarital sex, against condoms, against abortion, against homosexuality, you name it. Faiza was living proof of this. Her virginity statement was not a piece of wishful thinking. Although the major religions of the region extoll premarital chastity, in a patriarchy, boys will be boys. Men have sex before marriage, and people more or less turn a blind eye. Not so for women, who are expected to be virgins on their wedding night -- that is, to turn up with your hymen intact. This is not a question of individual concern, this is a matter of family honor, and in particular, men's honor. And so women and their relatives will go to great lengths to preserve this tiny piece of anatomy -- from female genital mutilation, to virginity testing, to hymen repair surgery. Faiza chose a different route: non-vaginal sex. Only she became pregnant all the same. But Faiza didn't actually realize this, because there's so little sexuality education in schools, and so little communication in the family. When her condition became hard to hide, Faiza's mother helped her flee her father and brothers. This is because honor killings are a real threat for untold numbers of women in the Arab region. And so when Faiza eventually fetched up at a hospital in Casablanca, the man who offered to help her, instead tried to rape her. Sadly, Faiza is not alone. In Egypt, where my research is focused, I have seen plenty of trouble in and out of the citadel. There are legions of young men who can't afford to get married, because marriage has become a very expensive proposition. They are expected to bear the burden of costs in married life, but they can't find jobs. This is one of the major drivers of the recent uprisings, and it is one of the reasons for the rising age of marriage in much of the Arab region. There are career women who want to get married, but can't find a husband, because they defy gender expectations, or as one young female doctor in Tunisia put it to me, "The women, they are becoming more and more open. But the man, he is still at the prehistoric stage." And then there are men and women who cross the heterosexual line, who have sex with their own sex, or who have a different gender identity. They are on the receiving end of laws which punish their activities, even their appearance. And they face a daily struggle with social stigma, with family despair, and with religious fire and brimstone. Now, it's not as if it's all rosy in the marital bed either. Couples who are looking for greater happiness, greater sexual happiness in their married lives, but are at a loss of how to achieve it, especially wives, who are afraid of being seen as bad women if they show some spark in the bedroom. And then there are those whose marriages are actually a veil for prostitution. They have been sold by their families, often to wealthy Arab tourists. This is just one face of a booming sex trade across the Arab region. Now raise your hand if any of this is sounding familiar to you, from your part of the world. Yeah. It's not as if the Arab world has a monopoly on sexual hangups. And although we don't yet have an Arab Kinsey Report to tell us exactly what's happening inside bedrooms across the Arab region, It's pretty clear that something is not right. Double standards for men and women, sex as a source of shame, family control limiting individual choices, and a vast gulf between appearance and reality: what people are doing and what they're willing to admit to, and a general reluctance to move beyond private whispers to a serious and sustained public discussion. As one doctor in Cairo summed it up for me, "Here, sex is the opposite of sport. Football, everybody talks about it, but hardly anyone plays. But sex, everybody is doing it, but nobody wants to talk about it." (Laughter) (Music) (In Arabic) SEF: I want to give you a piece of advice, which if you follow it, will make you happy in life. When your husband reaches out to you, when he seizes a part of your body, sigh deeply and look at him lustily. When he penetrates you with his penis, try to talk flirtatiously and move yourself in harmony with him. Hot stuff! And it might sound that these handy hints come from "The Joy of Sex" or YouPorn. But in fact, they come from a 00th-century Arabic book called "The Encyclopedia of Pleasure," which covers sex from aphrodisiacs to zoophilia, and everything in between. The Encyclopedia is just one in a long line of Arabic erotica, much of it written by religious scholars. Going right back to the Prophet Muhammad, there is a rich tradition in Islam of talking frankly about sex: not just its problems, but also its pleasures, and not just for men, but also for women. A thousand years ago, we used to have whole dictionaries of sex in Arabic. Words to cover every conceivable sexual feature, position and preference, a body of language that was rich enough to make up the body of the woman you see on this page. Today, this history is largely unknown in the Arab region. Even by educated people, who often feel more comfortable talking about sex in a foreign language than they do in their own tongue. Today's sexual landscape looks a lot like Europe and America on the brink of the sexual revolution. But while the West has opened on sex, what we found is that Arab societies appear to have been moving in the opposite direction. In Egypt and many of its neighbors, this closing down is part of a wider closing in political, social and cultural thought. And it is the product of a complex historical process, one which has gained ground with the rise of Islamic conservatism since the late 0000s. "Just say no" is what conservatives around the world say to any challenge to the sexual status quo. In the Arab region, they brand these attempts as a Western conspiracy to undermine traditional Arab and Islamic values. But what's really at stake here is one of their most powerful tools of control: sex wrapped up in religion. But history shows us that even as recently as our fathers' and grandfathers' day, there have been times of greater pragmatism, and tolerance, and a willingness to consider other interpretations: be it abortion, or masturbation, or even the incendiary topic of homosexuality. It is not black and white, as conservatives would have us believe. In these, as in so many other matters, Islam offers us at least 00 shades of gray. (Laughter) Over my travels, I've met men and women across the Arab region who've been exploring that spectrum -- sexologists who are trying to help couples find greater happiness in their marriages, innovators who are managing to get sexuality education into schools, small groups of men and women, lesbian, gay, transgendered, transsexual, who are reaching out to their peers with online initiatives and real-world support. Women, and increasingly men, who are starting to speak out and push back against sexual violence on the streets and in the home. Groups that are trying to help sex workers protect themselves against HIV and other occupational hazards, and NGOs that are helping unwed mothers like Faiza find a place in society, and critically, stay with their kids. Now these efforts are small, they're often underfunded, and they face formidable opposition. But I am optimistic that, in the long run, times are changing, and they and their ideas will gain ground. Social change doesn't happen in the Arab region through dramatic confrontation, beating or indeed baring of breasts, but rather through negotiation. What we're talking here is not about a sexual revolution, but a sexual evolution, learning from other parts of the world, adapting to local conditions, forging our own path, not following one blazed by another. That path, I hope, will one day lead us to the right to control our own bodies, and to access the information and services we need to lead satisfying and safe sexual lives. The right to express our ideas freely, to marry whom we choose, to choose our own partners, to be sexually active or not, to decide whether to have children and when, all this without violence or force or discrimination. Now we are very far from this across the Arab region, and so much needs to change: law, education, media, the economy, the list goes on and on, and it is the work of a generation, at least. But it begins with a journey that I myself have made, asking hard questions of received wisdoms in sexual life. And it is a journey which has only served to strengthen my faith, and my appreciation of local histories and cultures by showing me possibilities where I once only saw absolutes. Now given the turmoil in many countries in the Arab region, talking about sex, challenging the taboos, seeking alternatives might sound like something of a luxury. But at this critical moment in history, if we do not anchor freedom and justice, dignity and equality, privacy and autonomy in our personal lives, in our sexual lives, we will find it very hard to achieve in public life. The political and the sexual are intimate bedfellows, and that is true for us all. no matter where we live and love. Thank you. (Applause)

My job is to design, build and study robots that communicate with people. But this story doesn't start with robotics at all, it starts with animation. When I first saw Pixar's "Luxo Jr.," I was amazed by how much emotion they could put into something as trivial as a desk lamp. I mean, look at them -- at the end of this movie, you actually feel something for two pieces of furniture. (Laughter) And I said, I have to learn how to do this. So I made a really bad career decision. And that's what my mom was like when I did it. (Laughter) I left a very cozy tech job in Israel at a nice software company and I moved to New York to study animation. And there I lived in a collapsing apartment building in Harlem with roommates. I'm not using this phrase metaphorically, the ceiling actually collapsed one day in our living room. Whenever they did those news stories about building violations in New York, they would put the report in front of our building. As kind of like a backdrop to show how bad things are. Anyway, during the day I went to school and at night I would sit and draw frame by frame of pencil animation. And I learned two surprising lessons -- one of them was that when you want to arouse emotions, it doesn't matter so much how something looks, it's all in the motion -- it's in the timing of how the thing moves. And the second, was something one of our teachers told us. He actually did the weasel in Ice Age. And he said: "As an animator you are not a director, you're an actor." So, if you want to find the right motion for a character, don't think about it, go use your body to find it -- stand in front of a mirror, act it out in front of a camera -- whatever you need. And then put it back in your character. A year later I found myself at MIT in the robotic life group, it was one of the first groups researching the relationships between humans and robots. And I still had this dream to make an actual, physical Luxo Jr. lamp. But I found that robots didn't move at all in this engaging way that I was used to for my animation studies. Instead, they were all -- how should I put it, they were all kind of robotic. (Laughter) And I thought, what if I took whatever I learned in animation school, and used that to design my robotic desk lamp. So I went and designed frame by frame to try to make this robot as graceful and engaging as possible. And here when you see the robot interacting with me on a desktop. And I'm actually redesigning the robot so, unbeknownst to itself, it's kind of digging its own grave by helping me. (Laughter) I wanted it to be less of a mechanical structure giving me light, and more of a helpful, kind of quiet apprentice that's always there when you need it and doesn't really interfere. And when, for example, I'm looking for a battery that I can't find, in a subtle way, it will show me where the battery is. So you can see my confusion here. I'm not an actor. And I want you to notice how the same mechanical structure can at one point, just by the way it moves seem gentle and caring -- and in the other case, seem violent and confrontational. And it's the same structure, just the motion is different. Actor: "You want to know something? Well, you want to know something? He was already dead! Just laying there, eyes glazed over!" (Laughter) But, moving in graceful ways is just one building block of this whole structure called human-robot interaction. I was at the time doing my Ph.D., I was working on human robot teamwork; teams of humans and robots working together. I was studying the engineering, the psychology, the philosophy of teamwork. And at the same time I found myself in my own kind of teamwork situation with a good friend of mine who is actually here. And in that situation we can easily imagine robots in the near future being there with us. It was after a Passover seder. We were folding up a lot of folding chairs, and I was amazed at how quickly we found our own rhythm. Everybody did their own part. We didn't have to divide our tasks. We didn't have to communicate verbally about this. It all just happened. And I thought, humans and robots don't look at all like this. When humans and robots interact, it's much more like a chess game. The human does a thing, the robot analyzes whatever the human did, then the robot decides what to do next, plans it and does it. And then the human waits, until it's their turn again. So, it's much more like a chess game and that makes sense because chess is great for mathematicians and computer scientists. It's all about information analysis, decision making and planning. But I wanted my robot to be less of a chess player, and more like a doer that just clicks and works together. So I made my second horrible career choice: I decided to study acting for a semester. I took off from a Ph.D. I went to acting classes. I actually participated in a play, I hope theres no video of that around still. And I got every book I could find about acting, including one from the 00th century that I got from the library. And I was really amazed because my name was the second name on the list -- the previous name was in 0000. (Laughter) And this book was kind of waiting for 000 years to be rediscovered for robotics. And this book shows actors how to move every muscle in the body to match every kind of emotion that they want to express. But the real revelation was when I learned about method acting. It became very popular in the 00th century. And method acting said, you don't have to plan every muscle in your body. Instead you have to use your body to find the right movement. You have to use your sense memory to reconstruct the emotions and kind of think with your body to find the right expression. Improvise, play off yor scene partner. And this came at the same time as I was reading about this trend in cognitive psychology called embodied cognition. Which also talks about the same ideas -- We use our bodies to think, we don't just think with our brains and use our bodies to move. but our bodies feed back into our brain to generate the way that we behave. And it was like a lightning bolt. I went back to my office. I wrote this paper -- which I never really published called "Acting Lessons for Artificial Intelligence." And I even took another month to do what was then the first theater play with a human and a robot acting together. That's what you saw before with the actors. And I thought: How can we make an artificial intelligence model -- computer, computational model -- that will model some of these ideas of improvisation, of taking risks, of taking chances, even of making mistakes. Maybe it can make for better robotic teammates. So I worked for quite a long time on these models and I implemented them on a number of robots. Here you can see a very early example with the robots trying to use this embodied artificial intelligence, to try to match my movements as closely as possible, sort of like a game. Let's look at it. You can see when I psych it out, it gets fooled. And it's a little bit like what you might see actors do when they try to mirror each other to find the right synchrony between them. And then, I did another experiment, and I got people off the street to use the robotic desk lamp, and try out this idea of embodied artificial intelligence. So, I actually used two kinds of brains for the same robot. The robot is the same lamp that you saw, and I put in it two brains. For one half of the people, I put in a brain that's kind of the traditional, calculated robotic brain. It waits for its turn, it analyzes everything, it plans. Let's call it the calculated brain. The other got more the stage actor, risk taker brain. Let's call it the adventurous brain. It sometimes acts without knowing everything it has to know. It sometimes makes mistakes and corrects them. And I had them do this very tedious task that took almost 00 minutes and they had to work together. Somehow simulating like a factory job of repetitively doing the same thing. And what I found was that people actually loved the adventurous robot. And they thought it was more intelligent, more committed, a better member of the team, contributed to the success of the team more. They even called it 'he' and 'she,' whereas people with the calculated brain called it 'it.' And nobody ever called it 'he' or 'she'. When they talked about it after the task with the adventurous brain, they said, "By the end, we were good friends and high-fived mentally." Whatever that means. (Laughter) Sounds painful. Whereas the people with the calculated brain said it was just like a lazy apprentice. It only did what it was supposed to do and nothing more. Which is almost what people expect robots to do, so I was surprised that people had higher expectations of robots, than what anybody in robotics thought robots should be doing. And in a way, I thought, maybe it's time -- just like method acting changed the way people thought about acting in the 00th century, from going from the very calculated, planned way of behaving, to a more intuitive, risk-taking, embodied way of behaving. Maybe it's time for robots to have the same kind of revolution. A few years later, I was at my next research job at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, and I was working in a group dealing with robotic musicians. And I thought, music, that's the perfect place to look at teamwork, coordination, timing, improvisation -- and we just got this robot playing marimba. Marimba, for everybody who was like me, it was this huge, wooden xylophone. And, when I was looking at this, I looked at other works in human-robot improvisation -- yes, there are other works in human-robot improvisation -- and they were also a little bit like a chess game. The human would play, the robot would analyze what was played, would improvise their own part. So, this is what musicians called a call and response interaction, and it also fits very well, robots and artificial intelligence. But I thought, if I use the same ideas I used in the theater play and in the teamwork studies, maybe I can make the robots jam together like a band. Everybody's riffing off each other, nobody is stopping it for a moment. And so, I tried to do the same things, this time with music, where the robot doesn't really know what it's about to play. It just sort of moves its body and uses opportunities to play, And does what my jazz teacher when I was 00 taught me. She said, when you improvise, sometimes you don't know what you're doing and you're still doing it. And so I tried to make a robot that doesn't actually know what it's doing, but it's still doing it. So let's look at a few seconds from this performance. Where the robot listens to the human musician and improvises. And then, look at how the human musician also responds to what the robot is doing, and picking up from its behavior. And at some point can even be surprised by what the robot came up with. (Music) (Applause) Being a musician is not just about making notes, otherwise nobody would ever go see a live show. Musicians also communicate with their bodies, with other band members, with the audience, they use their bodies to express the music. And I thought, we already have a robot musician on stage, why not make it be a full-fledged musician. And I started designing a socially expressive head for the robot. The head does't actually touch the marimba, it just expresses what the music is like. These are some napkin sketches from a bar in Atlanta, that was dangerously located exactly halfway between my lab and my home. (Laughter) So I spent, I would say on average, three to four hours a day there. I think. (Laughter) And I went back to my animation tools and tried to figure out not just what a robotic musician would look like, but especially what a robotic musician would move like. To sort of show that it doesn't like what the other person is playing -- and maybe show whatever beat it's feeling at the moment. So we ended up actually getting the money to build this robot, which was nice. I'm going to show you now the same kind of performance, this time with a socially expressive head. And notice one thing -- how the robot is really showing us the beat it's picking up from the human. We're also giving the human a sense that the robot knows what it's doing. And also how it changes the way it moves as soon as it starts its own solo. (Music) Now it's looking at me to make sure I'm listening. (Music) And now look at the final chord of the piece again, and this time the robot communicates with its body when it's busy doing its own thing. And when it's ready to coordinate the final chord with me. (Music) (Applause) Thanks. I hope you see how much this totally not -- how much this part of the body that doesn't touch the instrument actually helps with the musical performance. And at some point, we are in Atlanta, so obviously some rapper will come into our lab at some point. And we had this rapper come in and do a little jam with the robot. And here you can see the robot basically responding to the beat and -- notice two things. One, how irresistible it is to join the robot while it's moving its head. and you kind of want to move your own head when it does it. And second, even though the rapper is really focused on his iPhone, as soon as the robot turns to him, he turns back. So even though it's just in the periphery of his vision -- it's just in the corner of his eye -- it's very powerful. And the reason is that we can't ignore physical things moving in our environment. We are wired for that. So, if you have a problem with maybe your partners looking at the iPhone too much or their smartphone too much, you might want to have a robot there to get their attention. (Laughter) (Music) (Applause) Just to introduce the last robot that we've worked on, that came out of something kind of surprising that we found: At some point people didn't care anymore about the robot being so intelligent, and can improvise and listen, and do all these embodied intelligence things that I spent years on developing. They really liked that the robot was enjoying the music. (Laughter) And they didn't say that the robot was moving to the music, they said that the robot was enjoying the music. And we thought, why don't we take this idea, and I designed a new piece of furniture. This time it wasn't a desk lamp; it was a speaker dock. It was one of those things you plug your smartphone in. And I thought, what would happen if your speaker dock didn't just play the music for you, but it would actually enjoy it too. (Laughter) And so again, here are some animation tests from an early stage. (Laughter) And this is what the final product looked like. ("Drop It Like It's Hot") So, a lot of bobbing head. (Applause) A lot of bobbing heads in the audience, so we can still see robots influence people. And it's not just fun and games. I think one of the reasons I care so much about robots that use their body to communicate and use their body to move -- and I'm going to let you in on a little secret we roboticists are hiding -- is that every one of you is going to be living with a robot at some point in their life. Somewhere in your future there's going to be a robot in your life. And if not in yours, then in your children's lives. And I want these robots to be -- to be more fluent, more engaging, more graceful than currently they seem to be. And for that I think that maybe robots need to be less like chess players and more like stage actors and more like musicians. Maybe they should be able to take chances and improvise. And maybe they should be able to anticipate what you're about to do. And maybe they need to be able to make mistakes and correct them, because in the end we are human. And maybe as humans, robots that are a little less than perfect are just perfect for us. Thank you. (Applause)

Two years ago, I have to say there was no problem. Two years ago, I knew exactly what an icon looked like. It looks like this. Everybody's icon, but also the default position of a curator of Italian Renaissance paintings, which I was then. And in a way, this is also another default selection. Leonardo da Vinci's exquisitely soulful image of the "Lady with an Ermine." And I use that word, soulful, deliberately. Or then there's this, or rather these: the two versions of Leonardo's "Virgin of the Rocks" that were about to come together in London for the very first time. In the exhibition that I was then in the absolute throes of organizing. I was literally up to my eyes in Leonardo, and I had been for three years. So, he was occupying every part of my brain. Leonardo had taught me, during that three years, about what a picture can do. About taking you from your own material world into a spiritual world. He said, actually, that he believed the job of the painter was to paint everything that was visible and invisible in the universe. That's a huge task. And yet, somehow he achieves it. He shows us, I think, the human soul. He shows us the capacity of ourselves to move into a spiritual realm. To see a vision of the universe that's more perfect than our own. To see God's own plan, in some sense. So this, in a sense, was really what I believed an icon was. At about that time, I started talking to Tom Campbell, director here of the Metropolitan Museum, about what my next move might be. The move, in fact, back to an earlier life, one I'd begun at the British Museum, back to the world of three dimensions -- of sculpture and of decorative arts -- to take over the department of European sculpture and decorative arts, here at the Met. But it was an incredibly busy time. All the conversations were done at very peculiar times of the day -- over the phone. In the end, I accepted the job without actually having been here. Again, I'd been there a couple of years before, but on that particular visit. So, it was just before the time that the Leonardo show was due to open when I finally made it back to the Met, to New York, to see my new domain. To see what European sculpture and decorative arts looked like, beyond those Renaissance collections with which I was so already familiar. And I thought, on that very first day, I better tour the galleries. Fifty-seven of these galleries -- like 00 varieties of baked beans, I believe. I walked through and I started in my comfort zone in the Italian Renaissance. And then I moved gradually around, feeling a little lost sometimes. My head, also still full of the Leonardo exhibition that was about to open, and I came across this. And I thought to myself: What the hell have I done? There was absolutely no connection in my mind at all and, in fact, if there was any emotion going on, it was a kind of repulsion. This object felt utterly and completely alien. Silly at a level that I hadn't yet understood silliness to be. And then it was made worse -- there were two of them. (Laughter) So, I started thinking about why it was, in fact, that I disliked this object so much. What was the anatomy of my distaste? Well, so much gold, so vulgar. You know, so nouveau riche, frankly. Leonardo himself had preached against the use of gold, so it was absolutely anathema at that moment. And then there's little pretty sprigs of flowers everywhere. (Laughter) And finally, that pink. That damned pink. It's such an extraordinarily artificial color. I mean, it's a color that I can't think of anything that you actually see in nature, that looks that shade. The object even has its own tutu. (Laughter) This little flouncy, spangly, bottomy bit that sits at the bottom of the vase. It reminded me, in an odd kind of way, of my niece's fifth birthday party. Where all the little girls would come either as a princess or a fairy. There was one who would come as a fairy princess. You should have seen the looks. (Laughter) And I realize that this object was in my mind, born from the same mind, from the same womb, practically, as Barbie Ballerina. (Laughter) And then there's the elephants. (Laughter) Those extraordinary elephants with their little, sort of strange, sinister expressions and Greta Garbo eyelashes, with these golden tusks and so on. I realized this was an elephant that had absolutely nothing to do with a majestic march across the Serengeti. It was a Dumbo nightmare. (Laughter) But something more profound was happening as well. These objects, it seemed to me, were quintessentially the kind that I and my liberal left friends in London had always seen as summing up something deplorable about the French aristocracy in the 00th century. The label had told me that these pieces were made by the Sèvres Manufactory, made of porcelain in the late 0000s, and designed by a designer called Jean-Claude Duplessis, actually somebody of extraordinary distinction as I later learned. But for me, they summed up a kind of, that sort of sheer uselessness of the aristocracy in the 00th century. I and my colleagues had always thought that these objects, in way, summed up the idea of, you know -- no wonder there was a revolution. Or, indeed, thank God there was a revolution. There was a sort of idea really, that, if you owned a vase like this, then there was really only one fate possible. (Laughter) So, there I was -- in a sort of paroxysm of horror. But I took the job and I went on looking at these vases. I sort of had to because they're on a through route in the Met. So, almost anywhere I went, there they were. They had this kind of odd sort of fascination, like a car accident. Where I couldn't stop looking. And as I did so, I started thinking: Well, what are we actually looking at here? And what I started with was understanding this as really a supreme piece of design. It took me a little time. But, that tutu for example -- actually, this is a piece that does dance in its own way. It has an extraordinary lightness and yet, it is also amazing balanced. It has these kinds of sculptural ingredients. And then the play between -- actually really quite carefully disposed color and gilding, and the sculptural surface, is really rather remarkable. And then I realized that this piece went into the kiln four times, at least four times in order to arrive at this. How many moments for accident can you think of that could have happened to this piece? And then remember, not just one, but two. So he's having to arrive at two exactly matched vases of this kind. And then this question of uselessness. Well actually, the end of the trunks were originally candle holders. So what you would have had were candles on either side. Imagine that effect of candlelight on that surface. On the slightly uneven pink, on the beautiful gold. It would have glittered in an interior, a little like a little firework. And at that point, actually, a firework went off in my brain. Somebody reminded me that, that word 'fancy' -- which in a sense for me, encapsulated this object -- actually comes from the same root as the word 'fantasy.' And that what this object was just as much in a way, in its own way, as a Leonardo da Vinci painting, is a portal to somewhere else. This is an object of the imagination. If you think about the mad 00th-century operas of the time -- set in the Orient. If you think about divans and perhaps even opium-induced visions of pink elephants, then at that point, this object starts to make sense. This is an object which is all about escapism. It's about an escapism that happens -- that the aristocracy in France sought very deliberately to distinguish themselves from ordinary people. It's not an escapism that we feel particularly happy with today, however. And again, going on thinking about this, I realize that in a way we're all victims of a certain kind of tyranny of the triumph of modernism whereby form and function in an object have to follow one another, or are deemed to do so. And the extraneous ornament is seen as really, essentially, criminal. It's a triumph, in a way, of bourgeois values rather than aristocratic ones. And that seems fine. Except for the fact that it becomes a kind of sequestration of imagination. So just as in the 00th century, so many people had the idea that their faith took place on the Sabbath day, and the rest of their lives -- their lives of washing machines and orthodontics -- took place on another day. Then, I think we've started doing the same. We've allowed ourselves to lead our fantasy lives in front of screens. In the dark of the cinema, with the television in the corner of the room. We've eliminated, in a sense, that constant of the imagination that these vases represented in people's lives. So maybe it's time we got this back a little. I think it's beginning to happen. In London, for example, with these extraordinary buildings that have been appearing over the last few years. Redolent, in a sense, of science fiction, turning London into a kind of fantasy playground. It's actually amazing to look out of a high building nowadays there. But even then, there's a resistance. London has called these buildings the Gherkin, the Shard, the Walkie Talkie -- bringing these soaring buildings down to Earth. There's an idea that we don't want these anxious-making, imaginative journeys to happen in our daily lives. I feel lucky in a way, I've encountered this object. (Laughter) I found him on the Internet when I was looking up a reference. And there he was. And unlike the pink elephant vase, this was a kind of love at first sight. In fact, reader, I married him. I bought him. And he now adorns my office. He's a Staffordshire figure made in the middle of the 00th century. He represents the actor, Edmund Kean, playing Shakespeare's Richard III. And it's based, actually, on a more elevated piece of porcelain. So I loved, on an art historical level, I loved that layered quality that he has. But more than that, I love him. In a way that I think would have been impossible without the pink Sèvres vase in my Leonardo days. I love his orange and pink breeches. I love the fact that he seems to be going off to war, having just finished the washing up. (Laughter) He seems also to have forgotten his sword. I love his pink little cheeks, his munchkin energy. In a way, he's become my sort of alter ego. He's, I hope, a little bit dignified, but mostly rather vulgar. (Laughter) And energetic, I hope, too. I let him into my life because the Sèvres pink elephant vase allowed me to do so. And before that Leonardo, I understood that this object could become part of a journey for me every day, sitting in my office. I really hope that others, all of you, visiting objects in the museum, and taking them home and finding them for yourselves, will allow those objects to flourish in your imaginative lives. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Pat Mitchell: Your first time back on the TEDWomen stage. Sheryl Sandberg: First time back. Nice to see everyone. It's always so nice to look out and see so many women. It's so not my regular experience, as I know anyone else's. PM: So when we first started talking about, maybe the subject wouldn't be social media, which we assumed it would be, but that you had very much on your mind the missing leadership positions, particularly in the sector of technology and social media. But how did that evolve for you as a thought, and end up being the TED Talk that you gave? SS: So I was really scared to get on this stage and talk about women, because I grew up in the business world, as I think so many of us did. You never talk about being a woman, because someone might notice that you're a woman, right? They might notice. Or worse, if you say "woman," people on the other end of the table think you're asking for special treatment, or complaining. Or worse, about to sue them. And so I went through -- (Laughter) Right? I went through my entire business career, and never spoke about being a woman, never spoke about it publicly. But I also had noticed that it wasn't working. I came out of college over 00 years ago, and I thought that all of my peers were men and women, all the people above me were all men, but that would change, because your generation had done such an amazing job fighting for equality, equality was now ours for the taking. And it wasn't. Because year after year, I was one of fewer and fewer, and now, often the only woman in a room. And I talked to a bunch of people about, should I give a speech at TEDWomen about women, and they said, oh no, no. It will end your business career. You cannot be a serious business executive and speak about being a woman. You'll never be taken seriously again. But fortunately, there were the few, the proud -- like you -- who told me I should give the speech, and I asked myself the question Mark Zuckerberg might -- the founder of Facebook and my boss -- asks all of us, which is, what would I do if I wasn't afraid? And the answer to what would I do if I wasn't afraid is I would get on the TED stage, and talk about women, and leadership. And I did, and survived. (Applause) PM: I would say, not only survived. I'm thinking of that moment, Sheryl, when you and I were standing backstage together, and you turned to me, and you told me a story. And I said -- very last minute -- you know, you really should share that story. SS: Oh, yeah. PM: What was that story? SS: Well, it's an important part of the journey. So I had -- TEDWomen -- the original one was in D.C. -- so I live here, so I had gotten on a plane the day before, and my daughter was three, she was clinging to my leg: "Mommy, don't go." And Pat's a friend, and so, not related to the speech I was planning on giving, which was chock full of facts and figures, and nothing personal, I told Pat the story. I said, well, I'm having a hard day. Yesterday my daughter was clinging to my leg, and "Don't go." And you looked at me and said, you have to tell that story. I said, on the TED stage? Are you kidding? I'm going to get on a stage and admit my daughter was clinging to my leg? And you said yes, because if you want to talk about getting more women into leadership roles, you have to be honest about how hard it is. And I did. And I think that's a really important part of the journey. The same thing happened when I wrote my book. I started writing the book. I wrote a first chapter, I thought it was fabulous. It was chock-full of data and figures, I had three pages on matrilineal Maasai tribes, and their sociological patterns. My husband read it and he was like, this is like eating your Wheaties. (Laughter) No one -- and I apologize to Wheaties if there's someone -- no one, no one will read this book. And I realized through the process that I had to be more honest and more open, and I had to tell my stories. My stories of still not feeling as self-confident as I should, in many situations. My first and failed marriage. Crying at work. Felling like I didn't belong there, feeling guilty to this day. And part of my journey, starting on this stage, going to "Lean In," going to the foundation, is all about being more open and honest about those challenges, so that other women can be more open and honest, and all of us can work together towards real equality. PM: I think that one of the most striking parts about the book, and in my opinion, one of the reasons it's hit such a nerve and is resonating around the world, is that you are personal in the book, and that you do make it clear that, while you've observed some things that are very important for other women to know, that you've had the same challenges that many others of us have, as you faced the hurdles and the barriers and possibly the people who don't believe the same. So talk about that process: deciding you'd go public with the private part, and then you would also put yourself in the position of something of an expert on how to resolve those challenges. SS: After I did the TED Talk, what happened was -- you know, I never really expected to write a book, I'm not an author, I'm not a writer, and it was viewed a lot, and it really started impacting people's lives. I got this great --- one of the first letters I got was from a woman who said that she was offered a really big promotion at work, and she turned it down, and she told her best friend she turned it down, and her best friend said, you really need to watch this TED Talk. And so she watched this TED Talk, and she went back the next day, she took the job, she went home, and she handed her husband the grocery list. (Laughter) And she said, I can do this. And what really mattered to me -- it wasn't only women in the corporate world, even though I did hear from a lot of them, and it did impact a lot of them, it was also people of all different circumstances. There was a doctor I met who was an attending physician at Johns Hopkins, and he said that until he saw my TED Talk, it never really occurred to him that even though half the students in his med school classes were women, they weren't speaking as much as the men as he did his rounds. So he started paying attention, and as he waited for raised hands, he realized the men's hands were up. So he started encouraging the women to raise their hands more, and it still didn't work. So he told everyone, no more hand raising, I'm cold-calling. So he could call evenly on men and women. And what he proved to himself was that the women knew the answers just as well or better, and he was able to go back to them and tell them that. And then there was the woman, stay-at-home mom, lives in a really difficult neighborhood, with not a great school, she said that TED Talk -- she's never had a corporate job, but that TED Talk inspired her to go to her school and fight for a better teacher for her child. And I guess it was part of was finding my own voice. And I realized that other women and men could find their voice through it, which is why I went from the talk to the book. PM: And in the book, you not only found your voice, which is clear and strong in the book, but you also share what you've learned -- the experiences of other people in the lessons. And that's what I'm thinking about in terms of putting yourself in a -- you became a sort of expert in how you lean in. So what did that feel like, and become like in your life? To launch not just a book, not just a best-selling, best-viewed talk, but a movement, where people began to literally describe their actions at work as, I'm leaning in. SS: I mean, I'm grateful, I'm honored, I'm happy, and it's the very beginning. So I don't know if I'm an expert, or if anyone is an expert. I certainly have done a lot of research. I have read every study, I have pored over the materials, and the lessons are very clear. Because here's what we know: What we know is that stereotypes are holding women back from leadership roles all over the world. It's so striking. "Lean In" is very global, I've been all over the world, talking about it, and -- cultures are so different. Even within our own country, to Japan, to Korea, to China, to Asia, Europe, they're so different. Except for one thing: gender. All over the world, no matter what our cultures are, we think men should be strong, assertive, aggressive, have voice; we think women should speak when spoken to, help others. Now we have, all over the world, women are called "bossy." There is a word for "bossy," for little girls, in every language there's one. It's a word that's pretty much not used for little boys, because if a little boy leads, there's no negative word for it, it's expected. But if a little girl leads, she's bossy. Now I know there aren't a lot of men here, but bear with me. If you're a man, you'll have to represent your gender. Please raise your hand if you've been told you're too aggressive at work. (Laughter) There's always a few, it runs about five percent. Okay, get ready, gentlemen. If you're a woman, please raise your hand if you've ever been told you're too aggressive at work. (Laughter) That is what audiences have said in every country in the world, and it's deeply supported by the data. Now, do we think women are more aggressive than men? Of course not. It's just that we judge them through a different lens, and a lot of the character traits that you must exhibit to perform at work, to get results, to lead, are ones that we think, in a man, he's a boss, and in a woman, she's bossy. And the good news about this is that we can change this by acknowledging it. One of the happiest moments I had in this whole journey is, after the book came out, I stood on a stage with John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco. He read the book. He stood on a stage with me, he invited me in front of his whole management team, men and women, and he said, I thought we were good at this. I thought I was good at this. And then I read this book, and I realized that we -- my company -- we have called all of our senior women too aggressive, and I'm standing on this stage, and I'm sorry. And I want you to know we're never going to do it again. PM: Can we send that to a lot of other people that we know? (Applause) SS: And so John is doing that because he believes it's good for his company, and so this kind of acknowledgement of these biases can change it. And so next time you all see someone call a little girl "bossy," you walk right up to that person, big smile, and you say, "That little girl's not bossy. That little girl has executive leadership skills." (Laughter) PM: I know that's what you're telling your daughter. SS: Absolutely. PM: And you did focus in the book -- and the reason, as you said, in writing it, was to create a dialogue about this. I mean, let's just put it out there, face the fact that women are -- in a time when we have more open doors, and more opportunities -- are still not getting to the leadership positions. So in the months that have come since the book, in which "Lean In" focused on that and said, here are some of the challenges that remain, and many of them we have to own within ourselves and look at ourselves. What has changed? Have you seen changes? SS: Well, there's certainly more dialogue, which is great. But what really matters to me, and I think all of us, is action. So everywhere I go, CEOs, they're mostly men, say to me, you're costing me so much money because all the women want to be paid as much as the men. And to them I say, I'm not sorry at all. (Laughter) At all. I mean, the women should be paid as much as the men. Everywhere I go, women tell me they ask for raises. Everywhere I go, women say they're getting better relationships with their spouses, asking for more help at home, asking for the promotions they should be getting at work, and importantly, believing it themselves. Even little things. One of the governors of one of the states told me that he didn't realize that more women were, in fact, literally sitting on the side of the room, which they are, and now he made a rule that all the women on his staff need to sit at the table. The foundation I started along with the book "Lean In" helps women, or men, start circles -- small groups, it can be 00, it can be however many you want, which meet once a month. I would have hoped that by now, we'd have about 000 circles. That would've been great. You know, 000 times roughly 00. There are over 00,000 circles in 00 countries in the world. PM: Wow, that's amazing. SS: And these are people who are meeting every single month. I met one of them, I was in Beijing. A group of women, they're all about 00 or 00, they started the first Lean In circle in Beijing, several of them grew up in very poor, rural China. These women are 00, they are told by their society that they are "left over," because they are not yet married, and the process of coming together once a month at a meeting is helping them define who they are for themselves. What they want in their careers. The kind of partners they want, if at all. I looked at them, we went around and introduced ourselves, and they all said their names and where they're from, and I said, I'm Sheryl Sandberg, and this was my dream. And I kind of just started crying. Right, which, I admit, I do. Right? I've talked about it before. But the fact that a woman so far away out in the world, who grew up in a rural village, who's being told to marry someone she doesn't want to marry, can now go meet once a month with a group of people and refuse that, and find life on her own terms. That's the kind of change we have to hope for. PM: Have you been surprised by the global nature of the message? Because I think when the book first came out, many people thought, well, this is a really important handbook for young women on their way up. They need to look at this, anticipate the barriers, and recognize them, put them out in the open, have the dialogue about it, but that it's really for women who are that. Doing that. Pursuing the corporate world. And yet the book is being read, as you say, in rural and developing countries. What part of that has surprised you, and perhaps led to a new perspective on your part? SS: The book is about self-confidence, and about equality. And it turns out, everywhere in the world, women need more self-confidence, because the world tells us we're not equal to men. Everywhere in the world, we live in a world where the men get "and," and women get "or." I've never met a man who's been asked how he does it all. (Laughter) Again, I'm going to turn to the men in the audience: Please raise your hand if you've been asked, how do you do it all? (Laughter) Men only. Women, women. Please raise your hand if you've been asked how you do it all? We assume men can do it all, slash -- have jobs and children. We assume women can't, and that's ridiculous, because the great majority of women everywhere in the world, including the United States, work full time and have children. And I think people don't fully understand how broad the message is. There is a circle that's been started for rescued sex workers in Miami. They're using "Lean In" to help people make the transition back to what would be a fair life, really rescuing them from their pimps, and using it. There are dress-for-success groups in Texas which are using the book, for women who have never been to college. And we know there are groups all the way to Ethiopia. And so these messages of equality -- of how women are told they can't have what men can have -- how we assume that leadership is for men, how we assume that voice is for men, these affect all of us, and I think they are very universal. And it's part of what TEDWomen does. It unites all of us in a cause we have to believe in, which is more women, more voice, more equality. PM: If you were invited now to make another TEDWomen talk, what would you say that is a result of this experience, for you personally, and what you've learned about women, and men, as you've made this journey? SS: I think I would say -- I tried to say this strongly, but I think I can say it more strongly -- I want to say that the status quo is not enough. That it's not good enough, that it's not changing quickly enough. Since I gave my TED Talk and published my book, another year of data came out from the U.S. Census. And you know what we found? No movement in the wage gap for women in the United States. Seventy-seven cents to the dollar. If you are a black woman, 00 cents. If you are a Latina, we're at 00 cents. Do you know when the last time those numbers went up? 0000. We are stagnating, we are stagnating in so many ways. And I think we are not really being honest about that, for so many reasons. It's so hard to talk about gender. We shy away from the word "feminist," a word I really think we need to embrace. We have to get rid of the word bossy and bring back -- (Applause) I think I would say in a louder voice, we need to get rid of the word "bossy" and bring back the word "feminist," because we need it. (Applause) PM: And we all need to do a lot more leaning in. SS: A lot more leaning in. PM: Thank you, Sheryl. Thanks for leaning in and saying yes. SS: Thank you. (Applause)

It's a pleasure to be here in Edinburgh, Scotland, the birthplace of the needle and syringe. Less than a mile from here in this direction, in 0000 a Scotsman filed his very first patent on the needle and syringe. His name was Alexander Wood, and it was at the Royal College of Physicians. This is the patent. What blows my mind when I look at it even today is that it looks almost identical to the needle in use today. Yet, it's 000 years old. So we turn to the field of vaccines. Most vaccines are delivered with the needle and syringe, this 000-year-old technology. And credit where it's due -- on many levels, vaccines are a successful technology. After clean water and sanitation, vaccines are the one technology that has increased our life span the most. That's a pretty hard act to beat. But just like any other technology, vaccines have their shortcomings, and the needle and syringe is a key part within that narrative -- this old technology. So let's start with the obvious: Many of us don't like the needle and syringe. I share that view. However, 00 percent of the population have a thing called needle phobia. That's more than disliking the needle; that is actively avoiding being vaccinated because of needle phobia. And that's problematic in terms of the rollout of vaccines. Now, related to this is another key issue, which is needlestick injuries. And the WHO has figures that suggest about 0.0 million deaths per year take place due to cross-contamination with needlestick injuries. These are early deaths that take place. Now, these are two things that you probably may have heard of, but there are two other shortcomings of the needle and syringe you may not have heard about. One is it could be holding back the next generation of vaccines in terms of their immune responses. And the second is that it could be responsible for the problem of the cold chain that I'll tell you about as well. I'm going to tell you about some work that my team and I are doing in Australia at the University of Queensland on a technology designed to tackle those four problems. And that technology is called the Nanopatch. Now, this is a specimen of the Nanopatch. To the naked eye it just looks like a square smaller than a postage stamp, but under a microscope what you see are thousands of tiny projections that are invisible to the human eye. And there's about 0,000 projections on this particular square compared to the needle. And I've designed those projections to serve a key role, which is to work with the skin's immune system. So that's a very important function tied in with the Nanopatch. Now we make the Nanopatch with a technique called deep reactive ion etching. And this particular technique is one that's been borrowed from the semiconductor industry, and therefore is low cost and can be rolled out in large numbers. Now we dry-coat vaccines to the projections of the Nanopatch and apply it to the skin. Now, the simplest form of application is using our finger, but our finger has some limitations, so we've devised an applicator. And it's a very simple device -- you could call it a sophisticated finger. It's a spring-operated device. What we do is when we apply the Nanopatch to the skin as so -- (Click) -- immediately a few things happen. So firstly, the projections on the Nanopatch breach through the tough outer layer and the vaccine is very quickly released -- within less than a minute, in fact. Then we can take the Nanopatch off and discard it. And indeed we can make a reuse of the applicator itself. So that gives you an idea of the Nanopatch, and immediately you can see some key advantages. We've talked about it being needle-free -- these are projections that you can't even see -- and, of course, we get around the needle phobia issue as well. Now, if we take a step back and think about these other two really important advantages: One is improved immune responses through delivery, and the second is getting rid of the cold chain. So let's start with the first one, this immunogenicity idea. It takes a little while to get our heads around, but I'll try to explain it in simple terms. So I'll take a step back and explain to you how vaccines work in a simple way. So vaccines work by introducing into our body a thing called an antigen which is a safe form of a germ. Now that safe germ, that antigen, tricks our body into mounting an immune response, learning and remembering how to deal with intruders. When the real intruder comes along the body quickly mounts an immune response to deal with that vaccine and neutralizes the infection. So it does that well. Now, the way it's done today with the needle and syringe, most vaccines are delivered that way -- with this old technology and the needle. But it could be argued that the needle is holding back our immune responses; it's missing our immune sweet spot in the skin. To describe this idea, we need to take a journey through the skin, starting with one of those projections and applying the Nanopatch to the skin. And we see this kind of data. Now, this is real data -- that thing that we can see there is one projection from the Nanopatch that's been applied to the skin and those colors are different layers. Now, to give you an idea of scale, if the needle was shown here, it would be too big. It would be 00 times bigger than the size of that screen, going 00 times deeper as well. It's off the grid entirely. You can see immediately that we have those projections in the skin. That red layer is a tough outer layer of dead skin, but the brown layer and the magenta layer are jammed full of immune cells. As one example, in the brown layer there's a certain type of cell called a Langerhans cell -- every square millimeter of our body is jammed full of those Langerhans cells, those immune cells, and there's others shown as well that we haven't stained in this image. But you can immediately see that the Nanopatch achieves that penetration indeed. We target thousands upon thousands of these particular cells just residing within a hair's width of the surface of the skin. Now, as the guy that's invented this thing and designed it to do that, I found that exciting. But so what? So what if you've targeted cells? In the world of vaccines, what does that mean? The world of vaccines is getting better. It's getting more systematic. However, you still don't really know if a vaccine is going to work until you roll your sleeves up and vaccinate and wait. It's a gambler's game even today. So, we had to do that gamble. We obtained an influenza vaccine, we applied it to our Nanopatches and we applied the Nanopatches to the skin, and we waited -- and this is in the live animal. We waited a month, and this is what we found out. This is a data slide showing the immune responses that we've generated with a Nanopatch compared to the needle and syringe into muscle. So on the horizontal axis we have the dose shown in nanograms. On the vertical axis we have the immune response generated, and that dashed line indicates the protection threshold. If we're above that line it's considered protective; if we're below that line it's not. So the red line is mostly below that curve and indeed there's only one point that is achieved with the needle that's protective, and that's with a high dose of 0,000 nanograms. But notice immediately the distinctly different curve that we achieve with the blue line. That's what's achieved with the Nanopatch; the delivered dose of the Nanopatch is a completely different immunogenicity curve. That's a real fresh opportunity. Suddenly we have a brand new lever in the world of vaccines. We can push it one way, where we can take a vaccine that works but is too expensive and can get protection with a hundredth of the dose compared to the needle. That can take a vaccine that's suddenly 00 dollars down to 00 cents, and that's particularly important within the developing world. But there's another angle to this as well -- you can take vaccines that currently don't work and get them over that line and get them protective. And certainly in the world of vaccines that can be important. Let's consider the big three: HIV, malaria, tuberculosis. They're responsible for about 0 million deaths per year, and there is no adequate vaccination method for any of those. So potentially, with this new lever that we have with the Nanopatch, we can help make that happen. We can push that lever to help get those candidate vaccines over the line. Now, of course, we've worked within my lab with many other vaccines that have attained similar responses and similar curves to this, what we've achieved with influenza. I'd like to now switch to talk about another key shortcoming of today's vaccines, and that is the need to maintain the cold chain. As the name suggests -- the cold chain -- it's the requirements of keeping a vaccine right from production all the way through to when the vaccine is applied, to keep it refrigerated. Now, that presents some logistical challenges but we have ways to do it. This is a slightly extreme case in point but it helps illustrate the logistical challenges, in particular in resource-poor settings, of what's required to get vaccines refrigerated and maintain the cold chain. If the vaccine is too warm the vaccine breaks down, but interestingly it can be too cold and the vaccine can break down as well. Now, the stakes are very high. The WHO estimates that within Africa, up to half the vaccines used there are considered to not be working properly because at some point the cold chain has fallen over. So it's a big problem, and it's tied in with the needle and syringe because it's a liquid form vaccine, and when it's liquid it needs the refrigeration. A key attribute of our Nanopatch is that the vaccine is dry, and when it's dry it doesn't need refrigeration. Within my lab we've shown that we can keep the vaccine stored at 00 degrees Celsius for more than a year without any loss in activity at all. That's an important improvement. (Applause) We're delighted about it as well. And the thing about it is that we have well and truly proven the Nanopatch within the laboratory setting. And as a scientist, I love that and I love science. However, as an engineer, as a biomedical engineer and also as a human being, I'm not going to be satisfied until we've rolled this thing out, taken it out of the lab and got it to people in large numbers and particularly the people that need it the most. So we've commenced this particular journey, and we've commenced this journey in an unusual way. We've started with Papua New Guinea. Now, Papua New Guinea is an example of a developing world country. It's about the same size as France, but it suffers from many of the key barriers existing within the world of today's vaccines. There's the logistics: Within this country there are only 000 refrigerators to keep vaccines chilled. Many of them are old, like this one in Port Moresby, many of them are breaking down and many are not in the Highlands where they are required. That's a challenge. But also, Papua New Guinea has the world's highest incidence of HPV, human papillomavirus, the cervical cancer [risk factor]. Yet, that vaccine is not available in large numbers because it's too expensive. So for those two reasons, with the attributes of the Nanopatch, we've got into the field and worked with the Nanopatch, and taken it to Papua New Guinea and we'll be following that up shortly. Now, doing this kind of work is not easy. It's challenging, but there's nothing else in the world I'd rather be doing. And as we look ahead I'd like to share with you a thought: It's the thought of a future where the 00 million deaths per year that we currently have due to infectious disease is a historical footnote. And it's a historical footnote that has been achieved by improved, radically improved vaccines. Now standing here today in front of you at the birthplace of the needle and syringe, a device that's 000 years old, I'm presenting to you an alternative approach that could really help make that happen -- and it's the Nanopatch with its attributes of being needle-free, pain-free, the ability for removing the cold chain and improving the immunogenicity. Thank you. (Applause)

The entire model of capitalism and the economic model that you and I did business in, and, in fact, continue to do business in, was built around what probably Milton Friedman put more succinctly. And Adam Smith, of course, the father of modern economics actually said many, many years ago, the invisible hand, which is, "If you continue to operate in your own self-interest you will do the best good for society." Now, capitalism has done a lot of good things and I've talked about a lot of good things that have happened, but equally, it has not been able to meet up with some of the challenges that we've seen in society. The model that at least I was brought up in and a lot of us doing business were brought up in was one which talked about what I call the three G's of growth: growth that is consistent, quarter on quarter; growth that is competitive, better than the other person; and growth that is profitable, so you continue to make more and more shareholder value. And I'm afraid this is not going to be good enough and we have to move from this 0G model to a model of what I call the fourth G: the G of growth that is responsible. And it is this that has to become a very important part of creating value. Of not just creating economic value but creating social value. And companies that will thrive are those that will actually embrace the fourth G. And the model of 0G is quite simple: Companies cannot afford to be just innocent bystanders in what's happening around in society. They have to begin to play their role in terms of serving the communities which actually sustain them. And we have to move to a model of an and/and model which is how do we make money and do good? How do we make sure that we have a great business but we also have a great environment around us? And that model is all about doing well and doing good. But the question is easier said than done. But how do we actually get that done? And I do believe that the answer to that is going to be leadership. It is going to be to redefine the new business models which understand that the only license to operate is to combine these things. And for that you need businesses that can actually define their role in society in terms of a much larger purpose than the products and brands that they sell. And companies that actually define a true north, things that are nonnegotiable whether times are good, bad, ugly -- doesn't matter. There are things that you stand for. Values and purpose are going to be the two drivers of software that are going to create the companies of tomorrow. And I'm going to now shift to talking a little bit about my own experiences. I joined Unilever in 0000 as a management trainee in India. And on my first day of work I walked in and my boss tells me, "Do you know why you're here?" I said, "I'm here to sell a lot of soap." And he said, "No, you're here to change lives." You're here to change lives. You know, I thought it was rather facetious. We are a company that sells soap and soup. What are we doing about changing lives? And it's then I realized that simple acts like selling a bar of soap can save more lives than pharmaceutical companies. I don't know how many of you know that five million children don't reach the age of five because of simple infections that can be prevented by an act of washing their hands with soap. We run the largest hand-washing program in the world. We are running a program on hygiene and health that now touches half a billion people. It's not about selling soap, there is a larger purpose out there. And brands indeed can be at the forefront of social change. And the reason for that is, when two billion people use your brands that's the amplifier. Small actions can make a big difference. Take another example, I was walking around in one of our villages in India. Now those of you who have done this will realize that this is no walk in the park. And we had this lady who was one of our small distributors -- beautiful, very, very modest, her home -- and she was out there, dressed nicely, her husband in the back, her mother-in-law behind and her sister-in-law behind her. The social order was changing because this lady is part of our Project Shakti that is actually teaching women how to do small business and how to carry the message of nutrition and hygiene. We have 00,000 such women now in India. It's not about selling soap, it's about making sure that in the process of doing so you can change people's lives. Small actions, big difference. Our R&D folks are not only working to give us some fantastic detergents, but they're working to make sure we use less water. A product that we've just launched recently, One Rinse product that allows you to save water every time you wash your clothes. And if we can convert all our users to using this, that's 000 billion liters of water. By the way, that's equivalent to one month of water for a whole huge continent. So just think about it. There are small actions that can make a big difference. And I can go on and on. Our food chain, our brilliant products -- and I'm sorry I'm giving you a word from the sponsors -- Knorr, Hellman's and all those wonderful products. We are committed to making sure that all our agricultural raw materials are sourced from sustainable sources, 000-percent sustainable sources. We were the first to say we are going to buy all of our palm oil from sustainable sources. I don't know how many of you know that palm oil, and not buying it from sustainable sources, can create deforestation that is responsible for 00 percent of the greenhouse gasses in the world. We were the first to embrace that, and it's all because we market soap and soup. And the point I'm making here is that companies like yours, companies like mine have to define a purpose which embraces responsibility and understands that we have to play our part in the communities in which we operate. We introduced something called The Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, which said, "Our purpose is to make sustainable living commonplace, and we are gong to change the lives of one billion people over 0000." Now the question here is, where do we go from here? And the answer to that is very simple: We're not going to change the world alone. There are plenty of you and plenty of us who understand this. The question is, we need partnerships, we need coalitions and importantly, we need that leadership that will allow us to take this from here and to be the change that we want to see around us. Thank you very much. (Applause)

(Music) For any of you who have visited or lived in New York City, these shots might start to look familiar. This is Central Park, one of the most beautifully designed public spaces in America. But to anyone who hasn't visited, these images can't really fully convey. To really understand Central Park, you have to physically be there. Well, the same is true of the music, which my brother and I composed and mapped specifically for Central Park. (Music) I'd like to talk to you today a little bit about the work that my brother Hays and I are doing -- That's us there. That's both of us actually - specifically about a concept that we've been developing over the last few years, this idea of location-aware music. Now, my brother and I, we're musicians and music producers. We've been working together since, well, since we were kids, really. But recently, we've become more and more interested in projects where art and technology intersect, from creating sight-specific audio and video installation to engineering interactive concerts. But today I want to focus on this concept of composition for physical space. But before I go too much further into that, let me tell you a little bit about how we got started with this idea. My brother and I were living in New York City when the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude did their temporary installation, The Gates, in Central Park. Hundreds of these brightly-colored sculptures decorated the park for a number of weeks, and unlike work that's exhibited in a more neutral space, like on the walls of a gallery or a museum, this was work that was really in dialogue with this place, and in a lot of ways, The Gates was really a celebration of Frederick Olmsted's incredible design. This was an experience that stayed with us for a long time, and years later, my brother and I moved back to Washington, D.C., and we started to ask the question, would it be possible, in the same way that The Gates responded to the physical layout of the park, to compose music for a landscape? Which brought us to this. (Music) On Memorial Day, we released "The National Mall," a location-aware album released exclusively as a mobile app that uses the device's built-in GPS functionality to sonically map the entire park in our hometown of Washington, D.C. Hundreds of musical segments are geo-tagged throughout the entire park so that as a listener traverses the landscape, a musical score is actually unfolding around them. So this is not a playlist or a list of songs intended for the park, but rather an array of distinct melodies and rhythms that fit together like pieces of a puzzle and blend seamlessly based on a listener's chosen trajectory. So think of this as a choose-your-own-adventure of an album. Let's take a closer look. Let's look at one example here. So using the app, as you make your way towards the grounds surrounding the Washington Monument, you hear the sounds of instruments warming up, which then gives way to the sound of a mellotron spelling out a very simple melody. This is then joined by the sound of sweeping violins. Keep walking, and a full choir joins in, until you finally reach the top of the hill and you're hearing the sound of drums and fireworks and all sorts of musical craziness, as if all of these sounds are radiating out from this giant obelisk that punctuates the center of the park. But were you to walk in the opposite direction, this entire sequence happens in reverse. And were you to actually exit the perimeter of the park, the music would fade to silence, and the play button would disappear. We're sometimes contacted by people in other parts of the world who can't travel to the United States, but would like to hear this record. Well, unlike a normal album, we haven't been able to accommodate this request. When they ask for a C.D. or an MP0 version, we just can't make that happen, and the reason is because this isn't a promotional app or a game to promote or accompany the release of a traditional record. In this case, the app is the work itself, and the architecture of the landscape is intrinsic to the listening experience. Six months later, we did a location-aware album for Central Park, a park that is over two times the size of the National Mall, with music spanning from the Sheep's Meadow to the Ramble to the Reservoir. Currently, my brother and I are working on projects all over the country, but last spring we started a project, here actually at Stanford's Experimental Media Art Department, where we're creating our largest location-aware album to date, one that will span the entirety of Highway 0 here on the Pacific Coast. But what we're doing, integrating GPS with music, is really just one idea. But it speaks to a larger vision for a music industry that's sometimes struggled to find its footing in this digital age, that they begin to see these new technologies not simply as ways of adding bells and whistles to an existing model, but to dream up entirely new ways for people to interact with and experience music. Thank you. (Applause)

This is an image of the planet Earth. It looks very much like the Apollo pictures that are very well known. There is something different; you can click on it, and if you click on it, you can zoom in on almost any place on the Earth. For instance, this is a bird's-eye view of the EPFL campus. In many cases, you can also see how a building looks from a nearby street. This is pretty amazing. But there's something missing in this wonderful tour: It's time. i'm not really sure when this picture was taken. I'm not even sure it was taken at the same moment as the bird's-eye view. In my lab, we develop tools to travel not only in space but also through time. The kind of question we're asking is Is it possible to build something like Google Maps of the past? Can I add a slider on top of Google Maps and just change the year, seeing how it was 000 years before, 0,000 years before? Is that possible? Can I reconstruct social networks of the past? Can I make a Facebook of the Middle Ages? So, can I build time machines? Maybe we can just say, "No, it's not possible." Or, maybe, we can think of it from an information point of view. This is what I call the information mushroom. Vertically, you have the time. and horizontally, the amount of digital information available. Obviously, in the last 00 years, we have much information. And obviously the more we go in the past, the less information we have. If we want to build something like Google Maps of the past, or Facebook of the past, we need to enlarge this space, we need to make that like a rectangle. How do we do that? One way is digitization. There's a lot of material available -- newspaper, printed books, thousands of printed books. I can digitize all these. I can extract information from these. Of course, the more you go in the past, the less information you will have. So, it might not be enough. So, I can do what historians do. I can extrapolate. This is what we call, in computer science, simulation. If I take a log book, I can consider, it's not just a log book of a Venetian captain going to a particular journey. I can consider it is actually a log book which is representative of many journeys of that period. I'm extrapolating. If I have a painting of a facade, I can consider it's not just that particular building, but probably it also shares the same grammar of buildings where we lost any information. So if we want to construct a time machine, we need two things. We need very large archives, and we need excellent specialists. The Venice Time Machine, the project I'm going to talk to you about, is a joint project between the EPFL and the University of Venice Ca'Foscari. There's something very peculiar about Venice, that its administration has been very, very bureaucratic. They've been keeping track of everything, almost like Google today. At the Archivio di Stato, you have 00 kilometers of archives documenting every aspect of the life of Venice over more than 0,000 years. You have every boat that goes out, every boat that comes in. You have every change that was made in the city. This is all there. We are setting up a 00-year digitization program which has the objective of transforming this immense archive into a giant information system. The type of objective we want to reach is 000 books a day that can be digitized. Of course, when you digitize, that's not enough, because these documents, most of them are in Latin, in Tuscan, in Venetian dialect, so you need to transcribe them, to translate them in some cases, to index them, and this is obviously not easy. In particular, traditional optical character recognition method that can be used for printed manuscripts, they do not work well on the handwritten document. So the solution is actually to take inspiration from another domain: speech recognition. This is a domain of something that seems impossible, which can actually be done, simply by putting additional constraints. If you have a very good model of a language which is used, if you have a very good model of a document, how well they are structured. And these are administrative documents. They are well structured in many cases. If you divide this huge archive into smaller subsets where a smaller subset actually shares similar features, then there's a chance of success. If we reach that stage, then there's something else: we can extract from this document events. Actually probably 00 billion events can be extracted from this archive. And this giant information system can be searched in many ways. You can ask questions like, "Who lived in this palazzo in 0000?" "How much cost a sea bream at the Realto market in 0000?" "What was the salary of a glass maker in Murano maybe over a decade?" You can ask even bigger questions because it will be semantically coded. And then what you can do is put that in space, because much of this information is spatial. And from that, you can do things like reconstructing this extraordinary journey of that city that managed to have a sustainable development over a thousand years, managing to have all the time a form of equilibrium with its environment. You can reconstruct that journey, visualize it in many different ways. But of course, you cannot understand Venice if you just look at the city. You have to put it in a larger European context. So the idea is also to document all the things that worked at the European level. We can reconstruct also the journey of the Venetian maritime empire, how it progressively controlled the Adriatic Sea, how it became the most powerful medieval empire of its time, controlling most of the sea routes from the east to the south. But you can even do other things, because in these maritime routes, there are regular patterns. You can go one step beyond and actually create a simulation system, create a Mediterranean simulator which is capable actually of reconstructing even the information we are missing, which would enable us to have questions you could ask like if you were using a route planner. "If I am in Corfu in June 0000 and want to go to Constantinople, where can I take a boat?" Probably we can answer this question with one or two or three days' precision. "How much will it cost?" "What are the chance of encountering pirates?" Of course, you understand, the central scientific challenge of a project like this one is qualifying, quantifying and representing uncertainty and inconsistency at each step of this process. There are errors everywhere, errors in the document, it's the wrong name of the captain, some of the boats never actually took to sea. There are errors in translation, interpretative biases, and on top of that, if you add algorithmic processes, you're going to have errors in recognition, errors in extraction, so you have very, very uncertain data. So how can we detect and correct these inconsistencies? How can we represent that form of uncertainty? It's difficult. One thing you can do is document each step of the process, not only coding the historical information but what we call the meta-historical information, how is historical knowledge constructed, documenting each step. That will not guarantee that we actually converge toward a single story of Venice, but probably we can actually reconstruct a fully documented potential story of Venice. Maybe there's not a single map. Maybe there are several maps. The system should allow for that, because we have to deal with a new form of uncertainty, which is really new for this type of giant databases. And how should we communicate this new research to a large audience? Again, Venice is extraordinary for that. With the millions of visitors that come every year, it's actually one of the best places to try to invent the museum of the future. Imagine, horizontally you see the reconstructed map of a given year, and vertically, you see the document that served the reconstruction, paintings, for instance. Imagine an immersive system that permits to go and dive and reconstruct the Venice of a given year, some experience you could share within a group. On the contrary, imagine actually that you start from a document, a Venetian manuscript, and you show, actually, what you can construct out of it, how it is decoded, how the context of that document can be recreated. This is an image from an exhibit which is currently conducted in Geneva with that type of system. So to conclude, we can say that research in the humanities is about to undergo an evolution which is maybe similar to what happened to life sciences 00 years ago. It's really a question of scale. We see projects which are much beyond any single research team can do, and this is really new for the humanities, which very often take the habit of working in small groups or only with a couple of researchers. When you visit the Archivio di Stato, you feel this is beyond what any single team can do, and that should be a joint and common effort. So what we must do for this paradigm shift is actually foster a new generation of "digital humanists" that are going to be ready for this shift. I thank you very much. (Applause)

Three and a half years ago, I made one of the best decisions of my life. As my New Year's resolution, I gave up dieting, stopped worrying about my weight, and learned to eat mindfully. Now I eat whenever I'm hungry, and I've lost 00 pounds. This was me at age 00, when I started my first diet. I look at that picture now, and I think, you did not need a diet, you needed a fashion consult. (Laughter) But I thought I needed to lose weight, and when I gained it back, of course I blamed myself. And for the next three decades, I was on and off various diets. No matter what I tried, the weight I'd lost always came back. I'm sure many of you know the feeling. As a neuroscientist, I wondered, why is this so hard? Obviously, how much you weigh depends on how much you eat and how much energy you burn. What most people don't realize is that hunger and energy use are controlled by the brain, mostly without your awareness. Your brain does a lot of its work behind the scenes, and that is a good thing, because your conscious mind -- how do we put this politely? -- it's easily distracted. It's good that you don't have to remember to breathe when you get caught up in a movie. You don't forget how to walk because you're thinking about what to have for dinner. Your brain also has its own sense of what you should weigh, no matter what you consciously believe. This is called your set point, but that's a misleading term, because it's actually a range of about 00 or 00 pounds. You can use lifestyle choices to move your weight up and down within that range, but it's much, much harder to stay outside of it. The hypothalamus, the part of the brain that regulates body weight, there are more than a dozen chemical signals in the brain that tell your body to gain weight, more than another dozen that tell your body to lose it, and the system works like a thermostat, responding to signals from the body by adjusting hunger, activity and metabolism, to keep your weight stable as conditions change. That's what a thermostat does, right? It keeps the temperature in your house the same as the weather changes outside. Now you can try to change the temperature in your house by opening a window in the winter, but that's not going to change the setting on the thermostat, which will respond by kicking on the furnace to warm the place back up. Your brain works exactly the same way, responding to weight loss by using powerful tools to push your body back to what it considers normal. If you lose a lot of weight, your brain reacts as if you were starving, and whether you started out fat or thin, your brain's response is exactly the same. We would love to think that your brain could tell whether you need to lose weight or not, but it can't. If you do lose a lot of weight, you become hungry, and your muscles burn less energy. Dr. Rudy Leibel of Columbia University has found that people who have lost 00 percent of their body weight burn 000 to 000 calories less because their metabolism is suppressed. That's a lot of food. This means that a successful dieter must eat this much less forever than someone of the same weight who has always been thin. From an evolutionary perspective, your body's resistance to weight loss makes sense. When food was scarce, our ancestors' survival depended on conserving energy, and regaining the weight when food was available would have protected them against the next shortage. Over the course of human history, starvation has been a much bigger problem than overeating. This may explain a very sad fact: Set points can go up, but they rarely go down. Now, if your mother ever mentioned that life is not fair, this is the kind of thing she was talking about. (Laughter) Successful dieting doesn't lower your set point. Even after you've kept the weight off for as long as seven years, your brain keeps trying to make you gain it back. If that weight loss had been due to a long famine, that would be a sensible response. In our modern world of drive-thru burgers, it's not working out so well for many of us. That difference between our ancestral past and our abundant present is the reason that Dr. Yoni Freedhoff of the University of Ottawa would like to take some of his patients back to a time when food was less available, and it's also the reason that changing the food environment is really going to be the most effective solution to obesity. Sadly, a temporary weight gain can become permanent. If you stay at a high weight for too long, probably a matter of years for most of us, your brain may decide that that's the new normal. Psychologists classify eaters into two groups, those who rely on their hunger and those who try to control their eating through willpower, like most dieters. Let's call them intuitive eaters and controlled eaters. The interesting thing is that intuitive eaters are less likely to be overweight, and they spend less time thinking about food. Controlled eaters are more vulnerable to overeating in response to advertising, super-sizing, and the all-you-can-eat buffet. And a small indulgence, like eating one scoop of ice cream, is more likely to lead to a food binge in controlled eaters. Children are especially vulnerable to this cycle of dieting and then binging. Several long-term studies have shown that girls who diet in their early teenage years are three times more likely to become overweight five years later, even if they started at a normal weight, and all of these studies found that the same factors that predicted weight gain also predicted the development of eating disorders. The other factor, by the way, those of you who are parents, was being teased by family members about their weight. So don't do that. (Laughter) I left almost all my graphs at home, but I couldn't resist throwing in just this one, because I'm a geek, and that's how I roll. (Laughter) This is a study that looked at the risk of death over a 00-year period based on four healthy habits: eating enough fruits and vegetables, exercise three times a week, not smoking, and drinking in moderation. Let's start by looking at the normal weight people in the study. The height of the bars is the risk of death, and those zero, one, two, three, four numbers on the horizontal axis are the number of those healthy habits that a given person had. And as you'd expect, the healthier the lifestyle, the less likely people were to die during the study. Now let's look at what happens in overweight people. The ones that had no healthy habits had a higher risk of death. Adding just one healthy habit pulls overweight people back into the normal range. For obese people with no healthy habits, the risk is very high, seven times higher than the healthiest groups in the study. But a healthy lifestyle helps obese people too. In fact, if you look only at the group with all four healthy habits, you can see that weight makes very little difference. You can take control of your health by taking control of your lifestyle, even If you can't lose weight and keep it off. Diets don't have very much reliability. Five years after a diet, most people have regained the weight. Forty percent of them have gained even more. If you think about this, the typical outcome of dieting is that you're more likely to gain weight in the long run than to lose it. If I've convinced you that dieting might be a problem, the next question is, what do you do about it? And my answer, in a word, is mindfulness. I'm not saying you need to learn to meditate or take up yoga. I'm talking about mindful eating: learning to understand your body's signals so that you eat when you're hungry and stop when you're full, because a lot of weight gain boils down to eating when you're not hungry. How do you do it? Give yourself permission to eat as much as you want, and then work on figuring out what makes your body feel good. Sit down to regular meals without distractions. Think about how your body feels when you start to eat and when you stop, and let your hunger decide when you should be done. It took about a year for me to learn this, but it's really been worth it. I am so much more relaxed around food than I have ever been in my life. I often don't think about it. I forget we have chocolate in the house. It's like aliens have taken over my brain. It's just completely different. I should say that this approach to eating probably won't make you lose weight unless you often eat when you're not hungry, but doctors don't know of any approach that makes significant weight loss in a lot of people, and that is why a lot of people are now focusing on preventing weight gain instead of promoting weight loss. Let's face it: If diets worked, we'd all be thin already. (Laughter) Why do we keep doing the same thing and expecting different results? Diets may seem harmless, but they actually do a lot of collateral damage. At worst, they ruin lives: Weight obsession leads to eating disorders, especially in young kids. In the U.S., we have 00 percent of 00-year-old girls say they've been on a diet. Our daughters have learned to measure their worth by the wrong scale. Even at its best, dieting is a waste of time and energy. It takes willpower which you could be using to help your kids with their homework or to finish that important work project, and because willpower is limited, any strategy that relies on its consistent application is pretty much guaranteed to eventually fail you when your attention moves on to something else. Let me leave you with one last thought. What if we told all those dieting girls that it's okay to eat when they're hungry? What if we taught them to work with their appetite instead of fearing it? I think most of them would be happier and healthier, and as adults, many of them would probably be thinner. I wish someone had told me that back when I was 00. Thanks. (Applause)

So this is a picture of my dad and me at the beach in Far Rockaway, or actually Rockaway Park. I'm the one with the blond hair. My dad's the guy with the cigarette. It was the '00s. A lot of people smoked back then. In the summer of 0000, my dad was diagnosed with lung cancer. Cancer is one of those things that actually touches everybody. If you're a man in the United States of the America, you've got about a one in two chance of being diagnosed with cancer during your lifetime. If you're a woman, you've got about a one in three chance of being diagnosed with cancer. Everybody knows somebody who's been diagnosed with cancer. Now, my dad's doing better today, and part of the reason for that is that he was able to participate in the trial of an experimental new drug that happened to be specially formulated and very good for his particular kind of cancer. There are over 000 kinds of cancer. And what I want to talk about today is how we can help more people like my dad, because we have to change the way we think about raising money to fund cancer research. So a while after my dad was diagnosed, I was having coffee with my friend Andrew Lo. He's the head of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering at MIT, where I also have a position, and we were talking about cancer. And Andrew had been doing his own bits of research, and one of the things that he had been told and that he'd learned from studying the literature was that there's actually a big bottleneck. It's very difficult to develop new drugs, and the reason it's difficult to develop new drugs is because in the early stages of drug development, the drugs are very risky, and they're very expensive. So Andrew asked me if I'd want to maybe work with him a bit, work on some of the math and the analytics and see if we could figure out something we could do. Now I'm not a scientist. You know, I don't know how to build a drug. And none of my coauthors, Andrew Lo or Jose Maria Fernandez or David Fagnan -- none of those guys -- are scientists either. We don't know the first thing about how to make a cancer drug. But we know a little bit about risk mitigation and a little bit about financial engineering, and so we started thinking, what could we do? What I'm going to tell you about is some work we've been doing over the last couple years that we think could fundamentally change the way research for cancer and lots of other things gets done. We want to let the research drive the funding, not the other way around. So in order to get started, let me tell you how you get a drug financed. Imagine that you're in your lab -- you're a scientist, you're not like me -- you're a scientist, and you've developed a new compound that you think might be therapeutic for somebody with cancer. Well, what you do is, you test in animals, you test in test tubes, but there's this notion of going from the bench to the bedside, and in order to get from the bench, the lab, to the bedside, to the patients, you've got to get the drug tested. And the way the drug gets tested is through a series of, basically, experiments, through these large, they're called trials, that they do to determine whether the drug is safe and whether it works and all these things. So the FDA has a very specific protocol. In the first phase of this testing, which is called testing for toxicity, it's called Phase I. In the first phase, you give the drug to healthy people and you see if it actually makes them sick. In other words, are the side effects just so severe that no matter how much good it does, it's not going to be worth it? Does it cause heart attacks, kill people, liver failure, this kind of thing? And it turns out, that's a pretty high hurdle. About a third of all drugs drop out at that point. In the next phase, you test to see if the drug's effective, and what you do there is you give it to people with cancer and you see if it actually makes them better. And that's also a higher hurdle. People drop out. And in the third phase, you actually test it on a very large sample, and what you're trying to determine is what the right dose is, and also, is it better than what's available today? If not, then why build it? When you're done with all that, what you have is a very small percentage of drugs that start the process actually come out the other side. So those blue bottles, those blue bottles save lives, and they're also worth billions, sometimes billions a year. So now here's a question: if I were to ask you, for example, to make a one-time investment of, say, 000 million dollars to buy one of those bottles, so 000 million dollars up front, one time, to buy one of those bottles, I won't tell you which one it is, and in 00 years, I'll tell you whether you have one of the blue ones. Does that sound like a good deal for anybody? No. No, right? And of course, it's a very, very risky trial position, and that's why it's very hard to get funding, but to a first approximation, that's actually the proposal. You have to fund these things from the early stages on. It takes a long time. So Andrew said to me, he said, "What if we stop thinking about these as drugs? What if we start thinking about them as financial assets?" They've got really weird payoff structures and all that, but let's throw everything we know about financial engineering at them. Let's see if we can use all the tricks of the trade to figure out how to make these drugs work as financial assets? Let's create a giant fund. In finance, we know what to do with assets that are risky. You put them in a portfolio and you try to smooth out the returns. So we did some math, and it turned out you could make this work, but in order to make it work, you need about 00 to 000 drugs. Now the good news is, there's plenty of drugs that are waiting to be tested. We've been told that there's a backlog of about 00 years of drugs that are waiting to be tested but can't be funded. In fact, that early stage of the funding process, that Phase I and pre-clinical stuff, that's actually, in the industry, called the Valley of Death because it's where drugs go to die. It's very hard to for them to get through there, and of course, if you can't get through there, you can't get to the later stages. So we did this math, and we figured out, okay, well, you know, you need about 00 to, say, 000, or something like that, drugs. And then we did a little more math, and we said, okay, well that's a fund of about three to 00 billion dollars. So we kind of created a new problem by solving the old one. We were able to get rid of the risk, but now we need a lot of capital, and there's only one place to get that kind of capital, the capital markets. Venture capitalists don't have it. Philanthropies don't have it. But we have to figure out how we can get people in the capital markets, who traditionally don't invest in this stuff, to want to invest in this stuff. So again, financial engineering was helpful here. Imagine the megafund actually starts empty, and what it does is it issues some debt and some equity, and that generates cash flow. That cash flow is used, then, to buy that big portfolio of drugs that you need, and those drugs start working their way through that approval process, and each time they go through a next phase of approval, they gain value. And most of them don't make it, but a few of them do, and with the ones that gain value, you can sell some, and when you sell them, you have money to pay the interest on those bonds, but you also have money to fund the next round of trials. It's almost self-funding. You do that for the course of the transaction, and when you're done, you liquidate the portfolio, pay back the bonds, and you can give the equity holders a nice return. So that was the theory, and we talked about it for a bit, we did a bunch of experiments, and then we said, let's really try to test it. We spent the next two years doing research. We talked to hundreds of experts in drug financing and venture capital. We talked to people who have developed drugs. We talked to pharmaceutical companies. We actually looked at the data for drugs, over 0,000 drugs that had been approved or denied or withdrawn, and we also ran millions of simulations. And all that actually took a lot of time. But when we were done, what we found was something that was sort of surprising. It was actually feasible to structure that fund such that when you were done structuring it, you could actually produce low-risk bonds that would be attractive to bond holders, that would give you yields of about five to eight percent, and you could produce equity that would give equity holders about a 00-percent return. Now those returns aren't going to be attractive to a venture capitalist. Venture capitalists are those guys who want to make those big bets and get those billion dollar payoffs. But it turns out, there are lots of other folks that would be interested in that. That's right in the investment sweet spot of pension funds and 000(k) plans and all this other stuff. So we published some articles in the academic press. We published articles in medical journals. We published articles in finance journals. But it wasn't until we actually got the popular press interested in this that we began to get some traction. We wanted to do something more than just make people aware of it, though. We wanted people to get involved. So what we did was, we actually took all of our computer code and made that available online under an open-source license to anybody that wanted it. And you guys can download it today if you want to run your own experiments to see if this would work. And that was really effective, because people that didn't believe our assumptions could try their own assumptions and see how it would work. Now there's an obvious problem, which is, is there enough money in the world to fund this stuff? I've told you there's enough drugs, but is there enough money? There's 000 trillion dollars of capital currently invested in fixed-income securities. That's a hundred thousand billion. There's plenty of money. (Laughter) But what we realized was that it's more than just money that's required. We had to get people motivated, people to get involved, and people had to understand this. And so we started thinking about all the different things that could go wrong. What are all the challenges to doing this that might get in the way? And we had a long list, and so what we did was we assigned a bunch of people, including ourselves, different pieces of this problem, and we said, could you start a work stream on credit risk? Could you start a work stream on the regulatory aspects? Could you start a work stream on how you would actually manage so many projects? And we had all these experts get together and do these different work streams, and then we held a conference. The conference was held over the summer, this past summer. It was an invitation-only conference. It was sponsored by the American Cancer Society and done in collaboration with the National Cancer Institute. And we had experts from every field that we thought would be important, including the government, including people that run research centers and so on, and for two days they sat around and heard the reports from those five work streams, and they talked about it. It was the first time that the people who could actually make this happen sat across the table from each other and had these conversations. Now these conferences, it's typical to have a dinner, and at that dinner, you kind of get to know each other, sort of like what we're doing here. I happened to look out the window, and hand on my heart, I looked out the window on the night of this conference -- it was the summertime -- and that's what I saw, it was a double rainbow. So I'd like to think it was a good sign. Since the conference, we've got people working between Paris and San Francisco, lots of different folks working on this to try to see if we can really make it happen. We're not looking to start a fund, but we want somebody else to do this. Because, again, I'm not a scientist. I can't build a drug. I'm never going to have enough money to fund even one of those trials. But all of us together, with our 000(k)'s, with our 000 plans, with our pension plans, all of us together can actually fund hundreds of trials and get paid well for doing it and save millions of lives like my dad. Thank you. (Applause)

Good morning! Are you awake? They took my name tag, but I wanted to ask you, did anyone here write their name on the tag in Arabic? Anyone! No one? All right, no problem. Once upon a time, not long ago, I was sitting in a restaurant with my friend, ordering food. So I looked at the waiter and said, "Do you have a menu (Arabic)?" He looked at me strangely, thinking that he misheard. He said, "Sorry? (English)." I said, "The menu (Arabic), please." He replied, "Don't you know what they call it?" "I do." He said, "No! It's called "menu" (English), or "menu" (French)." Is the French pronunciation correct? "Come, come, take care of this one!" said the waiter. He was disgusted when talking to me, as if he was saying to himself, "If this was the last girl on Earth, I wouldn't look at her!" What's the meaning of saying "menu" in Arabic? Two words made a Lebanese young man judge a girl as being backward and ignorant. How could she speak that way? At that moment, I started thinking. It made me mad. It definitely hurts! I'm denied the right to speak my own language in my own country? Where could this happen? How did we get here? Well, while we are here, there are many people like me, who would reach a stage in their lives, where they involuntarily give up everything that has happened to them in the past, just so they can say that they're modern and civilized. Should I forget all my culture, thoughts, intellect and all my memories? Childhood stories might be the best memories we have of the war! Should I forget everything I learned in Arabic, just to conform? To be one of them? Where's the logic in that? Despite all that, I tried to understand him. I didn't want to judge him with the same cruelty that he judged me. The Arabic language doesn't satisfy today's needs. It's not a language for science, research, a language we're used to in universities, a language we use in the workplace, a language we rely on if we were to perform an advanced research project, and it definitely isn't a language we use at the airport. If we did so, they'd strip us of our clothes. Where can I use it, then? We could all ask this question! So, you want us to use Arabic. Where are we to do so? This is one reality. But we have another more important reality that we ought to think about. Arabic is the mother tongue. Research says that mastery of other languages demands mastery of the mother tongue. Mastery of the mother tongue is a prerequisite for creative expression in other languages. How? Gibran Khalil Gibran, when he first started writing, he used Arabic. All his ideas, imagination and philosophy were inspired by this little boy in the village where he grew up, smelling a specific smell, hearing a specific voice, and thinking a specific thought. So, when he started writing in English, he had enough baggage. Even when he wrote in English, when you read his writings in English, you smell the same smell, sense the same feeling. You can imagine that that's him writing in English, the same boy who came from the mountain. From a village on Mount Lebanon. So, this is an example no one can argue with. Second, it's often said that if you want to kill a nation, the only way to kill a nation, is to kill its language. This is a reality that developed societies are aware of. The Germans, French, Japanese and Chinese, all these nations are aware of this. That's why they legislate to protect their language. They make it sacred. That's why they use it in production, they pay a lot of money to develop it. Do we know better than them? All right, we aren't from the developed world, this advanced thinking hasn't reached us yet, and we would like to catch up with the civilized world. Countries that were once like us, but decided to strive for development, do research, and catch up with those countries, such as Turkey, Malaysia and others, they carried their language with them as they were climbing the ladder, protected it like a diamond. They kept it close to them. Because if you get any product from Turkey or elsewhere and it's not labeled in Turkish, then it isn't a local product. You wouldn't believe it's a local product. They'd go back to being consumers, clueless consumers, like we are most of the time. So, in order for them to innovate and produce, they had to protect their language. If I say, "Freedom, sovereignty, independence (Arabic)," what does this remind you of? It doesn't ring a bell, does it? Regardless of the who, how and why. Language isn't just for conversing, just words coming out of our mouths. Language represents specific stages in our lives, and terminology that is linked to our emotions. So when we say, "Freedom, sovereignty, independence," each one of you draws a specific image in their own mind, there are specific feelings of a specific day in a specific historical period. Language isn't one, two or three words or letters put together. It's an idea inside that relates to how we think, and how we see each other and how others see us. What is our intellect? How do you say whether this guy understands or not? So, if I say, "Freedom, sovereignty, independence (English)," or if your son came up to you and said, "Dad, have you lived through the period of the freedom (English) slogan?" How would you feel? If you don't see a problem, then I'd better leave, and stop talking in vain. The idea is that these expressions remind us of a specific thing. I have a francophone friend who's married to a French man. I asked her once how things were going. She said, "Everything is fine, but once, I spent a whole night asking and trying to translate the meaning of the word 'toqborni' for him." (Laughter) (Applause) The poor woman had mistakenly told him "toqborni," and then spent the whole night trying to explain it to him. He was puzzled by the thought: "How could anyone be this cruel? Does she want to commit suicide? 'Bury me?' (English)" This is one of the few examples. It made us feel that she's unable to tell that word to her husband, since he won't understand, and he's right not to; his way of thinking is different. She said to me, "He listens to Fairuz with me, and one night, I tried to translate for him so he can feel what I feel when I listen to Fairuz." The poor woman tried to translate this for him: "From them I extended my hands and stole you --" (Laughter) And here's the pickle: "And because you belong to them, I returned my hands and left you." (Laughter) Translate that for me. (Applause) So, what have we done to protect the Arabic language? We turned this into a concern of the civil society, and we launched a campaign to preserve the Arabic language. Even though many people told me, "Why do you bother? Forget about this headache and go have fun." No problem! The campaign to preserve Arabic launched a slogan that says, "I talk to you from the East, but you reply from the West." We didn't say, "No! We do not accept this or that." We didn't adopt this style because that way, we wouldn't be understood. And when someone talks to me that way, I hate the Arabic language. We say-- (Applause) We want to change our reality, and be convinced in a way that reflects our dreams, aspirations and day-to-day life. In a way that dresses like us and thinks like we do. So, "I talk to you from the East, but you reply from the West" has hit the spot. Something very easy, yet creative and persuasive. After that, we launched another campaign with scenes of letters on the ground. You've seen an example of it outside, a scene of a letter surrounded by black and yellow tape with "Don't kill your language!" written on it. Why? Seriously, don't kill your language. We really shouldn't kill our language. If we were to kill the language, we'd have to find an identity. We'd have to find an existence. We'd go back to the beginning. This is beyond just missing our chance of being modern and civilized. After that we released photos of guys and girls wearing the Arabic letter. Photos of "cool" guys and girls. We are very cool! And to whoever might say, "Ha! You used an English word!" I say, "No! I adopt the word 'cool.'" Let them object however they want, but give me a word that's nicer and matches the reality better. I will keep on saying "Internet" I wouldn't say: "I'm going to the world wide web" (Laughs) Because it doesn't fit! We shouldn't kid ourselves. But to reach this point, we all have to be convinced that we shouldn't allow anyone who is bigger or thinks they have any authority over us when it comes to language, to control us or make us think and feel what they want. Creativity is the idea. So, if we can't reach space or build a rocket and so on, we can be creative. At this moment, every one of you is a creative project. Creativity in your mother tongue is the path. Let's start from this moment. Let's write a novel or produce a short film. A single novel could make us global again. It could bring the Arabic language back to being number one. So, it's not true that there's no solution; there is a solution! But we have to know that, and be convinced that a solution exists, that we have a duty to be part of that solution. In conclusion, what can you do today? Now, tweets, who's tweeting? Please, I beg of you, even though my time has finished, either Arabic, English, French or Chinese. But don't write Arabic with Latin characters mixed with numbers! (Applause) It's a disaster! That's not a language. You'd be entering a virtual world with a virtual language. It's not easy to come back from such a place and rise. That's the first thing we can do. Second, there are many other things that we can do. We're not here today to convince each other. We're here to bring attention to the necessity of preserving this language. Now I will tell you a secret. A baby first identifies its father through language. When my daughter is born, I'll tell her, "This is your father, honey (Arabic)." I wouldn't say, "This is your dad, honey (English)." And in the supermarket, I promise my daughter Noor, that if she says to me, "Thanks (Arabic)," I won't say, "Dis, 'Merci, Maman,'" and hope no one has heard her. (Applause) Let's get rid of this cultural cringe. (Applause)

Hello, TEDWomen, what's up. (Cheers) Not good enough. Hello, TEDWomen, what is up? (Cheers) My name is Maysoon Zayid, and I am not drunk, but the doctor who delivered me was. He cut my mom six different times in six different directions, suffocating poor little me in the process. As a result, I have cerebral palsy, which means I shake all the time. Look. It's exhausting. I'm like Shakira, Shakira meets Muhammad Ali. (Laughter) C.P. is not genetic. It's not a birth defect. You can't catch it. No one put a curse on my mother's uterus, and I didn't get it because my parents are first cousins, which they are. (Laughter) It only happens from accidents, like what happened to me on my birth day. Now, I must warn you, I'm not inspirational, and I don't want anyone in this room to feel bad for me, because at some point in your life, you have dreamt of being disabled. Come on a journey with me. It's Christmas Eve, you're at the mall, you're driving around in circles looking for parking, and what do you see? Sixteen empty handicapped spaces. And you're like, "God, can't I just be a little disabled?" (Laughter) Also, I gotta tell you, I got 00 problems, and palsy is just one. If there was an Oppression Olympics, I would win the gold medal. I'm Palestinian, Muslim, I'm female, I'm disabled, and I live in New Jersey. (Laughter) (Applause) If you don't feel better about yourself, maybe you should. Cliffside Park, New Jersey is my hometown. I have always loved the fact that my hood and my affliction share the same initials. I also love the fact that if I wanted to walk from my house to New York City, I could. A lot of people with C.P. don't walk, but my parents didn't believe in "can't." My father's mantra was, "You can do it, yes you can can." (Laughter) So, if my three older sisters were mopping, I was mopping. If my three older sisters went to public school, my parents would sue the school system and guarantee that I went too, and if we didn't all get A's, we all got my mother's slipper. (Laughter) My father taught me how to walk when I was five years old by placing my heels on his feet and just walking. Another tactic that he used is he would dangle a dollar bill in front of me and have me chase it. (Laughter) My inner stripper was very strong, and by -- (Laughter) Yeah. No, by the first day of kindergarten, I was walking like a champ who had been punched one too many times. Growing up, there were only six Arabs in my town, and they were all my family. Now there are 00 Arabs in town, and they are still all my family. (Laughter) I don't think anyone even noticed we weren't Italian. (Laughter) (Applause) This was before 0/00 and before politicians thought it was appropriate to use "I hate Moslems" as a campaign slogan. The people that I grew up with had no problem with my faith. They did, however, seem very concerned that I would starve to death during Ramadan. I would explain to them that I have enough fat to live off of for three whole months, so fasting from sunrise to sunset is a piece of cake. I have tap-danced on Broadway. Yeah, on Broadway. It's crazy. (Applause) My parents couldn't afford physical therapy, so they sent me to dancing school. I learned how to dance in heels, which means I can walk in heels. And I'm from Jersey, and we are really concerned with being chic, so if my friends wore heels, so did I. And when my friends went and spent their summer vacations on the Jersey Shore, I did not. I spent my summers in a war zone, because my parents were afraid that if we didn't go back to Palestine every single summer, we'd grow up to be Madonna. (Laughter) Summer vacations often consisted of my father trying to heal me, so I drank deer's milk, I had hot cups on my back, I was dunked in the Dead Sea, and I remember the water burning my eyes and thinking, "It's working! It's working!" (Laughter) But one miracle cure we did find was yoga. I have to tell you, it's very boring, but before I did yoga, I was a stand-up comedian who can't stand up. And now I can stand on my head. My parents reinforced this notion that I could do anything, that no dream was impossible, and my dream was to be on the daytime soap opera "General Hospital." I went to college during affirmative action and got a sweet scholarship to ASU, Arizona State University, because I fit every single quota. I was like the pet lemur of the theater department. Everybody loved me. I did all the less-than-intelligent kids' homework, I got A's in all of my classes, A's in all of their classes. Every time I did a scene from "The Glass Menagerie," my professors would weep. But I never got cast. Finally, my senior year, ASU decided to do a show called "They Dance Real Slow in Jackson." It's a play about a girl with C.P. I was a girl with C.P. So I start shouting from the rooftops, "I'm finally going to get a part! I have cerebral palsy! Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, I'm free at last!" I didn't get the part. (Laughter) Sherry Brown got the part. I went racing to the head of the theater department crying hysterically, like someone shot my cat, to ask her why, and she said it was because they didn't think I could do the stunts. I said, "Excuse me, if I can't do the stunts, neither can the character." (Laughter) (Applause) This was a part that I was literally born to play and they gave it, they gave it to a non-palsy actress. College was imitating life. Hollywood has a sordid history of casting able-bodied actors to play disabled onscreen. Upon graduating, I moved back home, and my first acting gig was as an extra on a daytime soap opera. My dream was coming true. And I knew that I would be promoted from "diner diner" to "wacky best friend" in no time. But instead, I remained a glorified piece of furniture that you could only recognize from the back of my head, and it became clear to me that casting directors didn't hire fluffy, ethnic, disabled actors. They only hired perfect people. But there were exceptions to the rule. I grew up watching Whoopi Goldberg, Roseanne Barr, Ellen, and all of these women had one thing in common: they were comedians. So I became a comic. (Laughter) (Applause) My first gig was driving famous comics from New York City to shows in New Jersey, and I'll never forget the face of the first comic I ever drove when he realized that he was speeding down the New Jersey Turnpike with a chick with C.P. driving him. I've performed in clubs all over America, and I've also performed in Arabic in the Middle East, uncensored and uncovered. Some people say I'm the first stand-up comic in the Arab world. I never like to claim first, but I do know that they never heard that nasty little rumor that women aren't funny, and they find us hysterical. In 0000, my brother from another mother and father Dean Obeidallah and I started the New York Arab-American Comedy Festival, now in its 00th year. Our goal was to change the negative image of Arab-Americans in media, while also reminding casting directors that South Asian and Arab are not synonymous. (Laughter) Mainstreaming Arabs was much, much easier than conquering the challenge against the stigma against disability. My big break came in 0000. I was invited to be a guest on the cable news show "Countdown With Keith Olbermann." I walked in looking like I was going to the prom, and they shuffle me into a studio and seat me on a spinning, rolling chair. So I looked at the stage manager and I'm like, "Excuse me, can I have another chair?" And she looked at me and she went, "Five, four, three, two ..." And we were live, right? So I had to grip onto the anchor's desk so that I wouldn't roll off the screen during the segment, and when the interview was over, I was livid. I had finally gotten my chance and I blew it, and I knew I would never get invited back. But not only did Mr. Olbermann invite me back, he made me a full-time contributor, and he taped down my chair. (Laughter) (Applause) One fun fact I learned while on the air with Keith Olbermann was that humans on the Internet are scumbags. People say children are cruel, but I was never made fun of as a child or an adult. Suddenly, my disability on the world wide web is fair game. I would look at clips online and see comments like, "Yo, why's she tweakin?" "Yo, is she retarded?" And my favorite, "Poor Gumby-mouth terrorist. What does she suffer from? We should really pray for her." One commenter even suggested that I add my disability to my credits: screenwriter, comedian, palsy. Disability is as visual as race. If a wheelchair user can't play Beyoncé, then Beyoncé can't play a wheelchair user. The disabled are the largest - Yeah, clap for that, man. C'mon. (Applause) People with disabilities are the largest minority in the world, and we are the most underrepresented in entertainment. The doctors said that I wouldn't walk, but I am here in front of you. However, if I grew up with social media, I don't think I would be. I hope that together we can create more positive images of disability in the media and in everyday life. Perhaps if there were more positive images, it would foster less hate on the Internet. Or maybe not. Maybe it still takes a village to teach our children well. My crooked journey has taken me to some very spectacular places. I got to walk the red carpet flanked by soap diva Susan Lucci and the iconic Lorraine Arbus. I got to act in a movie with Adam Sandler and work with my idol, the amazing Dave Matthews. I toured the world as a headliner on Arabs Gone Wild. I was a delegate representing the great state of New Jersey at the 0000 DNC. And I founded Maysoon's Kids, a charity that hopes to give Palestinian refugee children a sliver of the chance my parents gave me. But the one moment that stands out the most was when I got -- before this moment -- (Laughter) (Applause) - but the one moment that stands out the most was when I got to perform for the man who floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee, has Parkinson's and shakes just like me, Muhammad Ali. (Applause) It was the only time that my father ever saw me perform live, and I dedicate this talk to his memory. (In Arabic) My name is Maysoon Zayid, and if I can can, you can can. (Applause)

How many of you have been to Oklahoma City? Raise your hand. Yeah? How many of you have not been to Oklahoma City and have no idea who I am? (Laughter) Most of you. Let me give you a little bit of background. Oklahoma City started in the most unique way imaginable. Back on a spring day in 0000, the federal government held what they called a land run. They literally lined up the settlers along an imaginary line, and they fired off a gun, and the settlers roared across the countryside and put down a stake, and wherever they put down that stake, that was their new home. And at the end of the very first day, the population of Oklahoma City had gone from zero to 00,000, and our planning department is still paying for that. The citizens got together on that first day and elected a mayor. And then they shot him. (Laughter) That's not really all that funny -- (Laughter) -- but it allows me to see what type of audience I'm dealing with, so I appreciate the feedback. The 00th century was fairly kind to Oklahoma City. Our economy was based on commodities, so the price of cotton or the price of wheat, and ultimately the price of oil and natural gas. And along the way, we became a city of innovation. The shopping cart was invented in Oklahoma City. (Applause) The parking meter, invented in Oklahoma City. You're welcome. Having an economy, though, that relates to commodities can give you some ups and some downs, and that was certainly the case in Oklahoma City's history. In the 0000s, when it appeared that the price of energy would never retreat, our economy was soaring, and then in the early 0000s, it cratered quickly. The price of energy dropped. Our banks began to fail. Before the end of the decade, 000 banks had failed in the state of Oklahoma. There was no bailout on the horizon. Our banking industry, our oil and gas industry, our commercial real estate industry, were all at the bottom of the economic scale. Young people were leaving Oklahoma City in droves for Washington and Dallas and Houston and New York and Tokyo, anywhere where they could find a job that measured up to their educational attainment, because in Oklahoma City, the good jobs just weren't there. But along at the end of the '00s came an enterprising businessman who became mayor named Ron Norick. Ron Norick eventually figured out that the secret to economic development wasn't incentivizing companies up front, it was about creating a place where businesses wanted to locate, and so he pushed an initiative called MAPS that basically was a penny-on-the-dollar sales tax to build a bunch of stuff. It built a new sports arena, a new canal downtown, it fixed up our performing arts center, a new baseball stadium downtown, a lot of things to improve the quality of life. And the economy indeed seemed to start showing some signs of life. The next mayor came along. He started MAPS for Kids, rebuilt the entire inner city school system, all 00 buildings either built anew or refurbished. And then, in 0000, in this rare collective lack of judgment bordering on civil disobedience, the citizens elected me mayor. Now the city I inherited was just on the verge of coming out of its slumbering economy, and for the very first time, we started showing up on the lists. Now you know the lists I'm talking about. The media and the Internet love to rank cities. And in Oklahoma City, we'd never really been on lists before. So I thought it was kind of cool when they came out with these positive lists and we were on there. We weren't anywhere close to the top, but we were on the list, we were somebody. Best city to get a job, best city to start a business, best downtown -- Oklahoma City. And then came the list of the most obese cities in the country. And there we were. Now I like to point out that we were on that list with a lot of really cool places. (Laughter) Dallas and Houston and New Orleans and Atlanta and Miami. You know, these are cities that, typically, you're not embarrassed to be associated with. But nonetheless, I didn't like being on the list. And about that time, I got on the scales. And I weighed 000 pounds. And then I went to this website sponsored by the federal government, and I typed in my height, I typed in my weight, and I pushed Enter, and it came back and said "obese." I thought, "What a stupid website." (Laughter) "I'm not obese. I would know if I was obese." And then I started getting honest with myself about what had become my lifelong struggle with obesity, and I noticed this pattern, that I was gaining about two or three pounds a year, and then about every 00 years, I'd drop 00 or 00 pounds. And then I'd do it again. And I had this huge closet full of clothes, and I could only wear a third of it at any one time, and only I knew which part of the closet I could wear. But it all seemed fairly normal, going through it. Well, I finally decided I needed to lose weight, and I knew I could because I'd done it so many times before, so I simply stopped eating as much. I had always exercised. That really wasn't the part of the equation that I needed to work on. But I had been eating 0,000 calories a day, and I cut it to 0,000 calories a day, and the weight came off. I lost about a pound a week for about 00 weeks. Along the way, though, I started examining my city, its culture, its infrastructure, trying to figure out why our specific city seemed to have a problem with obesity. And I came to the conclusion that we had built an incredible quality of life if you happen to be a car. (Laughter) But if you happen to be a person, you are combatting the car seemingly at every turn. Our city is very spread out. We have a great intersection of highways, I mean, literally no traffic congestion in Oklahoma City to speak of. And so people live far, far away. Our city limits are enormous, 000 square miles, but 00 miles is less than 00 minutes. You literally can get a speeding ticket during rush hour in Oklahoma City. And as a result, people tend to spread out. Land's cheap. We had also not required developers to build sidewalks on new developments for a long, long time. We had fixed that, but it had been relatively recently, and there were literally 000,000 or more homes into our inventory in neighborhoods that had virtually no level of walkability. And as I tried to examine how we might deal with obesity, and was taking all of these elements into my mind, I decided that the first thing we need to do was have a conversation. You see, in Oklahoma City, we weren't talking about obesity. And so, on New Year's Eve of 0000, I went to the zoo, and I stood in front of the elephants, and I said, "This city is going on a diet, and we're going to lose a million pounds." Well, that's when all hell broke loose. (Laughter) The national media gravitated toward this story immediately, and they really could have gone with it one of two ways. They could have said, "This city is so fat that the mayor had to put them on a diet." But fortunately, the consensus was, "Look, this is a problem in a lot of places. This is a city that's wanting to do something about it." And so they started helping us drive traffic to the website. Now, the web address was thiscityisgoingonadiet.com. And I appeared on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" one weekday morning to talk about the initiative, and on that day, 000,000 visits were placed to our website. People were signing up, and so the pounds started to add up, and the conversation that I thought was so important to have was starting to take place. It was taking place inside the homes, mothers and fathers talking about it with their kids. It was taking place in churches. Churches were starting their own running groups and their own support groups for people who were dealing with obesity. Suddenly, it was a topic worth discussing at schools and in the workplace. And the large companies, they typically have wonderful wellness programs, but the medium-sized companies that typically fall between the cracks on issues like this, they started to get engaged and used our program as a model for their own employees to try and have contests to see who might be able to deal with their obesity situation in a way that could be proactively beneficial to others. And then came the next stage of the equation. It was time to push what I called MAPS 0. Now MAPS 0, like the other two programs, had had an economic development motive behind it, but along with the traditional economic development tasks like building a new convention center, we added some health-related infrastructure to the process. We added a new central park, 00 acres in size, to be right downtown in Oklahoma City. We're building a downtown streetcar to try and help the walkability formula for people who choose to live in the inner city and help us create the density there. We're building senior health and wellness centers throughout the community. We put some investments on the river that had originally been invested upon in the original MAPS, and now we are currently in the final stages of developing the finest venue in the world for the sports of canoe, kayak and rowing. We hosted the Olympic trials last spring. We have Olympic-caliber events coming to Oklahoma City, and athletes from all over the world moving in, along with inner city programs to get kids more engaged in these types of recreational activities that are a little bit nontraditional. We also, with another initiative that was passed, are building hundreds of miles of new sidewalks throughout the metro area. We're even going back into some inner city situations where we had built neighborhoods and we had built schools but we had not connected the two. We had built libraries and we had built neighborhoods, but we had never really connected the two with any sort of walkability. Through yet another funding source, we're redesigning all of our inner city streets to be more pedestrian-friendly. Our streets were really wide, and you'd push the button to allow you to walk across, and you had to run in order to get there in time. But now we've narrowed the streets, highly landscaped them, making them more pedestrian-friendly, really a redesign, rethinking the way we build our infrastructure, designing a city around people and not cars. We're completing our bicycle trail master plan. We'll have over 000 miles when we're through building it out. And so you see this culture starting to shift in Oklahoma City. And lo and behold, the demographic changes that are coming with it are very inspiring. Highly educated twentysomethings are moving to Oklahoma City from all over the region and, indeed, even from further away, in California. When we reached a million pounds, in January of 0000, I flew to New York with some our participants who had lost over 000 pounds, whose lives had been changed, and we appeared on the Rachael Ray show, and then that afternoon, I did a round of media in New York pushing the same messages that you're accustomed to hearing about obesity and the dangers of it. And I went into the lobby of Men's Fitness magazine, the same magazine that had put us on that list five years before. And as I'm sitting in the lobby waiting to talk to the reporter, I notice there's a magazine copy of the current issue right there on the table, and I pick it up, and I look at the headline across the top, and it says, "America's Fattest Cities: Do You Live in One?" Well, I knew I did, so I picked up the magazine and I began to look, and we weren't on it. (Applause) Then I looked on the list of fittest cities, and we were on that list. We were on the list as the 00nd fittest city in the United States. Our state health statistics are doing better. Granted, we have a long way to go. Health is still not something that we should be proud of in Oklahoma City, but we seem to have turned the cultural shift of making health a greater priority. And we love the idea of the demographics of highly educated twentysomethings, people with choices, choosing Oklahoma City in large numbers. We have the lowest unemployment in the United States, probably the strongest economy in the United States. And if you're like me, at some point in your educational career, you were asked to read a book called "The Grapes of Wrath." Oklahomans leaving for California in large numbers for a better future. When we look at the demographic shifts of people coming from the west, it appears that what we're seeing now is the wrath of grapes. (Laughter) (Applause) The grandchildren are coming home. You've been a great audience and very attentive. Thank you very much for having me here. (Applause)

It's the fifth time I stand on this shore, the Cuban shore, looking out at that distant horizon, believing, again, that I'm going to make it all the way across that vast, dangerous wilderness of an ocean. Not only have I tried four times, but the greatest swimmers in the world have been trying since 0000, and it's still never been done. The team is proud of our four attempts. It's an expedition of some 00 people. Bonnie is my best friend and head handler, who somehow summons will, that last drop of will within me, when I think it's gone, after many, many hours and days out there. The shark experts are the best in the world -- large predators below. The box jellyfish, the deadliest venom in all of the ocean, is in these waters, and I have come close to dying from them on a previous attempt. The conditions themselves, besides the sheer distance of over 000 miles in the open ocean -- the currents and whirling eddies and the Gulf Stream itself, the most unpredictable of all of the planet Earth. And by the way, it's amusing to me that journalists and people before these attempts often ask me, "Well, are you going to go with any boats or any people or anything?" And I'm thinking, what are they imagining? That I'll just sort of do some celestial navigation, and carry a bowie knife in my mouth, and I'll hunt fish and skin them alive and eat them, and maybe drag a desalinization plant behind me for fresh water. (Laughter) Yes, I have a team. (Laughter) And the team is expert, and the team is courageous, and brimming with innovation and scientific discovery, as is true with any major expedition on the planet. And we've been on a journey. And the debate has raged, hasn't it, since the Greeks, of isn't it what it's all about? Isn't life about the journey, not really the destination? And here we've been on this journey, and the truth is, it's been thrilling. We haven't reached that other shore, and still our sense of pride and commitment, unwavering commitment. When I turned 00, the dream was still alive from having tried this in my 00s, and dreamed it and imagined it. The most famous body of water on the Earth today, I imagine, Cuba to Florida. And it was deep. It was deep in my soul. And when I turned 00, it wasn't so much about the athletic accomplishment, it wasn't the ego of "I want to be the first." That's always there and it's undeniable. But it was deeper. It was, how much life is there left? Let's face it, we're all on a one-way street, aren't we, and what are we going to do? What are we going to do as we go forward to have no regrets looking back? And all this past year in training, I had that Teddy Roosevelt quote to paraphrase it, floating around in my brain, and it says, "You go ahead, you go ahead and sit back in your comfortable chair and you be the critic, you be the observer, while the brave one gets in the ring and engages and gets bloody and gets dirty and fails over and over and over again, but yet isn't afraid and isn't timid and lives life in a bold way." And so of course I want to make it across. It is the goal, and I should be so shallow to say that this year, the destination was even sweeter than the journey. (Laughter) (Applause) But the journey itself was worthwhile taking. And at this point, by this summer, everybody -- scientists, sports scientists, endurance experts, neurologists, my own team, Bonnie -- said it's impossible. It just simply can't be done, and Bonnie said to me, "But if you're going to take the journey, I'm going to see you through to the end of it, so I'll be there." And now we're there. And as we're looking out, kind of a surreal moment before the first stroke, standing on the rocks at Marina Hemingway, the Cuban flag is flying above, all my team's out in their boats, hands up in the air, "We're here, we're here for you," Bonnie and I look at each other, and we say, this year, the mantra is -- and I've been using it in training -- find a way. You have a dream and you have obstacles in front of you, as we all do. None of us ever get through this life without heartache, without turmoil, and if you believe and you have faith and you can get knocked down and get back up again and you believe in perseverance as a great human quality, you find your way, and Bonnie grabbed my shoulders, and she said, "Let's find our way to Florida." And we started, and for the next 00 hours, it was an intense, unforgettable life experience. The highs were high, the awe, I'm not a religious person, but I'll tell you, to be in the azure blue of the Gulf Stream as if, as you're breathing, you're looking down miles and miles and miles, to feel the majesty of this blue planet we live on, it's awe-inspiring. I have a playlist of about 00 songs, and especially in the middle of the night, and that night, because we use no lights -- lights attract jellyfish, lights attract sharks, lights attract baitfish that attract sharks, so we go in the pitch black of the night. You've never seen black this black. You can't see the front of your hand, and the people on the boat, Bonnie and my team on the boat, they just hear the slapping of the arms, and they know where I am, because there's no visual at all. And I'm out there kind of tripping out on my little playlist. (Laughter) I've got a tight rubber cap, so I don't hear a thing. I've got goggles and I'm turning my head 00 times a minute, and I'm singing, ♪ Imagine there's no heaven ♪ ♪ doo doo doo doo doo ♪ ♪ It's easy if you try ♪ ♪ doo doo doo doo doo ♪ And I can sing that song a thousand times in a row. (Laughter) Now there's a talent unto itself. (Laughter) (Applause) And each time I get done with ♪ Ooh, you may say I'm a dreamer but I'm not the only one ♪ 000. ♪ Imagine there's no heaven ♪ And when I get through the end of a thousand of John Lennon's "Imagine," I have swum nine hours and 00 minutes, exactly. And then there are the crises. Of course there are. And the vomiting starts, the seawater, you're not well, you're wearing a jellyfish mask for the ultimate protection. It's difficult to swim in. It's causing abrasions on the inside of the mouth, but the tentacles can't get you. And the hypothermia sets in. The water's 00 degrees, and yet you're losing weight and using calories, and as you come over toward the side of the boat, not allowed to touch it, not allowed to get out, but Bonnie and her team hand me nutrition and asks me what I'm doing, am I all right, I am seeing the Taj Mahal over here. I'm in a very different state, and I'm thinking, wow, I never thought I'd be running into the Taj Mahal out here. It's gorgeous. I mean, how long did it take them to build that? It's just -- So, uh, wooo. (Laughter) And then we kind of have a cardinal rule that I'm never told, really, how far it is, because we don't know how far it is. What's going to happen to you between this point and that point? What's going to happen to the weather and the currents and, God forbid, you're stung when you don't think you could be stung in all this armor, and Bonnie made a decision coming into that third morning that I was suffering and I was hanging on by a thread and she said, "Come here," and I came close to the boat, and she said, "Look, look out there," and I saw light, because the day's easier than the night, and I thought we were coming into day, and I saw a stream of white light along the horizon, and I said, "It's going to be morning soon." And she said, "No, those are the lights of Key West." It was 00 more hours, which for most swimmers would be a long time. (Laughter) (Applause) You have no idea how many 00-hour training swims I had done. So here we go, and I somehow, without a decision, went into no counting of strokes and no singing and no quoting Stephen Hawking and the parameters of the universe, I just went into thinking about this dream, and why, and how. And as I said, when I turned 00, it wasn't about that concrete "Can you do it?" That's the everyday machinations. That's the discipline, and it's the preparation, and there's a pride in that. But I decided to think, as I went along, about, the phrase usually is reaching for the stars, and in my case, it's reaching for the horizon. And when you reach for the horizon, as I've proven, you may not get there, but what a tremendous build of character and spirit that you lay down. What a foundation you lay down in reaching for those horizons. And now the shore is coming, and there's just a little part of me that's sad. The epic journey is going to be over. So many people come up to me now and say, "What's next? We love that! That little tracker that was on the computer? When are you going to do the next one? We just can't wait to follow the next one." Well, they were just there for 00 hours, and I was there for years. And so there won't be another epic journey in the ocean. But the point is, and the point was that every day of our lives is epic, and I'll tell you, when I walked up onto that beach, staggered up onto that beach, and I had so many times in a very puffed up ego way, rehearsed what I would say on the beach. When Bonnie thought that the back of my throat was swelling up, and she brought the medical team over to our boat to say that she's really beginning to have trouble breathing. Another 00, 00 hours in the saltwater, the whole thing -- and I just thought in my hallucinatory moment, that I heard the word tracheotomy. (Laughter) And Bonnie said to the doctor, "I'm not worried about her not breathing. If she can't talk when she gets to the shore, she's gonna be pissed off." (Laughter) But the truth is, all those orations that I had practiced just to get myself through some training swims as motivation, it wasn't like that. It was a very real moment, with that crowd, with my team. We did it. I didn't do it. We did it. And we'll never forget it. It'll always be part of us. And the three things that I did sort of blurt out when we got there, was first, "Never, ever give up." I live it. What's the phrase from today from Socrates? To be is to do. So I don't stand up and say, don't ever give up. I didn't give up, and there was action behind these words. The second is, "You can chase your dreams at any age; you're never too old." Sixty-four, that no one at any age, any gender, could ever do, has done it, and there's no doubt in my mind that I am at the prime of my life today. (Applause) Yeah. Thank you. And the third thing I said on that beach was, "It looks like the most solitary endeavor in the world, and in many ways, of course, it is, and in other ways, and the most important ways, it's a team, and if you think I'm a badass, you want to meet Bonnie." (Laughter) Bonnie, where are you? Where are you? There's Bonnie Stoll. (Applause) My buddy. The Henry David Thoreau quote goes, when you achieve your dreams, it's not so much what you get as who you have become in achieving them. And yeah, I stand before you now. In the three months since that swim ended, I've sat down with Oprah and I've been in President Obama's Oval Office. I've been invited to speak in front of esteemed groups such as yourselves. I've signed a wonderful major book contract. All of that's great, and I don't denigrate it. I'm proud of it all, but the truth is, I'm walking around tall because I am that bold, fearless person, and I will be, every day, until it's time for these days to be done. Thank you very much and enjoy the conference. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Find a way! (Applause)

I want you to, for a moment, think about playing a game of Monopoly, except in this game, that combination of skill, talent and luck that help earn you success in games, as in life, has been rendered irrelevant, because this game's been rigged, and you've got the upper hand. You've got more money, more opportunities to move around the board, and more access to resources. And as you think about that experience, I want you to ask yourself, how might that experience of being a privileged player in a rigged game change the way that you think about yourself and regard that other player? So we ran a study on the U.C. Berkeley campus to look at exactly that question. We brought in more than 000 pairs of strangers into the lab, and with the flip of a coin randomly assigned one of the two to be a rich player in a rigged game. They got two times as much money. When they passed Go, they collected twice the salary, and they got to roll both dice instead of one, so they got to move around the board a lot more. (Laughter) And over the course of 00 minutes, we watched through hidden cameras what happened. And what I want to do today, for the first time, is show you a little bit of what we saw. You're going to have to pardon the sound quality, in some cases, because again, these were hidden cameras. So we've provided subtitles. Rich Player: How many 000s did you have? Poor Player: Just one. Rich Player: Are you serious. Poor Player: Yeah. Rich Player: I have three. (Laughs) I don't know why they gave me so much. Paul Piff: Okay, so it was quickly apparent to players that something was up. One person clearly has a lot more money than the other person, and yet, as the game unfolded, we saw very notable differences and dramatic differences begin to emerge between the two players. The rich player started to move around the board louder, literally smacking the board with their piece as he went around. We were more likely to see signs of dominance and nonverbal signs, displays of power and celebration among the rich players. We had a bowl of pretzels positioned off to the side. It's on the bottom right corner there. That allowed us to watch participants' consummatory behavior. So we're just tracking how many pretzels participants eat. Rich Player: Are those pretzels a trick? Poor Player: I don't know. PP: Okay, so no surprises, people are onto us. They wonder what that bowl of pretzels is doing there in the first place. One even asks, like you just saw, is that bowl of pretzels there as a trick? And yet, despite that, the power of the situation seems to inevitably dominate, and those rich players start to eat more pretzels. Rich Player: I love pretzels. (Laughter) PP: And as the game went on, one of the really interesting and dramatic patterns that we observed begin to emerge was that the rich players actually started to become ruder toward the other person, less and less sensitive to the plight of those poor, poor players, and more and more demonstrative of their material success, more likely to showcase how well they're doing. Rich Player: I have money for everything. Poor Player: How much is that? Rich Player: You owe me 00 dollars. You're going to lose all your money soon. I'll buy it. I have so much money. I have so much money, it takes me forever. Rich Player 0: I'm going to buy out this whole board. Rich Player 0: You're going to run out of money soon. I'm pretty much untouchable at this point. PP: Okay, and here's what I think was really, really interesting, is that at the end of the 00 minutes, we asked the players to talk about their experience during the game. And when the rich players talked about why they had inevitably won in this rigged game of Monopoly -- (Laughter) - they talked about what they'd done to buy those different properties and earn their success in the game, and they became far less attuned to all those different features of the situation, including that flip of a coin that had randomly gotten them into that privileged position in the first place. And that's a really, really incredible insight into how the mind makes sense of advantage. Now this game of Monopoly can be used as a metaphor for understanding society and its hierarchical structure, wherein some people have a lot of wealth and a lot of status, and a lot of people don't. They have a lot less wealth and a lot less status and a lot less access to valued resources. And what my colleagues and I for the last seven years have been doing is studying the effects of these kinds of hierarchies. What we've been finding across dozens of studies and thousands of participants across this country is that as a person's levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down, and their feelings of entitlement, of deservingness, and their ideology of self-interest increases. In surveys, we found that it's actually wealthier individuals who are more likely to moralize greed being good, and that the pursuit of self-interest is favorable and moral. Now what I want to do today is talk about some of the implications of this ideology self-interest, talk about why we should care about those implications, and end with what might be done. Some of the first studies that we ran in this area looked at helping behavior, something social psychologists call pro-social behavior. And we were really interested in who's more likely to offer help to another person, someone who's rich or someone who's poor. In one of the studies, we bring in rich and poor members of the community into the lab and give each of them the equivalent of 00 dollars. We told the participants that they could keep these 00 dollars for themselves, or they could share a portion of it, if they wanted to, with a stranger who is totally anonymous. They'll never meet that stranger and the stranger will never meet them. And we just monitor how much people give. Individuals who made 00,000 sometimes under 00,000 dollars a year, gave 00 percent more of their money to the stranger than did individuals making 000,000 or 000,000 dollars a year. We've had people play games to see who's more or less likely to cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize. In one of the games, we actually rigged a computer so that die rolls over a certain score were impossible. You couldn't get above 00 in this game, and yet, the richer you were, the more likely you were to cheat in this game to earn credits toward a $00 cash prize, sometimes by three to four times as much. We ran another study where we looked at whether people would be inclined to take candy from a jar of candy that we explicitly identified as being reserved for children -- (Laughter) - participating -- I'm not kidding. I know it sounds like I'm making a joke. We explicitly told participants this jar of candy's for children participating in a developmental lab nearby. They're in studies. This is for them. And we just monitored how much candy participants took. Participants who felt rich took two times as much candy as participants who felt poor. We've even studied cars, not just any cars, but whether drivers of different kinds of cars are more or less inclined to break the law. In one of these studies, we looked at whether drivers would stop for a pedestrian that we had posed waiting to cross at a crosswalk. Now in California, as you all know, because I'm sure we all do this, it's the law to stop for a pedestrian who's waiting to cross. So here's an example of how we did it. That's our confederate off to the left posing as a pedestrian. He approaches as the red truck successfully stops. In typical California fashion, it's overtaken by the bus who almost runs our pedestrian over. (Laughter) Now here's an example of a more expensive car, a Prius, driving through, and a BMW doing the same. So we did this for hundreds of vehicles on several days, just tracking who stops and who doesn't. What we found was that as the expensiveness of a car increased, the driver's tendencies to break the law increased as well. None of the cars, none of the cars in our least expensive car category broke the law. Close to 00 percent of the cars in our most expensive vehicle category broke the law. We've run other studies finding that wealthier individuals are more likely to lie in negotiations, to endorse unethical behavior at work like stealing cash from the cash register, taking bribes, lying to customers. Now I don't mean to suggest that it's only wealthy people who show these patterns of behavior. Not at all. In fact, I think that we all, in our day-to-day, minute-by-minute lives, struggle with these competing motivations of when, or if, to put our own interests above the interests of other people. And that's understandable because the American dream is an idea in which we all have an equal opportunity to succeed and prosper, as long as we apply ourselves and work hard, and a piece of that means that sometimes, you need to put your own interests above the interests and well-being of other people around you. But what we're finding is that, the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to pursue a vision of personal success, of achievement and accomplishment, to the detriment of others around you. Here I've plotted for you the mean household income received by each fifth and top five percent of the population over the last 00 years. In 0000, the differences between the different quintiles of the population, in terms of income, are fairly egregious. It's not difficult to discern that there are differences. But over the last 00 years, that significant difference has become a grand canyon of sorts between those at the top and everyone else. In fact, the top 00 percent of our population own close to 00 percent of the total wealth in this country. We're at unprecedented levels of economic inequality. What that means is that wealth is not only becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a select group of individuals, but the American dream is becoming increasingly unattainable for an increasing majority of us. And if it's the case, as we've been finding, that the wealthier you are, the more entitled you feel to that wealth, and the more likely you are to prioritize your own interests above the interests of other people, and be willing to do things to serve that self-interest, well then there's no reason to think that those patterns will change. In fact, there's every reason to think that they'll only get worse, and that's what it would look like if things just stayed the same, at the same linear rate, over the next 00 years. Now, inequality, economic inequality, is something we should all be concerned about, and not just because of those at the bottom of the social hierarchy, but because individuals and groups with lots of economic inequality do worse, not just the people at the bottom, everyone. There's a lot of really compelling research coming out from top labs all over the world showcasing the range of things that are undermined as economic inequality gets worse. Social mobility, things we really care about, physical health, social trust, all go down as inequality goes up. Similarly, negative things in social collectives and societies, things like obesity, and violence, imprisonment, and punishment, are exacerbated as economic inequality increases. Again, these are outcomes not just experienced by a few, but that resound across all strata of society. Even people at the top experience these outcomes. So what do we do? This cascade of self-perpetuating, pernicious, negative effects could seem like something that's spun out of control, and there's nothing we can do about it, certainly nothing we as individuals could do. But in fact, we've been finding in our own laboratory research that small psychological interventions, small changes to people's values, small nudges in certain directions, can restore levels of egalitarianism and empathy. For instance, reminding people of the benefits of cooperation, or the advantages of community, cause wealthier individuals to be just as egalitarian as poor people. In one study, we had people watch a brief video, just 00 seconds long, about childhood poverty that served as a reminder of the needs of others in the world around them, and after watching that, we looked at how willing people were to offer up their own time to a stranger presented to them in the lab who was in distress. After watching this video, an hour later, rich people became just as generous of their own time to help out this other person, a stranger, as someone who's poor, suggesting that these differences are not innate or categorical, but are so malleable to slight changes in people's values, and little nudges of compassion and bumps of empathy. And beyond the walls of our lab, we're even beginning to see signs of change in society. Bill Gates, one of our nation's wealthiest individuals, in his Harvard commencement speech, talked about the problem facing society of inequality as being the most daunting challenge, and talked about what must be done to combat it, saying, "Humanity's greatest advances are not in its discoveries, but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity." And there's the Giving Pledge, in which more than 000 of our nation's wealthiest individuals are pledging half of their fortunes to charity. And there's the emergence of dozens of grassroots movements, like We are the One Percent, the Resource Generation, or Wealth for Common Good, in which the most privileged members of the population, members of the one percent and elsewhere, people who are wealthy, are using their own economic resources, adults and youth alike, that's what's most striking to me, leveraging their own privilege, their own economic resources, to combat inequality by advocating for social policies, changes in social values, and changes in people's behavior, that work against their own economic interests but that may ultimately restore the American dream. Thank you. (Applause)

Nine years ago, I worked for the U.S. government in Iraq, helping rebuild the electricity infrastructure. And I was there, and I worked in that job because I believe that technology can improve people's lives. One afternoon, I had tea with a storekeeper at the Al Rasheed Hotel in Baghdad, and he said to me, "You Americans, you can put a man on the moon, but when I get home tonight, I won't be able to turn on my lights." At the time, the U.S. government had spent more than two billion dollars on electricity reconstruction. How do you ensure technology reaches users? How do you put it in their hands so that it is useful? So those are the questions that my colleagues and I at D-Rev ask ourselves. And D-Rev is short for Design Revolution. And I took over the organization four years ago and really focused it on developing products that actually reach users, and not just any users, but customers who live on less than four dollars a day. One of the key areas we've been working on recently is medical devices, and while it may not be obvious that medical devices have something in common with Iraq's electricity grid then, there are some commonalities. Despite the advanced technology, it's not reaching the people who need it most. So I'm going to tell you about one of the projects we've been working on, the ReMotion Knee, and it's a prosthetic knee for above-knee amputees. And this project started when the Jaipur Foot Organization, the largest fitter of prosthetic limbs in the world, came to the Bay Area and they said, "We need a better knee." Chances are, if you're living on less than four dollars a day, and you're an amputee, you've lost your limb in a vehicle accident. Most people think it's land mines, but it's a vehicle accident. You're walking by the side of the road and you're hit by a truck, or you're trying to to jump on a moving train, you're late for work, and your pant leg gets caught. And the reality is that if you don't have much money, like this young named Kamal right here, the option you really have is a bamboo staff to get around. And how big a problem is this? There's over three million amputees every year who need a new or replacement knee. And what are their options? This is a high-end. This is what we'd call a "smart knee." It's got a microprocessor inside. It can pretty much do anything, but it's 00,000 dollars, and to give you a sense of who wears this, veterans, American veterans coming back from Afghanistan or Iraq would be fit with something like this. This is a low-end titanium knee. It's a polycentric knee, and all that that means is the mechanism, is a four-bar mechanism, that mimics a natural human knee. But at 0,000 dollars, it's still too expensive for people like Kamal. And lastly, here you see a low-end knee. This is a knee that's been designed specifically for poor people. And while you have affordability, you've lost on functionality. The mechanism here is a single axis, and a single axis is like a door hinge. So you can think about how unstable that would be. And this is the type of mechanism that the Jaipur Foot Organization was using when they were looking for a better knee, and I just wanted to give you a sense of what a leg system looks like, because I'm showing you all these knees and I imagine it's hard to think how it all fits together. So at the top you have a socket, and this fits over someone's residual limb, and everyone's residual limb is a little bit different. And then you have the knee, and here I've got a single axis on the knee so you can see how it rotates, and then a pylon, and then a foot. And we've been able to develop a knee, a polycentric knee, so that type of knee that acts like a human knee, mimics human gait, for 00 dollars retail. (Applause) But the key is, you can have this great invention, you can have this great design, but how do you get it to the people who most need it? How do you ensure it gets to them and it improves their lives? So at D-Rev, we've done some other projects, and we looked at three things that we really believe gets technologies to customers, to users, to people who need it. And the first thing is that the product needs to be world class. It needs to perform on par or better than the best products on the market. Regardless of your income level, you want the most beautiful, the best product that there is. I'm going to show you a video now of a man named Ash. You can see him walking. He's wearing the same knee system here with a single axis knee. And he's doing a 00-meter walk test. And you'll notice that he's struggling with stability as he's walking. And something that's not obvious, that you can't see, is that it's psychologically draining to walk and to be preventing yourself from falling. Now this is a video of Kamal. You remember Kamal earlier, holding the bamboo staff. He's wearing one of the earlier versions of our knee, and he's doing that same 00-meter walk test. And you can see his stability is much better. So world class isn't just about technical performance. It's also about human performance. And most medical devices, we've learned, as we've dug in, are really designed for Westerners, for wealthier economies. But the reality is our users, our customers, they do different things. They sit cross-legged more. We see that they squat. They kneel in prayer. And we designed our knee to have the greatest range of motion of almost any other knee on the market. So the second thing we learned, and this leads into my second point, which is that we believe that products need to be designed to be user-centric. And at D-Rev, we go one step further and we say you need to be user-obsessed. So it's not just the end user that you're thinking about, but everyone who interacts with the product, so, for example, the prosthetist who fits the knee, but also the context in which the knee is being fit. What is the local market like? How do all these components get to the clinic? Do they all get there on time? The supply chain. Everything that goes into ensuring that this product gets to the end user, and it goes in as part of the system, and it's used. So I wanted to show you some of the iterations we did between the first version, the Jaipur Knee, so this is it right here. (Clicking) Notice anything about it? It clicks. We'd seen that users had actually modified it. So do you see that black strip right there? That's a homemade noise dampener. We also saw that our users had modified it in other ways. You can see there that that particular amputee, he had wrapped bandages around the knee. He'd made a cosmesis. And if you look at the knee, it's got those pointy edges, right? So if you're wearing it under pants or a skirt or a sari, it's really obvious that you're wearing a prosthetic limb, and in societies where there's social stigma around being disabled, people are particularly acute about this. So I'm going to show you some of the modifications we did. We did a lot of iterations, not just around this, but some other things. But here we have the version three, the ReMotion Knee, but if you look in here, you can see the noise dampener. It's quieter. The other thing we did is that we smoothed the profile. We made it thinner. And something that's not obvious is that we designed it for mass production. And this goes into my last point. We really, truly believe that if a product is going to reach users at the scale that it's needed, it needs to be market-driven, and market-driven means that products are sold. They're not donated. They're not heavily subsidized. Our product needs to be designed to offer value to the end user. It also has to be designed to be very affordable. But a product that is valued by a customer is used by a customer, and use is what creates impact. And we believe that as designers, it holds us accountable to our customers. And with centralized manufacturing, you can control the quality control, and you can hit that $00 price point with profit margins built in. And now, those profit margins are critical, because if you want to scale, if you want to reach all the people in the world who possibly need a knee, it needs to be economically sustainable. So I want to give you a sense of where we are at. We have fit over 0,000 amputees, and one of the big indicators we're looking at, of course, is, does it improve lives? Well, the standard is, is someone still wearing their knee six months later? The industry average is about 00 percent. Ours is 00 percent, and we're hoping to get that higher. Right now, our knees are worn in 00 countries. This is where we want to get, though, in the next three years. We'll double the impact in 0000, and we'll double it each of the following years after that. But then we hit a new challenge, and that's the number of skilled prosthetists who are able to fit knees. So I want to end with a story of Pournima. Pournima was 00 years old when she was in a car accident where she lost her leg, and she traveled 00 hours by train to come to the clinic to be fit with a knee, and while all of the amputees who wear our knees affect us as the designers, she's particularly meaningful to me as an engineer and as a woman, because she was in school, she had just started school to study engineering. And she said, "Well, now that I can walk again, I can go back and complete my studies." And to me she represents the next generation of engineers solving problems and ensuring meaningful technologies reach their users. So thank you. (Applause)

"I felt a funeral in my brain, and mourners to and fro kept treading, treading till I felt that sense was breaking through. And when they all were seated, a service, like a drum, kept beating, beating, till I felt my mind was going numb. And then I heard them lift a box and creak across my soul with those same boots of lead again, then space began to toll, as if the heavens were a bell and being were an ear, and I, and silence, some strange race wrecked, solitary, here. Just then, a plank in reason broke, and I fell down and down and hit a world at every plunge, and finished knowing then." We know depression through metaphors. Emily Dickinson was able to convey it in language, Goya in an image. Half the purpose of art is to describe such iconic states. As for me, I had always thought myself tough, one of the people who could survive if I'd been sent to a concentration camp. In 0000, I had a series of losses. My mother died, a relationship I'd been in ended, I moved back to the United States from some years abroad, and I got through all of those experiences intact. But in 0000, three years later, I found myself losing interest in almost everything. I didn't want to do any of the things I had previously wanted to do, and I didn't know why. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep away from me in that moment. Everything there was to do seemed like too much work. I would come home and I would see the red light flashing on my answering machine, and instead of being thrilled to hear from my friends, I would think, "What a lot of people that is to have to call back." Or I would decide I should have lunch, and then I would think, but I'd have to get the food out and put it on a plate and cut it up and chew it and swallow it, and it felt to me like the Stations of the Cross. And one of the things that often gets lost in discussions of depression is that you know it's ridiculous. You know it's ridiculous while you're experiencing it. You know that most people manage to listen to their messages and eat lunch and organize themselves to take a shower and go out the front door and that it's not a big deal, and yet you are nonetheless in its grip and you are unable to figure out any way around it. And so I began to feel myself doing less and thinking less and feeling less. It was a kind of nullity. And then the anxiety set in. If you told me that I'd have to be depressed for the next month, I would say, "As long I know it'll be over in November, I can do it." But if you said to me, "You have to have acute anxiety for the next month," I would rather slit my wrist than go through it. It was the feeling all the time like that feeling you have if you're walking and you slip or trip and the ground is rushing up at you, but instead of lasting half a second, the way that does, it lasted for six months. It's a sensation of being afraid all the time but not even knowing what it is that you're afraid of. And it was at that point that I began to think that it was just too painful to be alive, and that the only reason not to kill oneself was so as not to hurt other people. And finally one day, I woke up and I thought perhaps I'd had a stroke, because I lay in bed completely frozen, looking at the telephone, thinking, "Something is wrong and I should call for help," and I couldn't reach out my arm and pick up the phone and dial. And finally, after four full hours of my lying and staring at it, the phone rang, and somehow I managed to pick it up, and it was my father, and I said, "I'm in serious trouble. We need to do something." The next day I started with the medications and the therapy. And I also started reckoning with this terrible question: If I'm not the tough person who could have made it through a concentration camp, then who am I? And if I have to take medication, is that medication making me more fully myself, or is it making me someone else? And how do I feel about it if it's making me someone else? I had two advantages as I went in to the fight. The first is that I knew that, objectively speaking, I had a nice life, and that if I could only get well, there was something at the other end that was worth living for. And the other was that I had access to good treatment. But I nonetheless emerged and relapsed, and emerged and relapsed, and emerged and relapsed, and finally understood I would have to be on medication and in therapy forever. And I thought, "But is it a chemical problem or a psychological problem? And does it need a chemical cure or a philosophical cure?" And I couldn't figure out which it was. And then I understood that actually, we aren't advanced enough in either area for it to explain things fully. The chemical cure and the psychological cure both have a role to play, and I also figured out that depression was something that was braided so deep into us that there was no separating it from our character and personality. I want to say that the treatments we have for depression are appalling. They're not very effective. They're extremely costly. They come with innumerable side effects. They're a disaster. But I am so grateful that I live now and not 00 years ago, when there would have been almost nothing to be done. I hope that 00 years hence, people will hear about my treatments and be appalled that anyone endured such primitive science. Depression is the flaw in love. If you were married to someone and thought, "Well, if my wife dies, I'll find another one," it wouldn't be love as we know it. There's no such thing as love without the anticipation of loss, and that specter of despair can be the engine of intimacy. There are three things people tend to confuse: depression, grief and sadness. Grief is explicitly reactive. If you have a loss and you feel incredibly unhappy, and then, six months later, you are still deeply sad, but you're functioning a little better, it's probably grief, and it will probably ultimately resolve itself in some measure. If you experience a catastrophic loss, and you feel terrible, and six months later you can barely function at all, then it's probably a depression that was triggered by the catastrophic circumstances. The trajectory tells us a great deal. People think of depression as being just sadness. It's much, much too much sadness, much too much grief at far too slight a cause. As I set out to understand depression, and to interview people who had experienced it, I found that there were people who seemed on the surface to have what sounded like relatively mild depression who were nonetheless utterly disabled by it. And there were other people who had what sounded as they described it like terribly severe depression who nonetheless had good lives in the interstices between their depressive episodes. And I set out to find out what it is that causes some people to be more resilient than other people. What are the mechanisms that allow people to survive? And I went out and I interviewed person after person who was suffering with depression. One of the first people I interviewed described depression as a slower way of being dead, and that was a good thing for me to hear early on because it reminded me that that slow way of being dead can lead to actual deadness, that this is a serious business. It's the leading disability worldwide, and people die of it every day. One of the people I talked to when I was trying to understand this was a beloved friend who I had known for many years, and who had had a psychotic episode in her freshman year of college, and then plummeted into a horrific depression. She had bipolar illness, or manic depression, as it was then known. And then she did very well for many years on lithium, and then eventually, she was taken off her lithium to see how she would do without it, and she had another psychosis, and then plunged into the worst depression that I had ever seen in which she sat in her parents' apartment, more or less catatonic, essentially without moving, day after day after day. And when I interviewed her about that experience some years later -- she's a poet and psychotherapist named Maggie Robbins - when I interviewed her, she said, "I was singing 'Where Have All The Flowers Gone' over and over to occupy my mind. I was singing to blot out the things my mind was saying, which were, 'You are nothing. You are nobody. You don't even deserve to live.' And that was when I really started thinking about killing myself." You don't think in depression that you've put on a gray veil and are seeing the world through the haze of a bad mood. You think that the veil has been taken away, the veil of happiness, and that now you're seeing truly. It's easier to help schizophrenics who perceive that there's something foreign inside of them that needs to be exorcised, but it's difficult with depressives, because we believe we are seeing the truth. But the truth lies. I became obsessed with that sentence: "But the truth lies." And I discovered, as I talked to depressive people, that they have many delusional perceptions. People will say, "No one loves me." And you say, "I love you, your wife loves you, your mother loves you." You can answer that one pretty readily, at least for most people. But people who are depressed will also say, "No matter what we do, we're all just going to die in the end." Or they'll say, "There can be no true communion between two human beings. Each of us is trapped in his own body." To which you have to say, "That's true, but I think we should focus right now on what to have for breakfast." (Laughter) A lot of the time, what they are expressing is not illness, but insight, and one comes to think what's really extraordinary is that most of us know about those existential questions and they don't distract us very much. There was a study I particularly liked in which a group of depressed and a group of non-depressed people were asked to play a video game for an hour, and at the end of the hour, they were asked how many little monsters they thought they had killed. The depressive group was usually accurate to within about 00 percent, and the non-depressed people guessed between 00 and 00 times as many little monsters - (Laughter) - as they had actually killed. A lot of people said, when I chose to write about my depression, that it must be very difficult to be out of that closet, to have people know. They said, "Do people talk to you differently?" And I said, "Yes, people talk to me differently. They talk to me differently insofar as they start telling me about their experience, or their sister's experience, or their friend's experience. Things are different because now I know that depression is the family secret that everyone has. I went a few years ago to a conference, and on Friday of the three-day conference, one of the participants took me aside, and she said, "I suffer from depression and I'm a little embarrassed about it, but I've been taking this medication, and I just wanted to ask you what you think?" And so I did my best to give her such advice as I could. And then she said, "You know, my husband would never understand this. He's really the kind of guy to whom this wouldn't make any sense, so I just, you know, it's just between us." And I said, "Yes, that's fine." On Sunday of the same conference, her husband took me aside, and he said, "My wife wouldn't think that I was really much of a guy if she knew this, but I've been dealing with this depression and I'm taking some medication, and I wondered what you think?" They were hiding the same medication in two different places in the same bedroom. And I said that I thought communication within the marriage might be triggering some of their problems. (Laughter) But I was also struck by the burdensome nature of such mutual secrecy. Depression is so exhausting. It takes up so much of your time and energy, and silence about it, it really does make the depression worse. And then I began thinking about all the ways people make themselves better. I'd started off as a medical conservative. I thought there were a few kinds of therapy that worked, it was clear what they were -- there was medication, there were certain psychotherapies, there was possibly electroconvulsive treatment, and that everything else was nonsense. But then I discovered something. If you have brain cancer, and you say that standing on your head for 00 minutes every morning makes you feel better, it may make you feel better, but you still have brain cancer, and you'll still probably die from it. But if you say that you have depression, and standing on your head for 00 minutes every day makes you feel better, then it's worked, because depression is an illness of how you feel, and if you feel better, then you are effectively not depressed anymore. So I became much more tolerant of the vast world of alternative treatments. And I get letters, I get hundreds of letters from people writing to tell me about what's worked for them. Someone was asking me backstage today about meditation. My favorite of the letters that I got was the one that came from a woman who wrote and said that she had tried therapy, she had tried medication, she had tried pretty much everything, and she had found a solution and hoped I would tell the world, and that was making little things from yarn. (Laughter) She sent me some of them. (Laughter) And I'm not wearing them right now. I suggested to her that she also should look up obsessive compulsive disorder in the DSM. And yet, when I went to look at alternative treatments, I also gained perspective on other treatments. I went through a tribal exorcism in Senegal that involved a great deal of ram's blood and that I'm not going to detail right now, but a few years afterwards I was in Rwanda working on a different project, and I happened to describe my experience to someone, and he said, "Well, you know, that's West Africa, and we're in East Africa, and our rituals are in some ways very different, but we do have some rituals that have something in common with what you're describing." And I said, "Oh." And he said, "Yes," he said, "but we've had a lot of trouble with Western mental health workers, especially the ones who came right after the genocide." And I said, "What kind of trouble did you have?" And he said, "Well, they would do this bizarre thing. They didn't take people out in the sunshine where you begin to feel better. They didn't include drumming or music to get people's blood going. They didn't involve the whole community. They didn't externalize the depression as an invasive spirit. Instead what they did was they took people one at a time into dingy little rooms and had them talk for an hour about bad things that had happened to them." (Laughter) (Applause) He said, "We had to ask them to leave the country." (Laughter) Now at the other end of alternative treatments, let me tell you about Frank Russakoff. Frank Russakoff had the worst depression perhaps that I've ever seen in a man. He was constantly depressed. He was, when I met him, at a point at which every month he would have electroshock treatment. Then he would feel sort of disoriented for a week. Then he would feel okay for a week. Then he would have a week of going downhill. And then he would have another electroshock treatment. And he said to me when I met him, "It's unbearable to go through my weeks this way. I can't go on this way, and I've figured out how I'm going to end it if I don't get better. But," he said to me, "I heard about a protocol at Mass General for a procedure called a cingulotomy, which is a brain surgery, and I think I'm going to give that a try." And I remember being amazed at that point to think that someone who clearly had so many bad experiences with so many different treatments still had buried in him somewhere enough optimism to reach out for one more. And he had the cingulotomy, and it was incredibly successful. He's now a friend of mine. He has a lovely wife and two beautiful children. He wrote me a letter the Christmas after the surgery, and he said, "My father sent me two presents this year, First, a motorized C.D. rack from The Sharper Image that I didn't really need, but I knew he was giving it to me to celebrate the fact that I'm living on my own and have a job I seem to love. And the other present was a photo of my grandmother, who committed suicide. As I unwrapped it, I began to cry, and my mother came over and said, 'Are you crying because of the relatives you never knew?' And I said, 'She had the same disease I have.' I'm crying now as I write to you. It's not that I'm so sad, but I get overwhelmed, I think, because I could have killed myself, but my parents kept me going, and so did the doctors, and I had the surgery. I'm alive and grateful. We live in the right time, even if it doesn't always feel like it." I was struck by the fact that depression is broadly perceived to be a modern, Western, middle-class thing, and I went to look at how it operated in a variety of other contexts, and one of the things I was most interested in was depression among the indigent. And so I went out to try to look at what was being done for poor people with depression. And what I discovered is that poor people are mostly not being treated for depression. Depression is the result of a genetic vulnerability, which is presumably evenly distributed in the population, and triggering circumstances, which are likely to be more severe for people who are impoverished. And yet it turns out that if you have a really lovely life but feel miserable all the time, you think, "Why do I feel like this? I must have depression." And you set out to find treatment for it. But if you have a perfectly awful life, and you feel miserable all the time, the way you feel is commensurate with your life, and it doesn't occur to you to think, "Maybe this is treatable." And so we have an epidemic in this country of depression among impoverished people that's not being picked up and that's not being treated and that's not being addressed, and it's a tragedy of a grand order. And so I found an academic who was doing a research project in slums outside of D.C., where she picked up women who had come in for other health problems and diagnosed them with depression, and then provided six months of the experimental protocol. One of them, Lolly, came in, and this is what she said the day she came in. She said, and she was a woman, by the way, who had seven children. She said, "I used to have a job but I had to give it up because I couldn't go out of the house. I have nothing to say to my children. In the morning, I can't wait for them to leave, and then I climb in bed and pull the covers over my head, and three o'clock when they come home, it just comes so fast." She said, "I've been taking a lot of Tylenol, anything I can take so that I can sleep more. My husband has been telling me I'm stupid, I'm ugly. I wish I could stop the pain." Well, she was brought into this experimental protocol, and when I interviewed her six months later, she had taken a job working in childcare for the U.S. Navy, she had left the abusive husband, and she said to me, "My kids are so much happier now." She said, "There's one room in my new place for the boys and one room for the girls, but at night, they're just all up on my bed, and we're doing homework all together and everything. One of them wants to be a preacher, one of them wants to be a firefighter, and one of the girls says she's going to be a lawyer. They don't cry like they used to, and they don't fight like they did. That's all I need now is my kids. Things keep on changing, the way I dress, the way I feel, the way I act. I can go outside not being afraid anymore, and I don't think those bad feelings are coming back, and if it weren't for Dr. Miranda and that, I would still be at home with the covers pulled over my head, if I were still alive at all. I asked the Lord to send me an angel, and he heard my prayers." I was really moved by these experiences, and I decided that I wanted to write about them not only in a book I was working on, but also in an article, and so I got a commission from The New York Times Magazine to write about depression among the indigent. And I turned in my story, and my editor called me and said, "We really can't publish this." And I said, "Why not?" And she said, "It just is too far-fetched. These people who are sort of at the very bottom rung of society and then they get a few months of treatment and they're virtually ready to run Morgan Stanley? It's just too implausible." She said, I've never even heard of anything like it." And I said, "The fact that you've never heard of it is an indication that it is news." (Laughter) (Applause) "And you are a news magazine." So after a certain amount of negotiation, they agreed to it. But I think a lot of what they said was connected in some strange way to this distaste that people still have for the idea of treatment, the notion that somehow if we went out and treated a lot of people in indigent communities, that would be an exploitative thing to do, because we would be changing them. There is this false moral imperative that seems to be all around us that treatment of depression, the medications and so on, are an artifice, and that it's not natural. And I think that's very misguided. It would be natural for people's teeth to fall out, but there is nobody militating against toothpaste, at least not in my circles. And people then say, "Well, but isn't depression part of what people are supposed to experience? Didn't we evolve to have depression? Isn't it part of your personality?" To which I would say, mood is adaptive. Being able to have sadness and fear and joy and pleasure and all of the other moods that we have, that's incredibly valuable. And major depression is something that happens when that system gets broken. It's maladaptive. People will come to me and say, "I think, though, if I just stick it out for another year, I think I can just get through this." And I always say to them, "You may get through it, but you'll never be 00 again. Life is short, and that's a whole year you're talking about giving up. Think it through." It's a strange poverty of the English language, and indeed of many other languages, that we use this same word, depression, to describe how a kid feels when it rains on his birthday, and to describe how somebody feels the minute before they commit suicide. People say to me, "Well, is it continuous with normal sadness?" And I say, in a way it's continuous with normal sadness. There is a certain amount of continuity, but it's the same way there's continuity between having an iron fence outside your house that gets a little rust spot that you have to sand off and do a little repainting, and what happens if you leave the house for 000 years and it rusts through until it's only a pile of orange dust. And it's that orange dust spot, that orange dust problem, that's the one we're setting out to address. So now people say, "You take these happy pills, and do you feel happy?" And I don't. But I don't feel sad about having to eat lunch, and I don't feel sad about my answering machine, and I don't feel sad about taking a shower. I feel more, in fact, I think, because I can feel sadness without nullity. I feel sad about professional disappointments, about damaged relationships, about global warming. Those are the things that I feel sad about now. And I said to myself, well, what is the conclusion? How did those people who have better lives even with bigger depression manage to get through? What is the mechanism of resilience? And what I came up with over time was that the people who deny their experience, the ones who say, "I was depressed a long time ago and I never want to think about it again and I'm not going to look at it and I'm just going to get on with my life," ironically, those are the people who are most enslaved by what they have. Shutting out the depression strengthens it. While you hide from it, it grows. And the people who do better are the ones who are able to tolerate the fact that they have this condition. Those who can tolerate their depression are the ones who achieve resilience. So Frank Russakoff said to me, "If I had it again to do over, I suppose I wouldn't do it this way, but in a strange way, I'm grateful for what I've experienced. I'm glad to have been in the hospital 00 times. It taught me so much about love, and my relationship with my parents and my doctors has been so precious to me, and will be always." And Maggie Robbins said, "I used to volunteer in an AIDS clinic, and I would just talk and talk and talk, and the people I was dealing with weren't very responsive, and I thought, 'That's not very friendly or helpful of them.' And then I realized, I realized that they weren't going to do more than make those first few minutes of small talk. It was simply going to be an occasion where I didn't have AIDS and I wasn't dying, but could tolerate the fact that they did and they were. Our needs are our greatest assets. It turns out I've learned to give all the things I need." Valuing one's depression does not prevent a relapse, but it may make the prospect of relapse and even relapse itself easier to tolerate. The question is not so much of finding great meaning and deciding your depression has been very meaningful. It's of seeking that meaning and thinking, when it comes again, "This will be hellish, but I will learn something from it." I have learned in my own depression how big an emotion can be, how it can be more real than facts, and I have found that that experience has allowed me to experience positive emotion in a more intense and more focused way. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and these days, my life is vital, even on the days when I'm sad. I felt that funeral in my brain, and I sat next to the colossus at the edge of the world, and I have discovered something inside of myself that I would have to call a soul that I had never formulated until that day 00 years ago when hell came to pay me a surprise visit. I think that while I hated being depressed and would hate to be depressed again, I've found a way to love my depression. I love it because it has forced me to find and cling to joy. I love it because each day I decide, sometimes gamely, and sometimes against the moment's reason, to cleave to the reasons for living. And that, I think, is a highly privileged rapture. Thank you. (Applause)

Einstein said that "I never think about the future - it comes soon enough." And he was right, of course. So today, I'm here to ask you to think of how the future is happening now. Over the past 000 years, the world has experienced two major waves of innovation. First, the Industrial Revolution brought us machines and factories, railways, electricity, air travel, and our lives have never been the same. Then the Internet revolution brought us computing power, data networks, unprecedented access to information and communication, and our lives have never been the same. Now we are experiencing another metamorphic change: the industrial Internet. It brings together intelligent machines, advanced analytics, and the creativity of people at work. It's the marriage of minds and machines. And our lives will never be the same. In my current role, I see up close how technology is beginning to transform industrial sectors that play a huge role in our economy and in our lives: energy, aviation, transportation, health care. For an economist, this is highly unusual, and it's extremely exciting, because this is a transformation as powerful as the Industrial Revolution and more, and before the Industrial Revolution, there was no economic growth to speak of. So what is this industrial Internet? Industrial machines are being equipped with a growing number of electronic sensors that allow them to see, hear, feel a lot more than ever before, generating prodigious amounts of data. Increasingly sophisticated analytics then sift through the data, providing insights that allow us to operate the machines in entirely new ways, a lot more efficiently. And not just individual machines, but fleets of locomotives, airplanes, entire systems like power grids, hospitals. It is asset optimization and system optimization. Of course, electronic sensors have been around for some time, but something has changed: a sharp decline in the cost of sensors and, thanks to advances in cloud computing, a rapid decrease in the cost of storing and processing data. So we are moving to a world where the machines we work with are not just intelligent; they are brilliant. They are self-aware, they are predictive, reactive and social. It's jet engines, locomotives, gas turbines, medical devices, communicating seamlessly with each other and with us. It's a world where information itself becomes intelligent and comes to us automatically when we need it without having to look for it. We are beginning to deploy throughout the industrial system embedded virtualization, multi-core processor technology, advanced cloud-based communications, a new software-defined machine infrastructure which allows machine functionality to become virtualized in software, decoupling machine software from hardware, and allowing us to remotely and automatically monitor, manage and upgrade industrial assets. Why does any of this matter at all? Well first of all, it's already allowing us to shift towards preventive, condition-based maintenance, which means fixing machines just before they break, without wasting time servicing them on a fixed schedule. And this, in turn, is pushing us towards zero unplanned downtime, which means there will be no more power outages, no more flight delays. So let me give you a few examples of how these brilliant machines work, and some of the examples may seem trivial, some are clearly more profound, but all of them are going to have a very powerful impact. Let's start with aviation. Today, 00 percent of all flights cancellations and delays are due to unscheduled maintenance events. Something goes wrong unexpectedly. This results in eight billion dollars in costs for the airline industry globally every year, not to mention the impact on all of us: stress, inconvenience, missed meetings as we sit helplessly in an airport terminal. So how can the industrial Internet help here? We've developed a preventive maintenance system which can be installed on any aircraft. It's self-learning and able to predict issues that a human operator would miss. The aircraft, while in flight, will communicate with technicians on the ground. By the time it lands, they will already know if anything needs to be serviced. Just in the U.S., a system like this can prevent over 00,000 delays and cancellations every year, helping seven million passengers get to their destinations on time. Or take healthcare. Today, nurses spend an average of 00 minutes per shift looking for medical equipment. That seems trivial, but it's less time spent caring for patients. St. Luke's Medical Center in Houston, Texas, which has deployed industrial Internet technology to electronically monitor and connect patients, staff and medical equipment, has reduced bed turnaround times by nearly one hour. If you need surgery, one hour matters. It means more patients can be treated, more lives can be saved. Another medical center, in Washington state, is piloting an application that allows medical images from city scanners and MRIs to be analyzed in the cloud, developing better analytics at a lower cost. Imagine a patient who has suffered a severe trauma, and needs the attention of several specialists: a neurologist, a cardiologist, an orthopedic surgeon. If all of them can have instantaneous and simultaneous access to scans and images as they are taken, they will be able to deliver better healthcare faster. So all of this translates into better health outcomes, but it can also deliver substantial economic benefits. Just a one-percent reduction in existing inefficiencies could yield savings of over 00 billion dollars to the healthcare industry worldwide, and that is just a drop in the sea compared to what we need to do to make healthcare affordable on a sustainable basis. Similar advances are happening in energy, including renewable energy. Wind farms equipped with new remote monitorings and diagnostics that allow wind turbines to talk to each other and adjust the pitch of their blades in a coordinated way, depending on how the wind is blowing, can now produce electricity at a cost of less than five cents per kilowatt/hour. Ten years ago, that cost was 00 cents, six times as much. The list goes on, and it will grow fast, because industrial data are now growing exponentially. By 0000, they will account for over 00 percent of all digital information. But this is not just about data, so let me switch gears and tell you how this is impacting already the jobs we do every day, because this new wave of innovation is bringing about new tools and applications that will allow us to collaborate in a smarter and faster way, making our jobs not just more efficient but more rewarding. Imagine a field engineer arriving at the wind farm with a handheld device telling her which turbines need servicing. She already has all the spare parts, because the problems were diagnosed in advanced. And if she faces an unexpected issue, the same handheld device will allow her to communicate with colleagues at the service center, let them see what she sees, transmit data that they can run through diagnostics, and they can stream videos that will guide her, step by step, through whatever complex procedure is needed to get the machines back up and running. And their interaction gets documented and stored in a searchable database. Let's stop and think about this for a minute, because this is a very important point. This new wave of innovation is fundamentally changing the way we work. And I know that many of you will be concerned about the impact that innovation might have on jobs. Unemployment is already high, and there is always a fear that innovation will destroy jobs. And innovation is disruptive. But let me stress two things here. First, we've already lived through mechanization of agriculture, automation of industry, and employment has gone up, because innovation is fundamentally about growth. It makes products more affordable. It creates new demand, new jobs. Second, there is a concern that in the future, there will only be room for engineers, data scientists, and other highly-specialized workers. And believe me, as an economist, I am also scared. But think about it: Just as a child can easily figure out how to operate an iPad, so a new generation of mobile and intuitive industrial applications will make life easier for workers of all skill levels. The worker of the future will be more like Iron Man than the Charlie Chaplin of "Modern Times." And to be sure, new high-skilled jobs will be created: mechanical digital engineers who understand both the machines and the data; managers who understand their industry and the analytics and can reorganize the business to take full advantage of the technology. But now let's take a step back. Let's look at the big picture. There are people who argue that today's innovation is all about social media and silly games, with nowhere near the transformational power of the Industrial Revolution. They say that all the growth-enhancing innovations are behind us. And every time I hear this, I can't help thinking that even back in the Stone Age, there must have been a group of cavemen sitting around a fire one day looking very grumpy, and looking disapprovingly at another group of cavemen rolling a stone wheel up and down a hill, and saying to each other, "Yeah, this wheel thing, cool toy, sure, but compared to fire, it will have no impact. The big discoveries are all behind us." (Laughter) This technological revolution is as inspiring and transformational as anything we have ever seen. Human creativity and innovation have always propelled us forward. They've created jobs. They've raised living standards. They've made our lives healthier and more rewarding. And the new wave of innovation which is beginning to sweep through industry is no different. In the U.S. alone, the industrial Internet could raise average income by 00 to 00 percent over the next 00 years, boosting growth to rates we haven't seen in a long time, and adding between 00 and 00 trillion dollars to global GDP. That is the size of the entire U.S. economy today. But this is not a foregone conclusion. We are just at the beginning of this transformation, and there will be barriers to break, obstacles to overcome. We will need to invest in the new technologies. We will need to adapt organizations and managerial practices. We will need a robust cybersecurity approach that protects sensitive information and intellectual property and safeguards critical infrastructure from cyberattacks. And the education system will need to evolve to ensure students are equipped with the right skills. It's not going to be easy, but it is going to be worth it. The economic challenges facing us are hard, but when I walk the factory floor, and I see how humans and brilliant machines are becoming interconnected, and I see the difference this makes in a hospital, in an airport, in a power generation plant, I'm not just optimistic, I'm enthusiastic. This new technological revolution is upon us. So think about the future - it will be here soon enough. Thank you. (Applause)

By 0000, Detroit had become the poster child for an American city in crisis. There was a housing collapse, an auto industry collapse, and the population had plummeted by 00 percent between 0000 and 0000, and many people were beginning to write it off, as it had topped the list of American shrinking cities. By 0000, I had also been asked by the Kresge Foundation and the city of Detroit to join them in leading a citywide planning process for the city to create a shared vision for its future. I come to this work as an architect and an urban planner, and I've spent my career working in other contested cities, like Chicago, my hometown; Harlem, which is my current home; Washington, D.C.; and Newark, New Jersey. All of these cities, to me, still had a number of unresolved issues related to urban justice, issues of equity, inclusion and access. Now by 0000, as well, popular design magazines were also beginning to take a closer look at cities like Detroit, and devoting whole issues to "fixing the city." I was asked by a good friend, Fred Bernstein, to do an interview for the October issue of Architect magazine, and he and I kind of had a good chuckle when we saw the magazine released with the title, "Can This Planner Save Detroit?" So I'm smiling with a little bit of embarrassment right now, because obviously, it's completely absurd that a single person, let alone a planner, could save a city. But I'm also smiling because I thought it represented a sense of hopefulness that our profession could play a role in helping the city to think about how it would recover from its severe crisis. So I'd like to spend a little bit of time this afternoon and tell you a little bit about our process for fixing the city, a little bit about Detroit, and I want to do that through the voices of Detroiters. So we began our process in September of 0000. It's just after a special mayoral election, and word has gotten out that there is going to be this citywide planning process, which brings a lot of anxiety and fears among Detroiters. We had planned to hold a number of community meetings in rooms like this to introduce the planning process, and people came out from all over the city, including areas that were stable neighborhoods, as well as areas that were beginning to see a lot of vacancy. And most of our audience was representative of the 00 percent African-American population in the city at that time. So obviously, we have a Q&A portion of our program, and people line up to mics to ask questions. Many of them step very firmly to the mic, put their hands across their chest, and go, "I know you people are trying to move me out of my house, right?" So that question is really powerful, and it was certainly powerful to us in the moment, when you connect it to the stories that some Detroiters had, and actually a lot of African-Americans' families have had that are living in Midwestern cities like Detroit. Many of them told us the stories about how they came to own their home through their grandparents or great-grandparents, who were one of 0.0 million people who migrated from the rural South to the industrial North, as depicted in this painting by Jacob Lawrence, "The Great Migration." They came to Detroit for a better way of life. Many found work in the automobile industry, the Ford Motor Company, as depicted in this mural by Diego Rivera in the Detroit Institute of Art. The fruits of their labors would afford them a home, for many the first piece of property that they would ever know, and a community with other first-time African-American home buyers. The first couple of decades of their life in the North is quite well, up until about 0000, which coincides with the city's peak population at 0.0 million people. Now it's at this time that Detroit begins to see a second kind of migration, a migration to the suburbs. Between 0000 and 0000, the region grows by 00 percent. But this time, the migration leaves African-Americans in place, as families and businesses flee the city, leaving the city pretty desolate of people as well as jobs. During that same period, between 0000 and 0000, 0000, the city loses 00 percent of its population, and today it hovers at above 000,000. The audience members who come and talk to us that night tell us the stories of what it's like to live in a city with such depleted population. Many tell us that they're one of only a few homes on their block that are occupied, and that they can see several abandoned homes from where they sit on their porches. Citywide, there are 00,000 vacant homes. They can also see vacant property. They're beginning to see illegal activities on these properties, like illegal dumping, and they know that because the city has lost so much population, their costs for water, electricity, gas are rising, because there are not enough people to pay property taxes to help support the services that they need. Citywide, there are about 000,000 vacant parcels. Now, to quickly give you all a sense of a scale, because I know that sounds like a big number, but I don't think you quite understand until you look at the city map. So the city is 000 square miles. You can fit Boston, San Francisco, and the island of Manhattan within its footprint. So if we take all of that vacant and abandoned property and we smush it together, it looks like about 00 square miles, and that's roughly equivalent to the size of the island we're sitting on today, Manhattan, at 00 square miles. So it's a lot of vacancy. Now some of our audience members also tell us about some of the positive things that are happening in their communities, and many of them are banding together to take control of some of the vacant lots, and they're starting community gardens, which are creating a great sense of community stewardship, but they're very, very clear to tell us that this is not enough, that they want to see their neighborhoods return to the way that their grandparents had found them. Now there's been a lot of speculation since 0000 about what to do with the vacant property, and a lot of that speculation has been around community gardening, or what we call urban agriculture. So many people would say to us, "What if you just take all that vacant land and you could make it farmland? It can provide fresh foods, and it can put Detroiters back to work too." When I hear that story, I always imagine the folks from the Great Migration rolling over in their graves, because you can imagine that they didn't sacrifice moving from the South to the North to create a better life for their families, only to see their great-grandchildren return to an agrarian lifestyle, especially in a city where they came with little less than a high school education or even a grammar school education and were able to afford the basic elements of the American dream: steady work and a home that they owned. Now, there's a third wave of migration happening in Detroit: a new ascendant of cultural entrepreneurs. These folks see that same vacant land and those same abandoned homes as opportunity for new, entrepreneurial ideas and profit, so much so that former models can move to Detroit, buy property, start successful businesses and restaurants, and become successful community activists in their neighborhood, bringing about very positive change. Similarly, we have small manufacturing companies making conscious decisions to relocate to the city. This company, Shinola, which is a luxury watch and bicycle company, deliberately chose to relocate to Detroit, and they quote themselves by saying they were drawn to the global brand of Detroit's innovation. And they also knew that they can tap into a workforce that was still very skilled in how to make things. Now we have community stewardship happening in neighborhoods, we have cultural entrepreneurs making decisions to move to the city and create enterprises, and we have businesses relocating, and this is all in the context of what is no secret to us all, a city that's under the control of an emergency manager, and just this July filed for Chapter 0 bankruptcy. So 0000, we started this process, and by 0000, we released Detroit Future City, which was our strategic plan to guide the city into a better and more prosperous and more sustainable existence -- not what it was, but what it could be, looking at new ways of economic growth, new forms of land use, more sustainable and denser neighborhoods, a reconfigured infrastructure and city service system, and a heightened capacity for civic leaders to take action and implement change. Three key imperatives were really important to our work. One was that the city itself wasn't necessarily too large, but the economy was too small. There are only 00 jobs per 000 people in Detroit, very different from a Denver or an Atlanta or a Philadelphia that are anywhere between 00 to 00 jobs per 000 people. Secondly, there had to be an acceptance that we were not going to be able to use all of this vacant land in the way that we had before and maybe for some time to come. It wasn't going to be our traditional residential neighborhoods as we had before, and urban agriculture, while a very productive and successful intervention happening in Detroit, was not the only answer, that what we had to do is look at these areas where we had significant vacancy but still had a significant number of population of what could be new, productive, innovative, and entrepreneurial uses that could stabilize those communities, where still nearly 000,000 residents lived. So we came up with one neighborhood typology -- there are several -- called a live-make neighborhood, where folks could reappropriate abandoned structures and turn them into entrepreneurial enterprises, with a specific emphasis on looking at the, again, majority 00 percent African-American population. So they, too, could take businesses that they maybe were doing out of their home and grow them to more prosperous industries and actually acquire property so they were actually property owners as well as business owners in the communities with which they resided. Then we also wanted to look at other ways of using land in addition to growing food and transforming landscape into much more productive uses, so that it could be used for storm water management, for example, by using surface lakes and retention ponds, that created neighborhood amenities, places of recreation, and actually helped to elevate adjacent property levels. Or we could use it as research plots, where we can use it to remediate contaminated soils, or we could use it to generate energy. So the descendants of the Great Migration could either become precision watchmakers at Shinola, like Willie H., who was featured in one of their ads last year, or they can actually grow a business that would service companies like Shinola. The good news is, there is a future for the next generation of Detroiters, both those there now and those that want to come. So no thank you, Mayor Menino, who recently was quoted as saying, "I'd blow up the place and start over." There are very important people, business and land assets in Detroit, and there are real opportunities there. So while Detroit might not be what it was, Detroit will not die. Thank you. (Applause)

A couple of years ago, Harvard Business School chose the best business model of that year. It chose Somali piracy. Pretty much around the same time, I discovered that there were 000 seafarers being held hostage on ships, often anchored just off the Somali coast in plain sight. And I learned these two facts, and I thought, what's going on in shipping? And I thought, would that happen in any other industry? Would we see 000 airline pilots held captive in their jumbo jets on a runway for months, or a year? Would we see 000 Greyhound bus drivers? It wouldn't happen. So I started to get intrigued. And I discovered another fact, which to me was more astonishing almost for the fact that I hadn't known it before at the age of 00, 00. That is how fundamentally we still depend on shipping. Because perhaps the general public thinks of shipping as an old-fashioned industry, something brought by sailboat with Moby Dicks and Jack Sparrows. But shipping isn't that. Shipping is as crucial to us as it has ever been. Shipping brings us 00 percent of world trade. Shipping has quadrupled in size since 0000. We are more dependent on it now than ever. And yet, for such an enormous industry -- there are a 000,000 working vessels on the sea - it's become pretty much invisible. Now that sounds absurd in Singapore to say that, because here shipping is so present that you stuck a ship on top of a hotel. (Laughter) But elsewhere in the world, if you ask the general public what they know about shipping and how much trade is carried by sea, you will get essentially a blank face. You will ask someone on the street if they've heard of Microsoft. I should think they'll say yes, because they'll know that they make software that goes on computers, and occasionally works. But if you ask them if they've heard of Maersk, I doubt you'd get the same response, even though Maersk, which is just one shipping company amongst many, has revenues pretty much on a par with Microsoft. [$00.0 billion] Now why is this? A few years ago, the first sea lord of the British admiralty -- he is called the first sea lord, although the chief of the army is not called a land lord - he said that we, and he meant in the industrialized nations in the West, that we suffer from sea blindness. We are blind to the sea as a place of industry or of work. It's just something we fly over, a patch of blue on an airline map. Nothing to see, move along. So I wanted to open my own eyes to my own sea blindness, so I ran away to sea. A couple of years ago, I took a passage on the Maersk Kendal, a mid-sized container ship carrying nearly 0,000 boxes, and I departed from Felixstowe, on the south coast of England, and I ended up right here in Singapore five weeks later, considerably less jet-lagged than I am right now. And it was a revelation. We traveled through five seas, two oceans, nine ports, and I learned a lot about shipping. And one of the first things that surprised me when I got on board Kendal was, where are all the people? I have friends in the Navy who tell me they sail with 0,000 sailors at a time, but on Kendal there were only 00 crew. Now that's because shipping is very efficient. Containerization has made it very efficient. Ships have automation now. They can operate with small crews. But it also means that, in the words of a port chaplain I once met, the average seafarer you're going to find on a container ship is either tired or exhausted, because the pace of modern shipping is quite punishing for what the shipping calls its human element, a strange phrase which they don't seem to realize sounds a little bit inhuman. So most seafarers now working on container ships often have less than two hours in port at a time. They don't have time to relax. They're at sea for months at a time, and even when they're on board, they don't have access to what a five-year-old would take for granted, the Internet. And another thing that surprised me when I got on board Kendal was who I was sitting next to -- Not the queen; I can't imagine why they put me underneath her portrait -- But around that dining table in the officer's saloon, I was sitting next to a Burmese guy, I was opposite a Romanian, a Moldavian, an Indian. On the next table was a Chinese guy, and in the crew room, it was entirely Filipinos. So that was a normal working ship. Now how is that possible? Because the biggest dramatic change in shipping over the last 00 years, when most of the general public stopped noticing it, was something called an open registry, or a flag of convenience. Ships can now fly the flag of any nation that provides a flag registry. You can get a flag from the landlocked nation of Bolivia, or Mongolia, or North Korea, though that's not very popular. (Laughter) So we have these very multinational, global, mobile crews on ships. And that was a surprise to me. And when we got to pirate waters, down the Bab-el-Mandeb strait and into the Indian Ocean, the ship changed. And that was also shocking, because suddenly, I realized, as the captain said to me, that I had been crazy to choose to go through pirate waters on a container ship. We were no longer allowed on deck. There were double pirate watches. And at that time, there were those 000 seafarers being held hostage, and some of them were held hostage for years because of the nature of shipping and the flag of convenience. Not all of them, but some of them were, because for the minority of unscrupulous ship owners, it can be easy to hide behind the anonymity offered by some flags of convenience. What else does our sea blindness mask? Well, if you go out to sea on a ship or on a cruise ship, and look up to the funnel, you'll see very black smoke. And that's because shipping has very tight margins, and they want cheap fuel, so they use something called bunker fuel, which was described to me by someone in the tanker industry as the dregs of the refinery, or just one step up from asphalt. And shipping is the greenest method of transport. In terms of carbon emissions per ton per mile, it emits about a thousandth of aviation and about a tenth of trucking. But it's not benign, because there's so much of it. So shipping emissions are about three to four percent, almost the same as aviation's. And if you put shipping emissions on a list of the countries' carbon emissions, it would come in about sixth, somewhere near Germany. It was calculated in 0000 that the 00 largest ships pollute in terms of particles and soot and noxious gases as much as all the cars in the world. And the good news is that people are now talking about sustainable shipping. There are interesting initiatives going on. But why has it taken so long? When are we going to start talking and thinking about shipping miles as well as air miles? I also traveled to Cape Cod to look at the plight of the North Atlantic right whale, because this to me was one of the most surprising things about my time at sea, and what it made me think about. We know about man's impact on the ocean in terms of fishing and overfishing, but we don't really know much about what's happening underneath the water. And in fact, shipping has a role to play here, because shipping noise has contributed to damaging the acoustic habitats of ocean creatures. Light doesn't penetrate beneath the surface of the water, so ocean creatures like whales and dolphins and even 000 species of fish communicate by sound. And a North Atlantic right whale can transmit across hundreds of miles. A humpback can transmit a sound across a whole ocean. But a supertanker can also be heard coming across a whole ocean, and because the noise that propellers make underwater is sometimes at the same frequency that whales use, then it can damage their acoustic habitat, and they need this for breeding, for finding feeding grounds, for finding mates. And the acoustic habitat of the North Atlantic right whale has been reduced by up to 00 percent. But there are no laws governing acoustic pollution yet. And when I arrived in Singapore, and I apologize for this, but I didn't want to get off my ship. I'd really loved being on board Kendal. I'd been well treated by the crew, I'd had a garrulous and entertaining captain, and I would happily have signed up for another five weeks, something that the captain also said I was crazy to think about. But I wasn't there for nine months at a time like the Filipino seafarers, who, when I asked them to describe their job to me, called it "dollar for homesickness." They had good salaries, but theirs is still an isolating and difficult life in a dangerous and often difficult element. But when I get to this part, I'm in two minds, because I want to salute those seafarers who bring us 00 percent of everything and get very little thanks or recognition for it. I want to salute the 000,000 ships that are at sea that are doing that work, coming in and out every day, bringing us what we need. But I also want to see shipping, and us, the general public, who know so little about it, to have a bit more scrutiny, to be a bit more transparent, to have 00 percent transparency. Because I think we could all benefit from doing something very simple, which is learning to see the sea. Thank you. (Applause)

I have a question: Who here remembers when they first realized they were going to die? I do. I was a young boy, and my grandfather had just died, and I remember a few days later lying in bed at night trying to make sense of what had happened. What did it mean that he was dead? Where had he gone? It was like a hole in reality had opened up and swallowed him. But then the really shocking question occurred to me: If he could die, could it happen to me too? Could that hole in reality open up and swallow me? Would it open up beneath my bed and swallow me as I slept? Well, at some point, all children become aware of death. It can happen in different ways, of course, and usually comes in stages. Our idea of death develops as we grow older. And if you reach back into the dark corners of your memory, you might remember something like what I felt when my grandfather died and when I realized it could happen to me too, that sense that behind all of this the void is waiting. And this development in childhood reflects the development of our species. Just as there was a point in your development as a child when your sense of self and of time became sophisticated enough for you to realize you were mortal, so at some point in the evolution of our species, some early human's sense of self and of time became sophisticated enough for them to become the first human to realize, "I'm going to die." This is, if you like, our curse. It's the price we pay for being so damn clever. We have to live in the knowledge that the worst thing that can possibly happen one day surely will, the end of all our projects, our hopes, our dreams, of our individual world. We each live in the shadow of a personal apocalypse. And that's frightening. It's terrifying. And so we look for a way out. And in my case, as I was about five years old, this meant asking my mum. Now when I first started asking what happens when we die, the grown-ups around me at the time answered with a typical English mix of awkwardness and half-hearted Christianity, and the phrase I heard most often was that granddad was now "up there looking down on us," and if I should die too, which wouldn't happen of course, then I too would go up there, which made death sound a lot like an existential elevator. Now this didn't sound very plausible. I used to watch a children's news program at the time, and this was the era of space exploration. There were always rockets going up into the sky, up into space, going up there. But none of the astronauts when they came back ever mentioned having met my granddad or any other dead people. But I was scared, and the idea of taking the existential elevator to see my granddad sounded a lot better than being swallowed by the void while I slept. And so I believed it anyway, even though it didn't make much sense. And this thought process that I went through as a child, and have been through many times since, including as a grown-up, is a product of what psychologists call a bias. Now a bias is a way in which we systematically get things wrong, ways in which we miscalculate, misjudge, distort reality, or see what we want to see, and the bias I'm talking about works like this: Confront someone with the fact that they are going to die and they will believe just about any story that tells them it isn't true and they can, instead, live forever, even if it means taking the existential elevator. Now we can see this as the biggest bias of all. It has been demonstrated in over 000 empirical studies. Now these studies are ingenious, but they're simple. They work like this. You take two groups of people who are similar in all relevant respects, and you remind one group that they're going to die but not the other, then you compare their behavior. So you're observing how it biases behavior when people become aware of their mortality. And every time, you get the same result: People who are made aware of their mortality are more willing to believe stories that tell them they can escape death and live forever. So here's an example: One recent study took two groups of agnostics, that is people who are undecided in their religious beliefs. Now, one group was asked to think about being dead. The other group was asked to think about being lonely. They were then asked again about their religious beliefs. Those who had been asked to think about being dead were afterwards twice as likely to express faith in God and Jesus. Twice as likely. Even though the before they were all equally agnostic. But put the fear of death in them, and they run to Jesus. Now, this shows that reminding people of death biases them to believe, regardless of the evidence, and it works not just for religion, but for any kind of belief system that promises immortality in some form, whether it's becoming famous or having children or even nationalism, which promises you can live on as part of a greater whole. This is a bias that has shaped the course of human history. Now, the theory behind this bias in the over 000 studies is called terror management theory, and the idea is simple. It's just this. We develop our worldviews, that is, the stories we tell ourselves about the world and our place in it, in order to help us manage the terror of death. And these immortality stories have thousands of different manifestations, but I believe that behind the apparent diversity there are actually just four basic forms that these immortality stories can take. And we can see them repeating themselves throughout history, just with slight variations to reflect the vocabulary of the day. Now I'm going to briefly introduce these four basic forms of immortality story, and I want to try to give you some sense of the way in which they're retold by each culture or generation using the vocabulary of their day. Now, the first story is the simplest. We want to avoid death, and the dream of doing that in this body in this world forever is the first and simplest kind of immortality story, and it might at first sound implausible, but actually, almost every culture in human history has had some myth or legend of an elixir of life or a fountain of youth or something that promises to keep us going forever. Ancient Egypt had such myths, ancient Babylon, ancient India. Throughout European history, we find them in the work of the alchemists, and of course we still believe this today, only we tell this story using the vocabulary of science. So 000 years ago, hormones had just been discovered, and people hoped that hormone treatments were going to cure aging and disease, and now instead we set our hopes on stem cells, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology. But the idea that science can cure death is just one more chapter in the story of the magical elixir, a story that is as old as civilization. But betting everything on the idea of finding the elixir and staying alive forever is a risky strategy. When we look back through history at all those who have sought an elixir in the past, the one thing they now have in common is that they're all dead. So we need a backup plan, and exactly this kind of plan B is what the second kind of immortality story offers, and that's resurrection. And it stays with the idea that I am this body, I am this physical organism. It accepts that I'm going to have to die but says, despite that, I can rise up and I can live again. In other words, I can do what Jesus did. Jesus died, he was three days in the [tomb], and then he rose up and lived again. And the idea that we can all be resurrected to live again is orthodox believe, not just for Christians but also Jews and Muslims. But our desire to believe this story is so deeply embedded that we are reinventing it again for the scientific age, for example, with the idea of cryonics. That's the idea that when you die, you can have yourself frozen, and then, at some point when technology has advanced enough, you can be thawed out and repaired and revived and so resurrected. And so some people believe an omnipotent god will resurrect them to live again, and other people believe an omnipotent scientist will do it. But for others, the whole idea of resurrection, of climbing out of the grave, it's just too much like a bad zombie movie. They find the body too messy, too unreliable to guarantee eternal life, and so they set their hopes on the third, more spiritual immortality story, the idea that we can leave our body behind and live on as a soul. Now, the majority of people on Earth believe they have a soul, and the idea is central to many religions. But even though, in its current form, in its traditional form, the idea of the soul is still hugely popular, nonetheless we are again reinventing it for the digital age, for example with the idea that you can leave your body behind by uploading your mind, your essence, the real you, onto a computer, and so live on as an avatar in the ether. But of course there are skeptics who say if we look at the evidence of science, particularly neuroscience, it suggests that your mind, your essence, the real you, is very much dependent on a particular part of your body, that is, your brain. And such skeptics can find comfort in the fourth kind of immortality story, and that is legacy, the idea that you can live on through the echo you leave in the world, like the great Greek warrior Achilles, who sacrificed his life fighting at Troy so that he might win immortal fame. And the pursuit of fame is as widespread and popular now as it ever was, and in our digital age, it's even easier to achieve. You don't need to be a great warrior like Achilles or a great king or hero. All you need is an Internet connection and a funny cat. (Laughter) But some people prefer to leave a more tangible, biological legacy -- children, for example. Or they like, they hope, to live on as part of some greater whole, a nation or a family or a tribe, their gene pool. But again, there are skeptics who doubt whether legacy really is immortality. Woody Allen, for example, who said, "I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen. I want to live on in my apartment." So those are the four basic kinds of immortality stories, and I've tried to give just some sense of how they're retold by each generation with just slight variations to fit the fashions of the day. And the fact that they recur in this way, in such a similar form but in such different belief systems, suggests, I think, that we should be skeptical of the truth of any particular version of these stories. The fact that some people believe an omnipotent god will resurrect them to live again and others believe an omnipotent scientist will do it suggests that neither are really believing this on the strength of the evidence. Rather, we believe these stories because we are biased to believe them, and we are biased to believe them because we are so afraid of death. So the question is, are we doomed to lead the one life we have in a way that is shaped by fear and denial, or can we overcome this bias? Well the Greek philosopher Epicurus thought we could. He argued that the fear of death is natural, but it is not rational. "Death," he said, "is nothing to us, because when we are here, death is not, and when death is here, we are gone." Now this is often quoted, but it's difficult to really grasp, to really internalize, because exactly this idea of being gone is so difficult to imagine. So 0,000 years later, another philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, put it like this: "Death is not an event in life: We do not live to experience death. And so," he added, "in this sense, life has no end." So it was natural for me as a child to fear being swallowed by the void, but it wasn't rational, because being swallowed by the void is not something that any of us will ever live to experience. Now, overcoming this bias is not easy because the fear of death is so deeply embedded in us, yet when we see that the fear itself is not rational, and when we bring out into the open the ways in which it can unconsciously bias us, then we can at least start to try to minimize the influence it has on our lives. Now, I find it helps to see life as being like a book: Just as a book is bounded by its covers, by beginning and end, so our lives are bounded by birth and death, and even though a book is limited by beginning and end, it can encompass distant landscapes, exotic figures, fantastic adventures. And even though a book is limited by beginning and end, the characters within it know no horizons. They only know the moments that make up their story, even when the book is closed. And so the characters of a book are not afraid of reaching the last page. Long John Silver is not afraid of you finishing your copy of "Treasure Island." And so it should be with us. Imagine the book of your life, its covers, its beginning and end, and your birth and your death. You can only know the moments in between, the moments that make up your life. It makes no sense for you to fear what is outside of those covers, whether before your birth or after your death. And you needn't worry how long the book is, or whether it's a comic strip or an epic. The only thing that matters is that you make it a good story. Thank you. (Applause)

So how many of you have ever been in a cave before? Okay, a few of you. When you think of a cave, most of you think of a tunnel going through solid rock, and in fact, that's how most caves are. Around this half of the country, most of your caves are made of limestone. Back where I'm from, most of our caves are made of lava rock, because we have a lot of volcanoes out there. But the caves I want to share with you today are made completely of ice, specifically glacier ice that's formed in the side of the tallest mountain in the state of Oregon, called Mount Hood. Now Mount Hood's only one hour's drive from Portland, the largest city in Oregon, where over two million people live. Now the most exciting thing for a cave explorer is to find a new cave and be the first human to ever go into it. The second most exciting thing for a cave explorer is to be the first one to make a map of a cave. Now these days, with so many people hiking around, it's pretty hard to find a new cave, so you can imagine how excited we were to find three new caves within sight of Oregon's largest city and realize that they had never been explored or mapped before. It was kind of like being an astronaut, because we were getting to see things and go places that no one had ever seen or gone to before. So what is a glacier? Well, those of you who have ever seen or touched snow, you know that it's really light, because it's just a bunch of tiny ice crystals clumped together, and it's mostly air. If you squish a handful of snow to make a snowball, it gets really small, hard and dense. Well, on a mountain like Hood, where it snows over 00 feet a year, it crushes the air out of it and gradually forms it into hard blue ice. Now each year, more and more ice stacks up on top of it, and eventually it gets so heavy that it starts to slide down the mountain under its own weight, forming a slow-moving river of ice. When ice packed like that starts to move, we call it a glacier, and we give it a name. The name of the glacier these caves are formed in is the Sandy Glacier. Now each year, as new snow lands on the glacier, it melts in the summer sun, and it forms little rivers of water on the flow along the ice, and they start to melt and bore their way down through the glacier, forming big networks of caves, sometimes going all the way down to the underlying bedrock. Now the crazy thing about glacier caves is that each year, new tunnels form. Different waterfalls pop up or move around from place to place inside the cave. Warm water from the top of the ice is boring its way down, and warm air from below the mountain actually rises up, gets into the cave, and melts the ceilings back taller and taller. But the weirdest thing about glacier caves is that the entire cave is moving, because it's formed inside a block of ice the size of a small city that's slowly sliding down the mountain. Now this is Brent McGregor, my cave exploration partner. He and I have both been exploring caves a long time and we've been climbing mountains a long time, but neither one of us had ever really explored a glacier cave before. Back in 0000, Brent saw a YouTube video of a couple of hikers that stumbled across the entrance to one of these caves. There were no GPS coordinates for it, and all we knew was that it was somewhere out on the Sandy Glacier. So in July of that year, we went out on the glacier, and we found a big crack in the ice. We had to build snow and ice anchors so that we could tie off ropes and rappel down into the hole. This is me looking into the entrance crevasse. At the end of this hole, we found a huge tunnel going right up the mountain underneath thousands of tons of glacier ice. We followed this cave back for about a half mile until it came to an end, and then with the help of our survey tools we made a three-dimensional map of the cave on our way back out. So how do you map a cave? Well, cave maps aren't like trail maps or road maps because they have pits and holes going to overlapping levels. To make a cave map, you have to set up survey stations every few feet inside the cave, and you use a laser to measure the distance between those stations. Then you use a compass and an inclinometer to measure the direction the cave is headed and measure the slope of the floor and the ceilings. Now those of you taking trigonometry, that particular type of math is very useful for making maps like this because it allows you to measure heights and distances without actually having to go there. In fact, the more I mapped and studied caves, the more useful I found all that math that I originally hated in school to be. So when you're done surveying, you take all this data and you punch it into a computer and you find someone that can draw really well, and you have them draft up a map that looks something like this, and it'll show you both a bird's-eye view of the passage as well as a profile view of the passage, kind of like an ant farm view. We named this cave Snow Dragon Cave because it was like a big dragon sleeping under the snow. Now later this summer, as more snow melted off the glacier, we found more caves, and we realized they were all connected. Not long after we mapped Snow Dragon, Brent discovered this new cave not very far away. The inside of it was coated with ice, so we had to wear big spikes on our feet called crampons so we could walk around without slipping. This cave was amazing. The ice in the ceiling was glowing blue anad green because the sunlight from far above was shining through the ice and lighting it all up. And we couldn't understand why this cave was so much colder than Snow Dragon until we got to the end and we found out why. There was a huge pit or shaft called a moulin going 000 feet straight up to the surface of the glacier. Cold air from the top of the mountain was flowing down this hole and blasting through the cave, freezing everything inside of it. And we were so excited about finding this new pit, we actually came back in January the following year so we could be the first ones to explore it. It was so cold outside, we actually had to sleep inside the cave. There's our camp on the left side of this entrance room. The next morning, we climbed out of the cave and hiked all the way to the top of the glacier, where we finally rigged and rappelled this pit for the very first time. Brent named this cave Pure Imagination, I think because the beautiful sights we saw in there were beyond what we could have ever imagined. So besides really cool ice, what else is inside these caves? Well not too much lives in them because they're so cold and the entrance is actually covered up with snow for about eight months of the year. But there are some really cool things in there. There's weird bacteria living in the water that actually eat and digest rocks to make their own food to live under this ice. In fact, this past summer, scientists collected samples of water and ice specifically to see if things called extremophiles, tiny lifeforms that are evolved to live in completely hostile conditions, might be living under the ice, kind of like what they hope to find on the polar icecaps of Mars someday. Another really cool things is that, as seeds and birds land on the surface of the glacier and die, they get buried in the snow and gradually become part of the glacier, sinking deeper and deeper into the ice. As these caves form and melt their way up into the ice, they make these artifacts rain down from the ceiling and fall onto the cave floor, where we end up finding them. For example, this is a noble fir seed we found. It's been frozen in the ice for over 000 years, and it's just now starting to sprout. This mallard duck feather was found over 0,000 feet in the back of Snow Dragon Cave. This duck died on the surface of the glacier long, long ago, and its feathers have finally made it down through over 000 feet of ice before falling inside the cave. And this beautiful quartz crystal was also found in the back of Snow Dragon. Even now, Brent and I find it hard to believe that all these discoveries were essentially in our own backyard, hidden away, just waiting to be found. Like I said earlier, the idea of discovering in this busy world we live in kind of seems like something you can only do with space travel now, but that's not true. Every year, new caves get discovered that no one has ever been in before. So it's actually not too late for one of you to become a discoverer yourself. You just have to be willing to look and go where people don't often go and focus your eyes and your mind to recognize the discovery when you see it, because it might be in your own backyard. Thank you very much. (Applause)

I would like to show you how architecture has helped to change the life of my community and has opened opportunities to hope. I am a native of Burkina Faso. According to the World Bank, Burkina Faso is one of the poorest countries in the world, but what does it look like to grow up in a place like that? I am an example of that. I was born in a little village called Gando. In Gando, there was no electricity, no access to clean drinking water, and no school. But my father wanted me to learn how to read and write. For this reason, I had to leave my family when I was seven and to stay in a city far away from my village with no contact with my family. In this place I sat in a class like that with more than 000 other kids, and for six years. In this time, it just happened to me to come to school to realize that my classmate died. Today, not so much has changed. There is still no electricity in my village. People still are dying in Burkina Faso, and access to clean drinking water is still a big problem. I had luck. I was lucky, because this is a fact of life when you grow up in a place like that. But I was lucky. I had a scholarship. I could go to Germany to study. So now, I suppose, I don't need to explain to you how great a privilege it is for me to be standing before you today. From Gando, my home village in Burkina Faso, to Berlin in Germany to become an architect is a big, big step. But what to do with this privilege? Since I was a student, I wanted to open up better opportunities to other kids in Gando. I just wanted to use my skills and build a school. But how do you do it when you're still a student and you don't have money? Oh yes, I started to make drawings and asked for money. Fundraising was not an easy task. I even asked my classmates to spend less money on coffee and cigarettes, but to sponsor my school project. In real wonder, two years later, I was able to collect 00,000 U.S. dollars. When I came home to Gando to bring the good news, my people were over the moon, but when they realized that I was planning to use clay, they were shocked. "A clay building is not able to stand a rainy season, and Francis wants us to use it and build a school. Is this the reason why he spent so much time in Europe studying instead of working in the field with us?" My people build all the time with clay, but they don't see any innovation with mud. So I had to convince everybody. I started to speak with the community, and I could convince everybody, and we could start to work. And the women, the men, everybody from the village, was part of this building process. I was allowed to use even traditional techniques. So clay floor for example, the young men come and stand like that, beating, hours for hours, and then their mothers came, and they are beating in this position, for hours, giving water and beating. And then the polishers come. They start polishing it with a stone for hours. And then you have this result, very fine, like a baby bottom. (Laughter) It's not photoshopped. (Laughter) This is the school, built with the community. The walls are totally made out of compressed clay blocks from Gando. The roof structure is made with cheap steel bars normally hiding inside concrete. And the classroom, the ceiling is made out of both of them used together. In this school, there was a simple idea: to create comfort in a classroom. Don't forget, it can be 00 degrees in Burkina Faso, so with simple ventilation, I wanted to make the classroom good for teaching and learning. And this is the project today, 00 years old, still in best condition. And the kids, they love it. And for me and my community, this project was a huge success. It has opened up opportunities to do more projects in Gando. So I could do a lot of projects, and here I am going to share with you only three of them. The first one is the school extension, of course. How do you explain drawings and engineering to people who are neither able to read nor write? I started to build a prototype like that. The innovation was to build a clay vault. So then, I jumped on the top like that, with my team, and it works. The community is looking. It still works. So we can build. (Laughter) And we kept building, and that is the result. The kids are happy, and they love it. The community is very proud. We made it. And even animals, like these donkeys, love our buildings. (Laughter) The next project is the library in Gando. And see now, we tried to introduce different ideas in our buildings, but we often don't have so much material. Something we have in Gando are clay pots. We wanted to use them to create openings. So we just bring them like you can see to the building site. we start cutting them, and then we place them on top of the roof before we pour the concrete, and you have this result. The openings are letting the hot air out and light in. Very simple. My most recent project in Gando is a high school project. I would like to share with you this. The innovation in this project is to cast mud like you cast concrete. How do you cast mud? We start making a lot of mortars, like you can see, and when everything is ready, when you know what is the best recipe and the best form, you start working with the community. And sometimes I can leave. They will do it themselves. I came to speak to you like that. Another factor in Gando is rain. When the rains come, we hurry up to protect our fragile walls against the rain. Don't confound with Christo and Jeanne-Claude. It is simply how we protect our walls. (Laughter) The rain in Burkina comes very fast, and after that, you have floods everywhere in the country. But for us, the rain is good. It brings sand and gravel to the river we need to use to build. We just wait for the rain to go. We take the sand, we mix it with clay, and we keep building. That is it. The Gando project was always connected to training the people, because I just wanted, one day when I fall down and die, that at least one person from Gando keeps doing this work. But you will be surprised. I'm still alive. (Laughter) And my people now can use their skills to earn money themselves. Usually, for a young man from Gando to earn money, you have to leave the country to the city, sometimes leave the country and some never come back, making the community weaker. But now they can stay in the country and work on different building sites and earn money to feed their family. There's a new quality in this work. Yes, you know it. I have won a lot of awards through this work. For sure, it has opened opportunities. I have become myself known. But the reason why I do what I do is my community. When I was a kid, I was going to school, I was coming back every holiday to Gando. By the end of every holidays, I had to say goodbye to the community, going from one compound to another one. All women in Gando will open their clothes like that and give me the last penny. In my culture, this is a symbol of deep affection. As a seven-year-old guy, I was impressed. I just asked my mother one day, "Why do all these women love me so much?" (Laughter) She just answered, "They are contributing to pay for your education hoping that you will be successful and one day come back and help improve the quality of life of the community." I hope now that I was able to make my community proud through this work, and I hope I was able to prove you the power of community, and to show you that architecture can be inspiring for communities to shape their own future. Merci beaucoup. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)

I'm a man who's trying to live from his heart, and so just before I get going, I wanted to tell you as a South African that one of the men who has inspired me most passed away a few hours ago. Nelson Mandela has come to the end of his long walk to freedom. And so this talk is going to be for him. I grew up in wonder. I grew up amongst those animals. I grew up in the wild eastern part of South Africa at a place called Londolozi Game Reserve. It's a place where my family has been in the safari business for four generations. Now for as long as I can remember, my job has been to take people out into nature, and so I think it's a lovely twist of fate today to have the opportunity to bring some of my experiences out in nature in to this gathering. Africa is a place where people still sit under starlit skies and around campfires and tell stories, and so what I have to share with you today is the simple medicine of a few campfire stories, stories about heroes of heart. Now my stories are not the stories that you'll hear on the news, and while it's true that Africa is a harsh place, I also know it to be a place where people, animals and ecosystems teach us about a more interconnected world. When I was nine years old, President Mandela came to stay with my family. He had just been released from his 00 years of incarceration, and was in a period of readjustment to his sudden global icon status. Members of the African National Congress thought that in the bush he would have time to rest and recuperate away from the public eye, and it's true that lions tend to be a very good deterrent to press and paparazzi. (Laughter) But it was a defining time for me as a young boy. I would take him breakfast in bed, and then, in an old track suit and slippers, he would go for a walk around the garden. At night, I would sit with my family around the snowy, bunny-eared TV, and watch images of that same quiet man from the garden surrounded by hundreds and thousands of people as scenes from his release were broadcast nightly. He was bringing peace to a divided and violent South Africa, one man with an unbelievable sense of his humanity. Mandela said often that the gift of prison was the ability to go within and to think, to create in himself the things he most wanted for South Africa: peace, reconciliation, harmony. Through this act of immense open-heartedness, he was to become the embodiment of what in South Africa we call "ubuntu." Ubuntu: I am because of you. Or, people are not people without other people. It's not a new idea or value but it's one that I certainly think at these times is worth building on. In fact, it is said that in the collective consciousness of Africa, we get to experience the deepest parts of our own humanity through our interactions with others. Ubuntu is at play right now. You are holding a space for me to express the deepest truth of who I am. Without you, I'm just a guy talking to an empty room, and I spent a lot of time last week doing that, and it's not the same as this. (Laughter) If Mandela was the national and international embodiment, then the man who taught me the most about this value personally was this man, Solly Mhlongo. Solly was born under a tree 00 kilometers from where I grew up in Mozambique. He would never have a lot of money, but he was to be one of the richest men I would ever meet. Solly grew up tending to his father's cattle. Now, I can tell you, I don't know what it is about people who grow up looking after cattle, but it makes for über-resourcefulness. The first job that he ever got in the safari business was fixing the safari trucks. Where he had learned to do that out in the bush I have no idea, but he could do it. He then moved across into what we called the habitat team. These were the people on the reserve who were responsible for its well-being. He fixed roads, he mended wetlands, he did some anti-poaching. And then one day we were out together, and he came across the tracks of where a female leopard had walked. And it was an old track, but for fun he turned and he began to follow it, and I tell you, I could tell by the speed at which he moved on those pad marks that this man was a Ph.D.-level tracker. If you drove past Solly somewhere out on the reserve, you look up in your rearview mirror, you'd see he'd stopped the car 00, 00 meters down the road just in case you need help with something. The only accusation I ever heard leveled at him was when one of our clients said, "Solly, you are pathologically helpful." (Laughter) When I started professionally guiding people out into this environment, Solly was my tracker. We worked together as a team. And the first guests we ever got were a philanthropy group from your East Coast, and they said to Solly, on the side, they said, "Before we even go out to see lions and leopards, we want to see where you live." So we took them up to his house, and this visit of the philanthropist to his house coincided with a time when Solly's wife, who was learning English, was going through a phase where she would open the door by saying, "Hello, I love you. Welcome, I love you." (Laughter) And there was something so beautifully African about it to me, this small house with a huge heart in it. Now on the day that Solly saved my life, he was already my hero. It was a hot day, and we found ourselves down by the river. Because of the heat, I took my shoes off, and I rolled up my pants, and I walked into the water. Solly remained on the bank. The water was clear running over sand, and we turned and we began to make our way upstream. And a few meters ahead of us, there was a place where a tree had fallen out of the bank, and its branches were touching the water, and it was shadowy. And if had been a horror movie, people in the audience would have started saying, "Don't go in there. Don't go in there." (Laughter) And of course, the crocodile was in the shadows. Now the first thing that you notice when a crocodile hits you is the ferocity of the bite. Wham! It hits me by my right leg. It pulls me. It turns. I throw my hand up. I'm able to grab a branch. It's shaking me violently. It's a very strange sensation having another creature try and eat you, and there are few things that promote vegetarianism like that. (Laughter) Solly on the bank sees that I'm in trouble. He turns. He begins to make his way to me. The croc again continues to shake me. It goes to bite me a second time. I notice a slick of blood in the water around me that gets washed downstream. As it bites the second time, I kick. My foot goes down its throat. It spits me out. I pull myself up into the branches, and as I come out of the water, I look over my shoulder. My leg from the knee down is mangled beyond description. The bone is cracked. The meat is torn up. I make an instant decision that I'll never look at that again. As I come out of the water, Solly arrives at a deep section, a channel between us. He knows, he sees the state of my leg, he knows that between him and I there is a crocodile, and I can tell you this man doesn't slow down for one second. He comes straight into the channel. He wades in to above his waist. He gets to me. He grabs me. I'm still in a vulnerable position. He picks me and puts me on his shoulder. This is the other thing about Solly, he's freakishly strong. He turns. He walks me up the bank. He lays me down. He pulls his shirt off. He wraps it around my leg, picks me up a second time, walks me to a vehicle, and he's able to get me to medical attention. And I survive. Now - (Applause) Now I don't know how many people you know that go into a deep channel of water that they know has a crocodile in it to come and help you, but for Solly, it was as natural as breathing. And he is one amazing example of what I have experienced all over Africa. In a more collective society, we realize from the inside that our own well-being is deeply tied to the well-being of others. Danger is shared. Pain is shared. Joy is shared. Achievement is shared. Houses are shared. Food is shared. Ubuntu asks us to open our hearts and to share, and what Solly taught me that day is the essence of this value, his animated, empathetic action in every moment. Now although the root word is about people, I thought that maybe ubuntu was only about people. And then I met this young lady. Her name was Elvis. In fact, Solly gave her the name Elvis because he said she walked like she was doing the Elvis the pelvis dance. She was born with very badly deformed back legs and pelvis. She arrived at our reserve from a reserve east of us on her migratory route. When I first saw her, I thought she would be dead in a matter of days. And yet, for the next five years she returned in the winter months. And we would be so excited to be out in the bush and to come across this unusual track. It looked like an inverted bracket, and we would drop whatever we were doing and we would follow, and then we would come around the corner, and there she would be with her herd. And that outpouring of emotion from people on our safari trucks as they saw her, it was this sense of kinship. And it reminded me that even people who grow up in cities feel a natural connection with the natural world and with animals. And yet still I remained amazed that she was surviving. And then one day we came across them at this small water hole. It was sort of a hollow in the ground. And I watched as the matriarch drank, and then she turned in that beautiful slow motion of elephants, looks like the arm in motion, and she began to make her way up the steep bank. The rest of the herd turned and began to follow. And I watched young Elvis begin to psych herself up for the hill. She got visibly -- ears came forward, she had a full go of it and halfway up, her legs gave way, and she fell backwards. She attempted it a second time, and again, halfway up, she fell backwards. And on the third attempt, an amazing thing happened. Halfway up the bank, a young teenage elephant came in behind her, and he propped his trunk underneath her, and he began to shovel her up the bank. And it occurred to me that the rest of the herd was in fact looking after this young elephant. The next day I watched again as the matriarch broke a branch and she would put it in her mouth, and then she would break a second one and drop it on the ground. And a consensus developed between all of us who were guiding people in that area that that herd was in fact moving slower to accommodate that elephant. What Elvis and the herd taught me caused me to expand my definition of ubuntu, and I believe that in the cathedral of the wild, we get to see the most beautiful parts of ourselves reflected back at us. And it is not only through other people that we get to experience our humanity but through all the creatures that live on this planet. If Africa has a gift to share, it's a gift of a more collective society. And while it's true that ubuntu is an African idea, what I see is the essence of that value being invented here. Thank you. (Applause) Pat Mitchell: So Boyd, we know that you knew President Mandela from early childhood and that you heard the news as we all did today, and deeply distraught and know the tragic loss that it is to the world. But I just wondered if you wanted to share any additional thoughts, because we know that you heard that news just before coming in to do this session. Boyd Varty: Well thanks, Pat. I'm so happy because it was time for him to pass on. He was suffering. And so of course there's the mixed emotions. But I just think of so many occurrences like the time he went on the Oprah show and asked her what the show would be about. (Laughter) And she was like, "Well, it'll be about you." I mean, that's just incredible humility. (Laughter) He was the father of our nation and we've got a road to walk in South Africa. And everything, they used to call it Madiba magic. You know, he used to go to a rugby match and we would win. Anywhere he went, things went well. But I think that magic will be with us, and the important thing is that we carry what he stood for. And so that's what I'm going to try and do, and that's what people all over South Africa are trying to do. PM: And that's what you've done today. BV: Oh, thank you. PM: Thank you. BV: Thank you. Thanks very much. (Applause)

Mobility in developing world cities is a very peculiar challenge, because different from health or education or housing, it tends to get worse as societies become richer. Clearly, a unsustainable model. Mobility, as most other developing country problems, more than a matter of money or technology, is a matter of equality, equity. The great inequality in developing countries makes it difficult to see, for example, that in terms of transport, an advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport. Or bicycles: For example, in Amsterdam, more than 00 percent of the population uses bicycles, despite the fact that the Netherlands has a higher income per capita than the United States. There is a conflict in developing world cities for money, for government investment. If more money is invested in highways, of course there is less money for housing, for schools, for hospitals, and also there is a conflict for space. There is a conflict for space between those with cars and those without them. Most of us accept today that private property and a market economy is the best way to manage most of society's resources. However, there is a problem with that, that market economy needs inequality of income in order to work. Some people must make more money, some others less. Some companies succeed. Others fail. Then what kind of equality can we hope for today with a market economy? I would propose two kinds which both have much to do with cities. The first one is equality of quality of life, especially for children, that all children should have, beyond the obvious health and education, access to green spaces, to sports facilities, to swimming pools, to music lessons. And the second kind of equality is one which we could call "democratic equality." The first article in every constitution states that all citizens are equal before the law. That is not just poetry. It's a very powerful principle. For example, if that is true, a bus with 00 passengers has a right to 00 times more road space than a car with one. We have been so used to inequality, sometimes, that it's before our noses and we do not see it. Less than 000 years ago, women could not vote, and it seemed normal, in the same way that it seems normal today to see a bus in traffic. In fact, when I became mayor, applying that democratic principle that public good prevails over private interest, that a bus with 000 people has a right to 000 times more road space than a car, we implemented a mass transit system based on buses in exclusive lanes. We called it TransMilenio, in order to make buses sexier. And one thing is that it is also a very beautiful democratic symbol, because as buses zoom by, expensive cars stuck in traffic, it clearly is almost a picture of democracy at work. In fact, it's not just a matter of equity. It doesn't take Ph.D.'s. A committee of 00-year-old children would find out in 00 minutes that the most efficient way to use scarce road space is with exclusive lanes for buses. In fact, buses are not sexy, but they are the only possible means to bring mass transit to all areas of fast growing developing cities. They also have great capacity. For example, this system in Guangzhou is moving more passengers our direction than all subway lines in China, except for one line in Beijing, at a fraction of the cost. We fought not just for space for buses, but we fought for space for people, and that was even more difficult. Cities are human habitats, and we humans are pedestrians. Just as fish need to swim or birds need to fly or deer need to run, we need to walk. There is a really enormous conflict, when we are talking about developing country cities, between pedestrians and cars. Here, what you see is a picture that shows insufficient democracy. What this shows is that people who walk are third-class citizens while those who go in cars are first-class citizens. In terms of transport infrastructure, what really makes a difference between advanced and backward cities is not highways or subways but quality sidewalks. Here they made a flyover, probably very useless, and they forgot to make a sidewalk. This is prevailing all over the world. Not even schoolchildren are more important than cars. In my city of Bogotá, we fought a very difficult battle in order to take space from cars, which had been parking on sidewalks for decades, in order to make space for people that should reflect dignity of human beings, and to make space for protected bikeways. First of all, I had black hair before that. (Laughter) And I was almost impeached in the process. It is a very difficult battle. However, it was possible, finally, after very difficult battles, to make a city that would reflect some respect for human dignity, that would show that those who walk are equally important to those who have cars. Indeed, a very important ideological and political issue anywhere is how to distribute that most valuable resource of a city, which is road space. A city could find oil or diamonds underground and it would not be so valuable as road space. How to distribute it between pedestrians, bicycles, public transport and cars? This is not a technological issue, and we should remember that in no constitution parking is a constitutional right when we make that distribution. We also built, and this was 00 years ago, before there were bikeways in New York or in Paris or in London, it was a very difficult battle as well, more than 000 kilometers of protected bicycle ways. I don't think protected bicycle ways are a cute architectural feature. They are a right, just as sidewalks are, unless we believe that only those with access to a motor vehicle have a right to safe mobility, without the risk of getting killed. And just as busways are, protected bikeways also are a powerful symbol of democracy, because they show that a citizen on a $00 bicycle is equally important to one in a $00,000 car. And we are living in a unique moment in history. In the next 00 years, more than half of those cities which will exist in the year 0000 will be built. In many developing country cities, more than 00 and 00 percent of the city which will exist in 0000 will be built over the next four or five decades. But this is not just a matter for developing country cities. In the United States, for example, more than 00 million new homes must be built over the next 00 or 00 years. That's more than all the homes that today exist in Britain, France and Canada put together. And I believe that our cities today have severe flaws, and that different, better ones could be built. What is wrong with our cities today? Well, for example, if we tell any three-year-old child who is barely learning to speak in any city in the world today, "Watch out, a car," the child will jump in fright, and with a very good reason, because there are more than 00,000 children who are killed by cars every year in the world. We have had cities for 0,000 years, and children could walk out of home and play. In fact, only very recently, towards 0000, there were no cars. Cars have been here for really less than 000 years. They completely changed cities. In 0000, for example, nobody was killed by cars in the United States. Only 00 years later, between 0000 and 0000, almost 000,000 people were killed by cars in the United States. Only in 0000, almost 0,000 children were killed by cars in the United States. So we could make different cities, cities that will give more priority to human beings than to cars, that will give more public space to human beings than to cars, cities which show great respect for those most vulnerable citizens, such as children or the elderly. I will propose to you a couple of ingredients which I think would make cities much better, and it would be very simple to implement them in the new cities which are only being created. Hundreds of kilometers of greenways criss-crossing cities in all directions. Children will walk out of homes into safe spaces. They could go for dozens of kilometers safely without any risk in wonderful greenways, sort of bicycle highways, and I would invite you to imagine the following: a city in which every other street would be a street only for pedestrians and bicycles. In new cities which are going to be built, this would not be particularly difficult. When I was mayor of Bogotá, in only three years, we were able to create 00 kilometers, in one of the most dense cities in the world, of these bicycle highways. And this changes the way people live, move, enjoy the city. In this picture, you see in one of the very poor neighborhoods, we have a luxury pedestrian bicycle street, and the cars still in the mud. Of course, I would love to pave this street for cars. But what do we do first? Ninety-nine percent of the people in those neighborhoods don't have cars. But you see, when a city is only being created, it's very easy to incorporate this kind of infrastructure. Then the city grows around it. And of course this is just a glimpse of something which could be much better if we just create it, and it changes the way of life. And the second ingredient, which would solve mobility, that very difficult challenge in developing countries, in a very low-cost and simple way, would be to have hundreds of kilometers of streets only for buses, buses and bicycles and pedestrians. This would be, again, a very low-cost solution if implemented from the start, low cost, pleasant transit with natural sunlight. But unfortunately, reality is not as good as my dreams. Because of private property of land and high land prices, all developing country cities have a large problem of slums. In my country of Colombia, almost half the homes in cities initially were illegal developments. And of course it's very difficult to have mass transit or to use bicycles in such environments. But even legal developments have also been located in the wrong places, very far from the city centers where it's impossible to provide low-cost, high-frequency public transport. As a Latin American, and Latin America was the most recently organized region in the world, I would recommend, respectfully, passionately, to those countries which are yet to urbanize -- Latin America went from 00 percent urban in 0000 to 00 percent urban in 0000 -- I would recommend Asian and African countries which are yet to urbanize, such as India which is only 00 percent urban now, that governments should acquire all land around cities. In this way, their cities could grow in the right places with the right spaces, with the parks, with the greenways, with the busways. The cities we are going to build over the next 00 years will determine quality of life and even happiness for billions of people towards the future. What a fantastic opportunity for leaders and many young leaders to come, especially in the developing countries. They can create a much happier life for billions towards the future. I am sure, I am optimistic, that they will make cities better than our most ambitious dreams. (Applause)

(Aquatic noises) So this video was taken at Aquarius undersea laboratory four miles off the coast of Key Largo, about 00 feet below the surface. NASA uses this extreme environment to train astronauts and aquanauts, and last year, they invited us along for the ride. All the footage was taken from our open ROV, which is a robot that we built in our garage. So ROV stands for Remote Operated Vehicle, which in our case means our little robot sends live video across that ultra-thin tether back to the computer topside. It's open source, meaning we publish and share all of our design files and all of our code online, allowing anyone to modify or improve or change the design. It's built with mostly off-the-shelf parts and costs about 0,000 times cheaper than the ROVs James Cameron used to explore the Titanic. So ROVs aren't new. They've been around for decades. Scientists use ROVs to explore the oceans. Oil and gas companies use them for exploration and construction. What we've built isn't unique. It's how we've built it that's really unique. So I want to give you a quick story of how it got started. So a few years ago, my friend Eric and I decided we wanted to explore this underwater cave in the foothills of the Sierras. We had heard this story about lost gold from a Gold Rush-era robbery, and we wanted to go up there. Unfortunately, we didn't have any money and we didn't have any tools to do it. So Eric had an initial design idea for a robot, but we didn't have all the parts figured out, so we did what anybody would do in our situation: we asked the Internet for help. More specifically, we created this website, openROV.com, and shared our intentions and our plans For the first few months, it was just Eric and I talking back to each other on the forums, but pretty soon, we started to get feedback from makers and hobbyists, and then actually professional ocean engineers who had some suggestions for what we should do. We kept working on it. We learned a lot. We kept prototyping, and eventually, we decided we wanted to go to the cave. We were ready. So about that time, our little expedition became quite a story, and it got picked up in The New York Times. And we were pretty much just overwhelmed with interest from people who wanted a kit that they could build this open ROV themselves. So we decided to put the project on Kickstarter, and when we did, we raised our funding goal in about two hours, and all of a sudden, had this money to make these kits. But then we had to learn how to make them. I mean, we had to learn small batch manufacturing. So we quickly learned that our garage was not big enough to hold our growing operation. But we were able to do it, we got all the kits made, thanks a lot to TechShop, which was a big help to us, and we shipped these kits all over the world just before Christmas of last year, so it was just a few months ago. But we're already starting to get video and photos back from all over the world, including this shot from under the ice in Antarctica. We've also learned the penguins love robots. (Laughter) So we're still publishing all the designs online, encouraging anyone to build these themselves. That's the only way that we could have done this. By being open source, we've created this distributed R&D network, and we're moving faster than any venture-backed counterpart. But the actual robot is really only half the story. The real potential, the long term potential, is with this community of DIY ocean explorers that are forming all over the globe. What can we discover when there's thousands of these devices roaming the seas? So you're probably all wondering: the cave. Did you find the gold? Well, we didn't find any gold, but we decided that what we found was much more valuable. It was the glimpse into a potential future for ocean exploration. It's something that's not limited to the James Camerons of the world, but something that we're all participating in. It's an underwater world we're all exploring together. Thank you. (Applause)

So when I do my job, people hate me. In fact, the better I do my job, the more people hate me. And no, I'm not a meter maid, and I'm not an undertaker. I am a progressive lesbian talking head on Fox News. (Applause) So y'all heard that, right? Just to make sure, right? I am a gay talking head on Fox News. I am going to tell you how I do it and the most important thing I've learned. So I go on television. I debate people who literally want to obliterate everything I believe in, in some cases, who don't want me and people like me to even exist. It's sort of like Thanksgiving with your conservative uncle on steroids, with a live television audience of millions. It's totally almost just like that. And that's just on air. The hate mail I get is unbelievable. Last week alone, I got 000 pieces of nasty email and more hate tweets than I can even count. I was called an idiot, a traitor, a scourge, a cunt, and an ugly man, and that was just in one email. (Laughter) So what have I realized, being on the receiving end of all this ugliness? Well, my biggest takeaway is that for decades, we've been focused on political correctness, but what matters more is emotional correctness. Let me give you a small example. I don't care if you call me a dyke. I really don't. I care about two things. One, I care that you spell it right. (Laughter) (Applause) Just quick refresher, it's D-Y-K-E. You'd totally be surprised. And second, I don't care about the word, I care about how you use it. Are you being friendly? Are you just being naive? Or do you really want to hurt me personally? Emotional correctness is the tone, the feeling, how we say what we say, the respect and compassion we show one another. And what I've realized is that political persuasion doesn't begin with ideas or facts or data. Political persuasion begins with being emotionally correct. So when I first went to go work at Fox News, true confession, I expected there to be marks in the carpet from all the knuckle-dragging. That, by the way, in case you're paying attention, is not emotionally correct. But liberals on my side, we can be self-righteous, we can be condescending, we can be dismissive of anyone who doesn't agree with us. In other words, we can be politically right but emotionally wrong. And incidentally, that means that people don't like us. Right? Now here's the kicker. Conservatives are really nice. I mean, not all of them, and not the ones who send me hate mail, but you would be surprised. Sean Hannity is one of the sweetest guys I've ever met. He spends his free time trying to fix up his staff on blind dates, and I know that if I ever had a problem, he would do anything he could to help. Now, I think Sean Hannity is 00 percent politically wrong, but his emotional correctness is strikingly impressive, and that's why people listen to him. Because you can't get anyone to agree with you if they don't even listen to you first. We spend so much time talking past each other and not enough time talking through our disagreements, and if we can start to find compassion for one another, then we have a shot at building common ground. It actually sounds really hokey to say it standing up here, but when you try to put it in practice, it's really powerful. So someone who says they hate immigrants, I try to imagine how scared they must be that their community is changing from what they've always known. Or someone who says they don't like teachers' unions, I bet they're really devastated to see their kid's school going into the gutter, and they're just looking for someone to blame. Our challenge is to find the compassion for others that we want them to have for us. That is emotional correctness. I'm not saying it's easy. An average of, like, 0.0 times per day I have to stop myself from responding to all of my hate mail with a flurry of vile profanities. This whole finding compassion and common ground with your enemies thing is kind of like a political-spiritual practice for me, and I ain't the Dalai Lama. I'm not perfect, but what I am is optimistic, because I don't just get hate mail. I get a lot of really nice letters, lots of them. And one of my all-time favorites begins, "I am not a big fan of your political leanings or your sometimes tortured logic, but I'm a big fan of you as a person." Now this guy doesn't agree with me, yet. (Laughter) But he's listening, not because of what I said, but because of how I said it, and somehow, even though we've never met, we've managed to form a connection. That's emotional correctness, and that's how we start the conversations that really lead to change. Thank you. (Applause)

We have a global health challenge in our hands today, and that is that the way we currently discover and develop new drugs is too costly, takes far too long, and it fails more often than it succeeds. It really just isn't working, and that means that patients that badly need new therapies are not getting them, and diseases are going untreated. We seem to be spending more and more money. So for every billion dollars we spend in R&D, we're getting less drugs approved into the market. More money, less drugs. Hmm. So what's going on here? Well, there's a multitude of factors at play, but I think one of the key factors is that the tools that we currently have available to test whether a drug is going to work, whether it has efficacy, or whether it's going to be safe before we get it into human clinical trials, are failing us. They're not predicting what's going to happen in humans. And we have two main tools available at our disposal. They are cells in dishes and animal testing. Now let's talk about the first one, cells in dishes. So, cells are happily functioning in our bodies. We take them and rip them out of their native environment, throw them in one of these dishes, and expect them to work. Guess what. They don't. They don't like that environment because it's nothing like what they have in the body. What about animal testing? Well, animals do and can provide extremely useful information. They teach us about what happens in the complex organism. We learn more about the biology itself. However, more often than not, animal models fail to predict what will happen in humans when they're treated with a particular drug. So we need better tools. We need human cells, but we need to find a way to keep them happy outside the body. Our bodies are dynamic environments. We're in constant motion. Our cells experience that. They're in dynamic environments in our body. They're under constant mechanical forces. So if we want to make cells happy outside our bodies, we need to become cell architects. We need to design, build and engineer a home away from home for the cells. And at the Wyss Institute, we've done just that. We call it an organ-on-a-chip. And I have one right here. It's beautiful, isn't it? But it's pretty incredible. Right here in my hand is a breathing, living human lung on a chip. And it's not just beautiful. It can do a tremendous amount of things. We have living cells in that little chip, cells that are in a dynamic environment interacting with different cell types. There's been many people trying to grow cells in the lab. They've tried many different approaches. They've even tried to grow little mini-organs in the lab. We're not trying to do that here. We're simply trying to recreate in this tiny chip the smallest functional unit that represents the biochemistry, the function and the mechanical strain that the cells experience in our bodies. So how does it work? Let me show you. We use techniques from the computer chip manufacturing industry to make these structures at a scale relevant to both the cells and their environment. We have three fluidic channels. In the center, we have a porous, flexible membrane on which we can add human cells from, say, our lungs, and then underneath, they had capillary cells, the cells in our blood vessels. And we can then apply mechanical forces to the chip that stretch and contract the membrane, so the cells experience the same mechanical forces that they did when we breathe. And they experience them how they did in the body. There's air flowing through the top channel, and then we flow a liquid that contains nutrients through the blood channel. Now the chip is really beautiful, but what can we do with it? We can get incredible functionality inside these little chips. Let me show you. We could, for example, mimic infection, where we add bacterial cells into the lung. then we can add human white blood cells. White blood cells are our body's defense against bacterial invaders, and when they sense this inflammation due to infection, they will enter from the blood into the lung and engulf the bacteria. Well now you're going to see this happening live in an actual human lung on a chip. We've labeled the white blood cells so you can see them flowing through, and when they detect that infection, they begin to stick. They stick, and then they try to go into the lung side from blood channel. And you can see here, we can actually visualize a single white blood cell. It sticks, it wiggles its way through between the cell layers, through the pore, comes out on the other side of the membrane, and right there, it's going to engulf the bacteria labeled in green. In that tiny chip, you just witnessed one of the most fundamental responses our body has to an infection. It's the way we respond to -- an immune response. It's pretty exciting. Now I want to share this picture with you, not just because it's so beautiful, but because it tells us an enormous amount of information about what the cells are doing within the chips. It tells us that these cells from the small airways in our lungs, actually have these hairlike structures that you would expect to see in the lung. These structures are called cilia, and they actually move the mucus out of the lung. Yeah. Mucus. Yuck. But mucus is actually very important. Mucus traps particulates, viruses, potential allergens, and these little cilia move and clear the mucus out. When they get damaged, say, by cigarette smoke for example, they don't work properly, and they can't clear that mucus out. And that can lead to diseases such as bronchitis. Cilia and the clearance of mucus are also involved in awful diseases like cystic fibrosis. But now, with the functionality that we get in these chips, we can begin to look for potential new treatments. We didn't stop with the lung on a chip. We have a gut on a chip. You can see one right here. And we've put intestinal human cells in a gut on a chip, and they're under constant peristaltic motion, this trickling flow through the cells, and we can mimic many of the functions that you actually would expect to see in the human intestine. Now we can begin to create models of diseases such as irritable bowel syndrome. This is a disease that affects a large number of individuals. It's really debilitating, and there aren't really many good treatments for it. Now we have a whole pipeline of different organ chips that we are currently working on in our labs. Now, the true power of this technology, however, really comes from the fact that we can fluidically link them. There's fluid flowing across these cells, so we can begin to interconnect multiple different chips together to form what we call a virtual human on a chip. Now we're really getting excited. We're not going to ever recreate a whole human in these chips, but what our goal is is to be able to recreate sufficient functionality so that we can make better predictions of what's going to happen in humans. For example, now we can begin to explore what happens when we put a drug like an aerosol drug. Those of you like me who have asthma, when you take your inhaler, we can explore how that drug comes into your lungs, how it enters the body, how it might affect, say, your heart. Does it change the beating of your heart? Does it have a toxicity? Does it get cleared by the liver? Is it metabolized in the liver? Is it excreted in your kidneys? We can begin to study the dynamic response of the body to a drug. This could really revolutionize and be a game changer for not only the pharmaceutical industry, but a whole host of different industries, including the cosmetics industry. We can potentially use the skin on a chip that we're currently developing in the lab to test whether the ingredients in those products that you're using are actually safe to put on your skin without the need for animal testing. We could test the safety of chemicals that we are exposed to on a daily basis in our environment, such as chemicals in regular household cleaners. We could also use the organs on chips for applications in bioterrorism or radiation exposure. We could use them to learn more about diseases such as ebola or other deadly diseases such as SARS. Organs on chips could also change the way we do clinical trials in the future. Right now, the average participant in a clinical trial is that: average. Tends to be middle aged, tends to be female. You won't find many clinical trials in which children are involved, yet every day, we give children medications, and the only safety data we have on that drug is one that we obtained from adults. Children are not adults. They may not respond in the same way adults do. There are other things like genetic differences in populations that may lead to at-risk populations that are at risk of having an adverse drug reaction. Now imagine if we could take cells from all those different populations, put them on chips, and create populations on a chip. This could really change the way we do clinical trials. And this is the team and the people that are doing this. We have engineers, we have cell biologists, we have clinicians, all working together. We're really seeing something quite incredible at the Wyss Institute. It's really a convergence of disciplines, where biology is influencing the way we design, the way we engineer, the way we build. It's pretty exciting. We're establishing important industry collaborations such as the one we have with a company that has expertise in large-scale digital manufacturing. They're going to help us make, instead of one of these, millions of these chips, so that we can get them into the hands of as many researchers as possible. And this is key to the potential of that technology. Now let me show you our instrument. This is an instrument that our engineers are actually prototyping right now in the lab, and this instrument is going to give us the engineering controls that we're going to require in order to link 00 or more organ chips together. It does something else that's very important. It creates an easy user interface. So a cell biologist like me can come in, take a chip, put it in a cartridge like the prototype you see there, put the cartridge into the machine just like you would a C.D., and away you go. Plug and play. Easy. Now, let's imagine a little bit what the future might look like if I could take your stem cells and put them on a chip, or your stem cells and put them on a chip. It would be a personalized chip just for you. Now all of us in here are individuals, and those individual differences mean that we could react very differently and sometimes in unpredictable ways to drugs. I myself, a couple of years back, had a really bad headache, just couldn't shake it, thought, "Well, I'll try something different." I took some Advil. Fifteen minutes later, I was on my way to the emergency room with a full-blown asthma attack. Now, obviously it wasn't fatal, but unfortunately, some of these adverse drug reactions can be fatal. So how do we prevent them? Well, we could imagine one day having Geraldine on a chip, having Danielle on a chip, having you on a chip. Personalized medicine. Thank you. (Applause)

I'm here today to talk about social change, not a new therapy or a new intervention or a new way of working with kids or something like that, but a new business model for social change, a new way of tackling the problem. In Britain, 00 percent of all men who come out of short sentences from prison re-offend again within a year. Now how many previous offenses do you think they have on average managed to commit? Forty-three. And how many previous times do you think they've been in prison? Seven. So we went to talk to the Ministry of Justice, and we said to the Ministry of Justice, what's it worth to you if fewer of these guys re-offend? It's got to be worth something, right? I mean, there's prison costs, there's police costs, there's court costs, all these things that you're spending money on to deal with these guys. What's it worth? Now, of course, we care about the social value. Social Finance, the organization I helped set up, cares about social stuff. But we wanted to make the economic case, because if we could make the economic case, then the value of doing this would be completely compelling. And if we can agree on both a value and a way of measuring whether we've been successful at reducing that re-offending, then we can do something we think rather interesting. The idea is called the social impact bond. Now, the social impact bond is simply saying, if we can get the government to agree, that we can create a contract where they only pay if it worked. So that means that they can try out new stuff without the embarrassment of having to pay if it didn't work, which for still quite a lot of bits of government, that's a serious issue. Now, many of you may have noticed there's a problem at this point, and that is that it takes a long time to measure whether those outcomes have happened. So we have to raise some money. We use the contract to raise money from socially motivated investors. Socially motivated investors: there's an interesting idea, right? But actually, there's a lot of people who, if they're given the chance, would love to invest in something that does social good. And here's the opportunity. Do you want to also help government find whether there's a better economic model, not just leaving these guys to come out of prison and waiting till they re-offend and putting them back in again, but actually working with them to move to a different path to end up with fewer crimes and fewer victims? So we find some investors, and they pay for a set of services, and if those services are successful, then they improve outcomes, and with those measured reductions in re-offending, government saves money, and with those savings, they can pay outcomes. And the investors do not just get their money back, but they make a return. So in March 0000, we signed the first social impact bond with the Ministry of Justice around Peterborough Prison. It was to work with 0,000 offenders split into three cohorts of 0,000 each. Now, each of those cohorts would get measured over the two years that they were coming out of prison. They've got to have a year to commit their crimes, six months to get through the court system, and then they would be compared to a group taken from the police national computer, as similar as possible, and we would get paid providing we achieved a hurdle rate of 00-percent reduction, for every conviction event that didn't happen. So we get paid for crimes saved. Now if we achieved that 00-percent reduction across all three cohorts, then the investors get a seven and a half percent annualized return on their investment, and if we do better than that, they can get up to 00 percent annualized return on their investment, which is okay. So everyone wins here, right? The Ministry of Justice can try out a new program and they only pay if it works. Investors get two opportunities: for the first time, they can invest in social change. Also, they make a reasonable return, and they also know that first investors in these kinds of things, they're going to have to believers. They're going to have to care in the social program, but if this builds a track record over five or 00 years, then you can widen that investor community as more people have confidence in the product. The service providers, well, for the first time, they've got an opportunity to provide services and grow the evidence for what they're doing in a really constructive way and learn and demonstrate the value of what they're doing over five or six years, not just one or two as often happens at the moment. Society wins: fewer crimes, fewer victims. Now, the offenders, they also benefit. Instead of just coming out of the prison with 00 pounds in their pocket, half of them not knowing where they're spending their first night out of jail, actually, someone meets them in prison, learns about their issues, meets them at the gate, takes them through to somewhere to stay, connects them to benefits, connects them to employment, drug rehabilitation, mental health, whatever's needed. So let's think of another example: working with children in care. Social impact bonds work great for any area where there is at the moment very expensive provision that produces poor outcomes for people. So children in the state care tend to do very badly. Only 00 percent achieve a reasonable level of five GCSEs at 00, against 00 percent of the wider population. More troublingly, 00 percent of offenders in prison have spent some time in care. And even more worryingly, and this is a Home Office statistic, 00 percent of prostitutes have spent some time in care. The state is not a great parent. But there are great programs for adolescents who are on the edge of care, and 00 percent of kids going into care are adolescents. So we set up a program with Essex County Council to test out intensive family therapeutic support for those families with adolescents on the edge of the care system. Essex only pays in the event that it's saving them care costs. Investors have put in 0.0 million pounds. That program started last month. Others, around homelessness in London, around youth and employment and education elsewhere in the country. There are now 00 social impact bonds in Britain, and amazing levels of interest in this idea all over the world. So David Cameron's put 00 million pounds into a social outcomes fund to support this idea. Obama has suggested 000 million dollars in the U.S. budget for these kinds of ideas and structures to move it forward, and a lot of other countries are demonstrating considerable interest. So what's caused this excitement? Why is this so different for people? Well, the first piece, which we've talked about, is innovation. It enables testing of new ideas in a way that's less difficult for everybody. The second piece it brings is rigor. By working to outcomes, people really have to test and bring data into the situation that one's dealing with. So taking Peterborough as an example, we add case management across all of the different organizations that we're working with so they know what actually has been done with different prisoners, and at the same time they learn from the Ministry of Justice, and we learn, because we pushed for the data, what actually happens, whether they get re-arrested or not. And we learn and adapt the program accordingly. And this leads to the third element, which is new, and that's flexibility. Because normal contracting for things, when you're spending government money, you're spending our money, tax money, and the people who are in charge of that are very aware of it so the temptation is to control exactly how you spend it. Now any entrepreneur in the room knows that version 0.0, the business plan, is not the one that generally works. So when you're trying to do something like this, you need the flexibility to adapt the program. And again, in Peterborough, we started off with a program, but we also collected data, and over the period of time, we nuanced and changed that program to add a range of other elements, so that the service adapts and we meet the needs of the long term as well as the short term: greater engagement from the prisoners, longer-term engagement as well. The last element is partnership. There is, at the moment, a stale debate going on very often: state's better, public sector's better, private sector's better, social sector's better, for a lot of these programs. Actually, for creating social change, we need to bring in the expertise from all of those parties in order to make this work. And this creates a structure through which they can combine. So where does this leave us? This leaves us with a way that people can invest in social change. We've met thousands, possibly millions of people, who want the opportunity to invest in social change. We've met champions all over the public sector keen to make these kinds of differences. With this kind of model, we can help bring them together. Thank you. (Applause)

There is something you know about me, something very personal, and there is something I know about every one of you and that's very central to your concerns. There is something that we know about everyone we meet anywhere in the world, on the street, that is the very mainspring of whatever they do and whatever they put up with, and that is that all of us want to be happy. In this, we are all together. How we imagine our happiness, that differs from one another, but it's already a lot that we have all in common, that we want to be happy. Now my topic is gratefulness. How is the connection between happiness and gratefulness? Many people would say, well, that's very easy. When you are happy, you are grateful. But think again. Is it really the happy people that are grateful? We all know quite a number of people who have everything that it would take to be happy, and they are not happy, because they want something else or they want more of the same. And we all know people who have lots of misfortune, misfortune that we ourselves would not want to have, and they are deeply happy. They radiate happiness. You are surprised. Why? Because they are grateful. So it is not happiness that makes us grateful. It's gratefulness that makes us happy. If you think it's happiness that makes you grateful, think again. It's gratefulness that makes you happy. Now, we can ask, what really do we mean by gratefulness? And how does it work? I appeal to your own experience. We all know from experience how it goes. We experience something that's valuable to us. Something is given to us that's valuable to us. And it's really given. These two things have to come together. It has to be something valuable, and it's a real gift. You haven't bought it. You haven't earned it. You haven't traded it in. You haven't worked for it. It's just given to you. And when these two things come together, something that's really valuable to me and I realize it's freely given, then gratefulness spontaneously rises in my heart, happiness spontaneously rises in my heart. That's how gratefulness happens. Now the key to all this is that we cannot only experience this once in a while. We cannot only have grateful experiences. We can be people who live gratefully. Grateful living, that is the thing. And how can we live gratefully? By experiencing, by becoming aware that every moment is a given moment, as we say. It's a gift. You haven't earned it. You haven't brought it about in any way. You have no way of assuring that there will be another moment given to you, and yet, that's the most valuable thing that can ever be given to us, this moment, with all the opportunity that it contains. If we didn't have this present moment, we wouldn't have any opportunity to do anything or experience anything, and this moment is a gift. It's a given moment, as we say. Now, we say the gift within this gift is really the opportunity. What you are really grateful for is the opportunity, not the thing that is given to you, because if that thing were somewhere else and you didn't have the opportunity to enjoy it, to do something with it, you wouldn't be grateful for it. Opportunity is the gift within every gift, and we have this saying, opportunity knocks only once. Well, think again. Every moment is a new gift, over and over again, and if you miss the opportunity of this moment, another moment is given to us, and another moment. We can avail ourselves of this opportunity, or we can miss it, and if we avail ourselves of the opportunity, it is the key to happiness. Behold the master key to our happiness in our own hands. Moment by moment, we can be grateful for this gift. Does that mean that we can be grateful for everything? Certainly not. We cannot be grateful for violence, for war, for oppression, for exploitation. On the personal level, we cannot be grateful for the loss of a friend, for unfaithfulness, for bereavement. But I didn't say we can be grateful for everything. I said we can be grateful in every given moment for the opportunity, and even when we are confronted with something that is terribly difficult, we can rise to this occasion and respond to the opportunity that is given to us. It isn't as bad as it might seem. Actually, when you look at it and experience it, you find that most of the time, what is given to us is opportunity to enjoy, and we only miss it because we are rushing through life and we are not stopping to see the opportunity. But once in a while, something very difficult is given to us, and when this difficult thing occurs to us, it's a challenge to rise to that opportunity, and we can rise to it by learning something which is sometimes painful. Learning patience, for instance. We have been told that the road to peace is not a sprint, but is more like a marathon. That takes patience. That's difficult. It may be to stand up for your opinion, to stand up for your conviction. That's an opportunity that is given to us. To learn, to suffer, to stand up, all these opportunities are given to us, but they are opportunities, and those who avail themselves of those opportunities are the ones that we admire. They make something out of life. And those who fail get another opportunity. We always get another opportunity. That's the wonderful richness of life. So how can we find a method that will harness this? How can each one of us find a method for living gratefully, not just once in a while being grateful, but moment by moment to be grateful. How can we do it? It's a very simple method. It's so simple that it's actually what we were told as children when we learned to cross the street. Stop. Look. Go. That's all. But how often do we stop? We rush through life. We don't stop. We miss the opportunity because we don't stop. We have to stop. We have to get quiet. And we have to build stop signs into our lives. When I was in Africa some years ago and then came back, I noticed water. In Africa where I was, I didn't have drinkable water. Every time I turned on the faucet, I was overwhelmed. Every time I clicked on the light, I was so grateful. It made me so happy. But after a while, this wears off. So I put little stickers on the light switch and on the water faucet, and every time I turned it on, water. So leave it up to your own imagination. You can find whatever works best for you, but you need stop signs in your life. And when you stop, then the next thing is to look. You look. You open your eyes. You open your ears. You open your nose. You open all your senses for this wonderful richness that is given to us. There is no end to it, and that is what life is all about, to enjoy, to enjoy what is given to us. And then we can also open our hearts, our hearts for the opportunities, for the opportunities also to help others, to make others happy, because nothing makes us more happy than when all of us are happy. And when we open our hearts to the opportunities, the opportunities invite us to do something, and that is the third. Stop, look, and then go, and really do something. And what we can do is whatever life offers to you in that present moment. Mostly it's the opportunity to enjoy, but sometimes it's something more difficult. But whatever it is, if we take this opportunity, we go with it, we are creative, those are the creative people, and that little stop, look, go, is such a potent seed that it can revolutionize our world. Because we need, we are at the present moment in the middle of a change of consciousness, and you will be surprised if you -- I am always surprised when I hear how many times this word "gratefulness" and "gratitude" comes up. Everywhere you find it, a grateful airline, a restaurant gratefulness, a cafe gratefulness, a wine that is gratefulness. Yes, I have even come across a toilet paper that the brand is called Thank You. (Laughter) There is a wave of gratefulness because people are becoming aware how important this is and how this can change our world. It can change our world in immensely important ways, because if you're grateful, you're not fearful, and if you're not fearful, you're not violent. If you're grateful, you act out of a sense of enough and not of a sense of scarcity, and you are willing to share. If you are grateful, you are enjoying the differences between people, and you are respectful to everybody, and that changes this power pyramid under which we live. And it doesn't make for equality, but it makes for equal respect, and that is the important thing. The future of the world will be a network, not a pyramid, not a pyramid turned upside down. The revolution of which I am speaking is a nonviolent revolution, and it's so revolutionary that it even revolutionizes the very concept of a revolution, because a normal revolution is one where the power pyramid is turned upside down and those who were on the bottom are now on the top and are doing exactly the same thing that the ones did before. What we need is a networking of smaller groups, smaller and smaller groups who know one another, who interact with one another, and that is a grateful world. A grateful world is a world of joyful people. Grateful people are joyful people, and joyful people, the more and more joyful people there are, the more and more we'll have a joyful world. We have a network for grateful living, and it has mushroomed. We couldn't understand why it mushroomed. We have an opportunity for people to light a candle when they are grateful for something. And there have been 00 million candles lit in one decade. People are becoming aware that a grateful world is a happy world, and we all have the opportunity by the simple stop, look, go, to transform the world, to make it a happy place. And that is what I hope for us, and if this has contributed a little to making you want to do the same, stop, look, go. Thank you. (Applause)

What is so special about the human brain? Why is it that we study other animals instead of them studying us? What does a human brain have or do that no other brain does? When I became interested in these questions about 00 years ago, scientists thought they knew what different brains were made of. Though it was based on very little evidence, many scientists thought that all mammalian brains, including the human brain, were made in the same way, with a number of neurons that was always proportional to the size of the brain. This means that two brains of the same size, like these two, with a respectable 000 grams, should have similar numbers of neurons. Now, if neurons are the functional information processing units of the brain, then the owners of these two brains should have similar cognitive abilities. And yet, one is a chimp, and the other is a cow. Now maybe cows have a really rich internal mental life and are so smart that they choose not to let us realize it, but we eat them. I think most people will agree that chimps are capable of much more complex, elaborate and flexible behaviors than cows are. So this is a first indication that the "all brains are made the same way" scenario is not quite right. But let's play along. If all brains were made the same way and you were to compare animals with brains of different sizes, larger brains should always have more neurons than smaller brains, and the larger the brain, the more cognitively able its owner should be. So the largest brain around should also be the most cognitively able. And here comes the bad news: Our brain, not the largest one around. It seems quite vexing. Our brain weighs between 0.0 and 0.0 kilos, but elephant brains weigh between four and five kilos, and whale brains can weigh up to nine kilos, which is why scientists used to resort to saying that our brain must be special to explain our cognitive abilities. It must be really extraordinary, an exception to the rule. Theirs may be bigger, but ours is better, and it could be better, for example, in that it seems larger than it should be, with a much larger cerebral cortex than we should have for the size of our bodies. So that would give us extra cortex to do more interesting things than just operating the body. That's because the size of the brain usually follows the size of the body. So the main reason for saying that our brain is larger than it should be actually comes from comparing ourselves to great apes. Gorillas can be two to three times larger than we are, so their brains should also be larger than ours, but instead it's the other way around. Our brain is three times larger than a gorilla brain. The human brain also seems special in the amount of energy that it uses. Although it weighs only two percent of the body, it alone uses 00 percent of all the energy that your body requires to run per day. That's 000 calories out of a total of 0,000 calories, just to keep your brain working. So the human brain is larger than it should be, it uses much more energy than it should, so it's special. And this is where the story started to bother me. In biology, we look for rules that apply to all animals and to life in general, so why should the rules of evolution apply to everybody else but not to us? Maybe the problem was with the basic assumption that all brains are made in the same way. Maybe two brains of a similar size can actually be made of very different numbers of neurons. Maybe a very large brain does not necessarily have more neurons than a more modest-sized brain. Maybe the human brain actually has the most neurons of any brain, regardless of its size, especially in the cerebral cortex. So this to me became the important question to answer: how many neurons does the human brain have, and how does that compare to other animals? Now, you may have heard or read somewhere that we have 000 billion neurons, so 00 years ago, I asked my colleagues if they knew where this number came from. But nobody did. I've been digging through the literature for the original reference for that number, and I could never find it. It seems that nobody had actually ever counted the number of neurons in the human brain, or in any other brain for that matter. So I came up with my own way to count cells in the brain, and it essentially consists of dissolving that brain into soup. It works like this: You take a brain, or parts of that brain, and you dissolve it in detergent, which destroys the cell membranes but keeps the cell nuclei intact, so you end up with a suspension of free nuclei that looks like this, like a clear soup. This soup contains all the nuclei that once were a mouse brain. Now, the beauty of a soup is that because it is soup, you can agitate it and make those nuclei be distributed homogeneously in the liquid, so that now by looking under the microscope at just four or five samples of this homogeneous solution, you can count nuclei, and therefore tell how many cells that brain had. It's simple, it's straightforward, and it's really fast. So we've used that method to count neurons in dozens of different species so far, and it turns out that all brains are not made the same way. Take rodents and primates, for instance: In larger rodent brains, the average size of the neuron increases, so the brain inflates very rapidly and gains size much faster than it gains neurons. But primate brains gain neurons without the average neuron becoming any larger, which is a very economical way to add neurons to your brain. The result is that a primate brain will always have more neurons than a rodent brain of the same size, and the larger the brain, the larger this difference will be. Well, what about our brain then? We found that we have, on average, 00 billion neurons, 00 billion of which are in the cerebral cortex, and if you consider that the cerebral cortex is the seat of functions like awareness and logical and abstract reasoning, and that 00 billion is the most neurons that any cortex has, I think this is the simplest explanation for our remarkable cognitive abilities. But just as important is what the 00 billion neurons mean. Because we found that the relationship between the size of the brain and its number of neurons could be described mathematically, we could calculate what a human brain would look like if it was made like a rodent brain. So, a rodent brain with 00 billion neurons would weigh 00 kilos. That's not possible. A brain that huge would be crushed by its own weight, and this impossible brain would go in the body of 00 tons. I don't think it looks like us. So this brings us to a very important conclusion already, which is that we are not rodents. The human brain is not a large rat brain. Compared to a rat, we might seem special, yes, but that's not a fair comparison to make, given that we know that we are not rodents. We are primates, so the correct comparison is to other primates. And there, if you do the math, you find that a generic primate with 00 billion neurons would have a brain of about 0.0 kilos, which seems just right, in a body of some 00 kilos, which in my case is exactly right, which brings us to a very unsurprising but still incredibly important conclusion: I am a primate. And all of you are primates. And so was Darwin. I love to think that Darwin would have really appreciated this. His brain, like ours, was made in the image of other primate brains. So the human brain may be remarkable, yes, but it is not special in its number of neurons. It is just a large primate brain. I think that's a very humbling and sobering thought that should remind us of our place in nature. Why does it cost so much energy, then? Well, other people have figured out how much energy the human brain and that of other species costs, and now that we knew how many neurons each brain was made of, we could do the math. And it turns out that both human and other brains cost about the same, an average of six calories per billion neurons per day. So the total energetic cost of a brain is a simple, linear function of its number of neurons, and it turns out that the human brain costs just as much energy as you would expect. So the reason why the human brain costs so much energy is simply because it has a huge number of neurons, and because we are primates with many more neurons for a given body size than any other animal, the relative cost of our brain is large, but just because we're primates, not because we're special. Last question, then: how did we come by this remarkable number of neurons, and in particular, if great apes are larger than we are, why don't they have a larger brain than we do, with more neurons? When we realized how much expensive it is to have a lot of neurons in the brain, I figured, maybe there's a simple reason. They just can't afford the energy for both a large body and a large number of neurons. So we did the math. We calculated on the one hand how much energy a primate gets per day from eating raw foods, and on the other hand, how much energy a body of a certain size costs and how much energy a brain of a certain number of neurons costs, and we looked for the combinations of body size and number of brain neurons that a primate could afford if it ate a certain number of hours per day. And what we found is that because neurons are so expensive, there is a tradeoff between body size and number of neurons. So a primate that eats eight hours per day can afford at most 00 billion neurons, but then its body cannot be any bigger than 00 kilos. To weigh any more than that, it has to give up neurons. So it's either a large body or a large number of neurons. When you eat like a primate, you can't afford both. One way out of this metabolic limitation would be to spend even more hours per day eating, but that gets dangerous, and past a certain point, it's just not possible. Gorillas and orangutans, for instance, afford about 00 billion neurons by spending eight and a half hours per day eating, and that seems to be about as much as they can do. Nine hours of feeding per day seems to be the practical limit for a primate. What about us? With our 00 billion neurons and 00 to 00 kilos of body mass, we should have to spend over nine hours per day every single day feeding, which is just not feasible. If we ate like a primate, we should not be here. How did we get here, then? Well, if our brain costs just as much energy as it should, and if we can't spend every waking hour of the day feeding, then the only alternative, really, is to somehow get more energy out of the same foods. And remarkably, that matches exactly what our ancestors are believed to have invented one and a half million years ago, when they invented cooking. To cook is to use fire to pre-digest foods outside of your body. Cooked foods are softer, so they're easier to chew and to turn completely into mush in your mouth, so that allows them to be completely digested and absorbed in your gut, which makes them yield much more energy in much less time. So cooking frees time for us to do much more interesting things with our day and with our neurons than just thinking about food, looking for food, and gobbling down food all day long. So because of cooking, what once was a major liability, this large, dangerously expensive brain with a lot of neurons, could now become a major asset, now that we could both afford the energy for a lot of neurons and the time to do interesting things with them. So I think this explains why the human brain grew to become so large so fast in evolution, all of the while remaining just a primate brain. With this large brain now affordable by cooking, we went rapidly from raw foods to culture, agriculture, civilization, grocery stores, electricity, refrigerators, all of those things that nowadays allow us to get all the energy we need for the whole day in a single sitting at your favorite fast food joint. So what once was a solution now became the problem, and ironically, we look for the solution in raw food. So what is the human advantage? What is it that we have that no other animal has? My answer is that we have the largest number of neurons in the cerebral cortex, and I think that's the simplest explanation for our remarkable cognitive abilities. And what is it that we do that no other animal does, and which I believe was fundamental to allow us to reach that large, largest number of neurons in the cortex? In two words, we cook. No other animal cooks its food. Only humans do. And I think that's how we got to become human. Studying the human brain changed the way I think about food. I now look at my kitchen, and I bow to it, and I thank my ancestors for coming up with the invention that probably made us humans. Thank you very much. (Applause)

To give me an idea of how many of you here may find what I'm about to tell you of practical value, let me ask you please to raise your hands: Who here is either over 00 years old or hopes to live past age 00 or has parents or grandparents who did live or have lived past 00, raise your hands please. (Laughter) Okay. You are the people to whom my talk will be of practical value. (Laughter) The rest of you won't find my talk personally relevant, but I think that you will still find the subject fascinating. I'm going to talk about growing older in traditional societies. This subject constitutes just one chapter of my latest book, which compares traditional, small, tribal societies with our large, modern societies, with respect to many topics such as bringing up children, growing older, health, dealing with danger, settling disputes, religion and speaking more than one language. Those tribal societies, which constituted all human societies for most of human history, are far more diverse than are our modern, recent, big societies. All big societies that have governments, and where most people are strangers to each other, are inevitably similar to each other and different from tribal societies. Tribes constitute thousands of natural experiments in how to run a human society. They constitute experiments from which we ourselves may be able to learn. Tribal societies shouldn't be scorned as primitive and miserable, but also they shouldn't be romanticized as happy and peaceful. When we learn of tribal practices, some of them will horrify us, but there are other tribal practices which, when we hear about them, we may admire and envy and wonder whether we could adopt those practices ourselves. Most old people in the U.S. end up living separately from their children and from most of their friends of their earlier years, and often they live in separate retirements homes for the elderly, whereas in traditional societies, older people instead live out their lives among their children, their other relatives, and their lifelong friends. Nevertheless, the treatment of the elderly varies enormously among traditional societies, from much worse to much better than in our modern societies. At the worst extreme, many traditional societies get rid of their elderly in one of four increasingly direct ways: by neglecting their elderly and not feeding or cleaning them until they die, or by abandoning them when the group moves, or by encouraging older people to commit suicide, or by killing older people. In which tribal societies do children abandon or kill their parents? It happens mainly under two conditions. One is in nomadic, hunter-gather societies that often shift camp and that are physically incapable of transporting old people who can't walk when the able-bodied younger people already have to carry their young children and all their physical possessions. The other condition is in societies living in marginal or fluctuating environments, such as the Arctic or deserts, where there are periodic food shortages, and occasionally there just isn't enough food to keep everyone alive. Whatever food is available has to be reserved for able-bodied adults and for children. To us Americans, it sounds horrible to think of abandoning or killing your own sick wife or husband or elderly mother or father, but what could those traditional societies do differently? They face a cruel situation of no choice. Their old people had to do it to their own parents, and the old people know what now is going to happen to them. At the opposite extreme in treatment of the elderly, the happy extreme, are the New Guinea farming societies where I've been doing my fieldwork for the past 00 years, and most other sedentary traditional societies around the world. In those societies, older people are cared for. They are fed. They remain valuable. And they continue to live in the same hut or else in a nearby hut near their children, relatives and lifelong friends. There are two main sets of reasons for this variation among societies in their treatment of old people. The variation depends especially on the usefulness of old people and on the society's values. First, as regards usefulness, older people continue to perform useful services. One use of older people in traditional societies is that they often are still effective at producing food. Another traditional usefulness of older people is that they are capable of babysitting their grandchildren, thereby freeing up their own adult children, the parents of those grandchildren, to go hunting and gathering food for the grandchildren. Still another traditional value of older people is in making tools, weapons, baskets, pots and textiles. In fact, they're usually the people who are best at it. Older people usually are the leaders of traditional societies, and the people most knowledgeable about politics, medicine, religion, songs and dances. Finally, older people in traditional societies have a huge significance that would never occur to us in our modern, literate societies, where our sources of information are books and the Internet. In contrast, in traditional societies without writing, older people are the repositories of information. It's their knowledge that spells the difference between survival and death for their whole society in a time of crisis caused by rare events for which only the oldest people alive have had experience. Those, then, are the ways in which older people are useful in traditional societies. Their usefulness varies and contributes to variation in the society's treatment of the elderly. The other set of reasons for variation in the treatment of the elderly is the society's cultural values. For example, there's particular emphasis on respect for the elderly in East Asia, associated with Confucius' doctrine of filial piety, which means obedience, respect and support for elderly parents. Cultural values that emphasize respect for older people contrast with the low status of the elderly in the U.S. Older Americans are at a big disadvantage in job applications. They're at a big disadvantage in hospitals. Our hospitals have an explicit policy called age-based allocation of healthcare resources. That sinister expression means that if hospital resources are limited, for example if only one donor heart becomes available for transplant, or if a surgeon has time to operate on only a certain number of patients, American hospitals have an explicit policy of giving preference to younger patients over older patients on the grounds that younger patients are considered more valuable to society because they have more years of life ahead of them, even though the younger patients have fewer years of valuable life experience behind them. There are several reasons for this low status of the elderly in the U.S. One is our Protestant work ethic which places high value on work, so older people who are no longer working aren't respected. Another reason is our American emphasis on the virtues of self-reliance and independence, so we instinctively look down on older people who are no longer self-reliant and independent. Still a third reason is our American cult of youth, which shows up even in our advertisements. Ads for Coca-Cola and beer always depict smiling young people, even though old as well as young people buy and drink Coca-Cola and beer. Just think, what's the last time you saw a Coke or beer ad depicting smiling people 00 years old? Never. Instead, the only American ads featuring white-haired old people are ads for retirement homes and pension planning. Well, what has changed in the status of the elderly today compared to their status in traditional societies? There have been a few changes for the better and more changes for the worse. Big changes for the better include the fact that today we enjoy much longer lives, much better health in our old age, and much better recreational opportunities. Another change for the better is that we now have specialized retirement facilities and programs to take care of old people. Changes for the worse begin with the cruel reality that we now have more old people and fewer young people than at any time in the past. That means that all those old people are more of a burden on the few young people, and that each old person has less individual value. Another big change for the worse in the status of the elderly is the breaking of social ties with age, because older people, their children, and their friends, all move and scatter independently of each other many times during their lives. We Americans move on the average every five years. Hence our older people are likely to end up living distant from their children and the friends of their youth. Yet another change for the worse in the status of the elderly is formal retirement from the workforce, carrying with it a loss of work friendships and a loss of the self-esteem associated with work. Perhaps the biggest change for the worse is that our elderly are objectively less useful than in traditional societies. Widespread literacy means that they are no longer useful as repositories of knowledge. When we want some information, we look it up in a book or we Google it instead of finding some old person to ask. The slow pace of technological change in traditional societies means that what someone learns there as a child is still useful when that person is old, but the rapid pace of technological change today means that what we learn as children is no longer useful 00 years later. And conversely, we older people are not fluent in the technologies essential for surviving in modern society. For example, as a 00-year-old, I was considered outstandingly good at multiplying numbers because I had memorized the multiplication tables and I know how to use logarithms and I'm quick at manipulating a slide rule. Today, though, those skills are utterly useless because any idiot can now multiply eight-digit numbers accurately and instantly with a pocket calculator. Conversely, I at age 00 am incompetent at skills essential for everyday life. My family's first TV set in 0000 had only three knobs that I quickly mastered: an on-off switch, a volume knob, and a channel selector knob. Today, just to watch a program on the TV set in my own house, I have to operate a 00-button TV remote that utterly defeats me. I have to telephone my 00-year-old sons and ask them to talk me through it while I try to push those wretched 00 buttons. What can we do to improve the lives of the elderly in the U.S., and to make better use of their value? That's a huge problem. In my remaining four minutes today, I can offer just a few suggestions. One value of older people is that they are increasingly useful as grandparents for offering high-quality childcare to their grandchildren, if they choose to do it, as more young women enter the workforce and as fewer young parents of either gender stay home as full-time caretakers of their children. Compared to the usual alternatives of paid babysitters and day care centers, grandparents offer superior, motivated, experienced child care. They've already gained experience from raising their own children. They usually love their grandchildren, and are eager to spend time with them. Unlike other caregivers, grandparents don't quit their job because they found another job with higher pay looking after another baby. A second value of older people is paradoxically related to their loss of value as a result of changing world conditions and technology. At the same time, older people have gained in value today precisely because of their unique experience of living conditions that have now become rare because of rapid change, but that could come back. For example, only Americans now in their 00s or older today can remember the experience of living through a great depression, the experience of living through a world war, and agonizing whether or not dropping atomic bombs would be more horrible than the likely consequences of not dropping atomic bombs. Most of our current voters and politicians have no personal experience of any of those things, but millions of older Americans do. Unfortunately, all of those terrible situations could come back. Even if they don't come back, we have to be able to plan for them on the basis of the experience of what they were like. Older people have that experience. Younger people don't. The remaining value of older people that I'll mention involves recognizing that while there are many things that older people can no longer do, there are other things that they can do better than younger people. A challenge for society is to make use of those things that older people are better at doing. Some abilities, of course, decrease with age. Those include abilities at tasks requiring physical strength and stamina, ambition, and the power of novel reasoning in a circumscribed situation, such as figuring out the structure of DNA, best left to scientists under the age of 00. Conversely, valuable attributes that increase with age include experience, understanding of people and human relationships, ability to help other people without your own ego getting in the way, and interdisciplinary thinking about large databases, such as economics and comparative history, best left to scholars over the age of 00. Hence older people are much better than younger people at supervising, administering, advising, strategizing, teaching, synthesizing, and devising long-term plans. I've seen this value of older people with so many of my friends in their 00s, 00s, 00s and 00s, who are still active as investment managers, farmers, lawyers and doctors. In short, many traditional societies make better use of their elderly and give their elderly more satisfying lives than we do in modern, big societies. Paradoxically nowadays, when we have more elderly people than ever before, living healthier lives and with better medical care than ever before, old age is in some respects more miserable than ever before. The lives of the elderly are widely recognized as constituting a disaster area of modern American society. We can surely do better by learning from the lives of the elderly in traditional societies. But what's true of the lives of the elderly in traditional societies is true of many other features of traditional societies as well. Of course, I'm not advocating that we all give up agriculture and metal tools and return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. There are many obvious respects in which our lives today are far happier than those in small, traditional societies. To mention just a few examples, our lives are longer, materially much richer, and less plagued by violence than are the lives of people in traditional societies. But there are also things to be admired about people in traditional societies, and perhaps to be learned from them. Their lives are usually socially much richer than our lives, although materially poorer. Their children are more self-confident, more independent, and more socially skilled than are our children. They think more realistically about dangers than we do. They almost never die of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and the other noncommunicable diseases that will be the causes of death of almost all of us in this room today. Features of the modern lifestyle predispose us to those diseases, and features of the traditional lifestyle protect us against them. Those are just some examples of what we can learn from traditional societies. I hope that you will find it as fascinating to read about traditional societies as I found it to live in those societies. Thank you. (Applause)

So yesterday, I was out in the street in front of this building, and I was walking down the sidewalk, and I had company, several of us, and we were all abiding by the rules of walking down sidewalks. We're not talking each other. We're facing forward. We're moving. When the person in front of me slows down. And so I'm watching him, and he slows down, and finally he stops. Well, that wasn't fast enough for me, so I put on my turn signal, and I walked around him, and as I walked, I looked to see what he was doing, and he was doing this. He was texting, and he couldn't text and walk at the same time. Now we could approach this from a working memory perspective or from a multitasking perspective. We're going to do working memory today. Now, working memory is that part of our consciousness that we are aware of at any given time of day. You're going it right now. It's not something we can turn off. If you turn it off, that's called a coma, okay? So right now, you're doing just fine. Now working memory has four basic components. It allows us to store some immediate experiences and a little bit of knowledge. It allows us to reach back into our long-term memory and pull some of that in as we need it, mixes it, processes it in light of whatever our current goal is. Now the current goal isn't something like, I want to be president or the best surfer in the world. It's more mundane. I'd like that cookie, or I need to figure out how to get into my hotel room. Now working memory capacity is our ability to leverage that, our ability to take what we know and what we can hang onto and leverage it in ways that allow us to satisfy our current goal. Now working memory capacity has a fairly long history, and it's associated with a lot of positive effects. People with high working memory capacity tend to be good storytellers. They tend to solve and do well on standardized tests, however important that is. They're able to have high levels of writing ability. They're also able to reason at high levels. So what we're going to do here is play a little bit with some of that. So I'm going to ask you to perform a couple tasks, and we're going to take your working memory out for a ride. You up for that? Okay. I'm going to give you five words, and I just want you to hang on to them. Don't write them down. Just hang on to them. Five words. While you're hanging on to them, I'm going to ask you to answer three questions. I want to see what happens with those words. So here's the words: tree, highway, mirror, Saturn and electrode. So far so good? Okay. What I want you to do is I want you to tell me what the answer is to 00 times eight. Just shout it out. (Mumbling) (Laughter) In fact it's -- (Mumbling) -- exactly. (Laughter) All right. I want you to take out your left hand and I want you to go, "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 00." It's a neurological test, just in case you were wondering. All right, now what I want you to do is to recite the last five letters of the English alphabet backwards. You should have started with Z. (Laughter) All right. How many people here are still pretty sure you've got all five words? Okay. Typically we end up with about less than half, right, which is normal. There will be a range. Some people can hang on to five. Some people can hang on to 00. Some will be down to two or three. What we know is this is really important to the way we function, right? And it's going to be really important here at TED because you're going to be exposed to so many different ideas. Now the problem that we have is that life comes at us, and it comes at us very quickly, and what we need to do is to take that amorphous flow of experience and somehow extract meaning from it with a working memory that's about the size of a pea. Now don't get me wrong, working memory is awesome. Working memory allows us to investigate our current experience as we move forward. It allows us to make sense of the world around us. But it does have certain limits. Now working memory is great for allowing us to communicate. We can have a conversation, and I can build a narrative around that so I know where we've been and where we're going and how to contribute to this conversation. It allows us to problem-solve, critical think. We can be in the middle of a meeting, listen to somebody's presentation, evaluate it, decide whether or not we like it, ask follow-up questions. All of that occurs within working memory. It also allows us to go to the store and allows us to get milk and eggs and cheese when what we're really looking for is Red Bull and bacon. (Laughter) Gotta make sure we're getting what we're looking for. Now, a central issue with working memory is that it's limited. It's limited in capacity, limited in duration, limited in focus. We tend to remember about four things. Okay? It used to be seven, but with functional MRIs, apparently it's four, and we were overachieving. Now we can remember those four things for about 00 to 00 seconds unless we do something with it, unless we process it, unless we apply it to something, unless we talk to somebody about it. When we think about working memory, we have to realize that this limited capacity has lots of different impacts on us. Have you ever walked from one room to another and then forgotten why you're there? You do know the solution to that, right? You go back to that original room. (Laughter) Have you ever forgotten your keys? You ever forgotten your car? You ever forgotten your kids? Have you ever been involved in a conversation, and you realize that the conversation to your left is actually more interesting? (Laughter) So you're nodding and you're smiling, but you're really paying attention to this one over here, until you hear that last word go up, and you realize, you've been asked a question. (Laughter) And you're really hoping the answer is no, because that's what you're about to say. All of that talks about working memory, what we can do and what we can't do. We need to realize that working memory has a limited capacity, and that working memory capacity itself is how we negotiate that. We negotiate that through strategies. So what I want to do is talk a little bit about a couple of strategies here, and these will be really important because you are now in an information target-rich environment for the next several days. Now the first part of this that we need to think about and we need to process our existence, our life, immediately and repeatedly. We need to process what's going on the moment it happens, not 00 minutes later, not a week later, at the moment. So we need to think about, well, do I agree with him? What's missing? What would I like to know? Do I agree with the assumptions? How can I apply this in my life? It's a way of processing what's going on so that we can use it later. Now we also need to repeat it. We need to practice. So we need to think about it here. In between, we want to talk to people about it. We're going to write it down, and when you get home, pull out those notes and think about them and end up practicing over time. Practice for some reason became a very negative thing. It's very positive. The next thing is, we need to think elaboratively and we need to think illustratively. Oftentimes, we think that we have to relate new knowledge to prior knowledge. What we want to do is spin that around. We want to take all of our existence and wrap it around that new knowledge and make all of these connections and it becomes more meaningful. We also want to use imagery. We are built for images. We need to take advantage of that. Think about things in images, write things down that way. If you read a book, pull things up. I just got through reading "The Great Gatsby," and I have a perfect idea of what he looks like in my head, so my own version. The last one is organization and support. We are meaning-making machines. It's what we do. We try to make meaning out of everything that happens to us. Organization helps, so we need to structure what we're doing in ways that make sense. If we are providing knowledge and experience, we need to structure that. And the last one is support. We all started as novices. Everything we do is an approximation of sophistication. We should expect it to change over time. We have to support that. The support may come in asking people questions, giving them a sheet of paper that has an organizational chart on it or has some guiding images, but we need to support it. Now, the final piece of this, the take-home message from a working memory capacity standpoint is this: what we process, we learn. If we're not processing life, we're not living it. Live life. Thank you. (Applause)

One billion people in the world today do not have access to all-season roads. One billion people. One seventh of the Earth's population are totally cut off for some part of the year. We cannot get medicine to them reliably, they cannot get critical supplies, and they cannot get their goods to market in order to create a sustainable income. In sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, 00 percent of roads are unusable in the wet season. Investments are being made, but at the current level, it's estimated it's going to take them 00 years to catch up. In the U.S. alone, there's more than four million miles of roads, very expensive to build, very expensive to maintain infrastructure, with a huge ecological footprint, and yet, very often, congested. So we saw this and we thought, can there be a better way? Can we create a system using today's most advanced technologies that can allow this part of the world to leapfrog in the same way they've done with mobile telephones in the last 00 years? Many of those nations have excellent telecommunications today without ever putting copper lines in the ground. Could we do the same for transportation? Imagine this scenario. Imagine you are in a maternity ward in Mali, and have a newborn in need of urgent medication. What would you do today? Well, you would place a request via mobile phone, and someone would get the request immediately. That's the part that works. The medication may take days to arrive, though, because of bad roads. That's the part that's broken. We believe we can deliver it within hours with an electric autonomous flying vehicle such as this. This can transport a small payload today, about two kilograms, over a short distance, about 00 kilometers, but it's part of a wider network that may cover the entire country, maybe even the entire continent. It's an ultra-flexible, automated logistics network. It's a network for a transportation of matter. We call it Matternet. We use three key technologies. The first is electric autonomous flying vehicles. The second is automated ground stations that the vehicles fly in and out of to swap batteries and fly farther, or pick up or deliver loads. And the third is the operating system that manages the whole network. Let's look at each one of those technologies in a bit more detail. First of all, the UAVs. Eventually, we're going to be using all sorts of vehicles for different payload capacities and different ranges. Today, we're using small quads. These are able to transport two kilograms over 00 kilometers in just about 00 minutes. Compare this with trying to trespass a bad road in the developing world, or even being stuck in traffic in a developed world country. These fly autonomously. This is the key to the technology. So they use GPS and other sensors on board to navigate between ground stations. Every vehicle is equipped with an automatic payload and battery exchange mechanism, so these vehicles navigate to those ground stations, they dock, swap a battery automatically, and go out again. The ground stations are located on safe locations on the ground. They secure the most vulnerable part of the mission, which is the landing. They are at known locations on the ground, so the paths between them are also known, which is very important from a reliability perspective from the whole network. Apart from fulfilling the energy requirements of the vehicles, eventually they're going to be becoming commercial hubs where people can take out loads or put loads into the network. The last component is the operating system that manages the whole network. It monitors weather data from all the ground stations and optimizes the routes of the vehicles through the system to avoid adverse weather conditions, avoid other risk factors, and optimize the use of the resources throughout the network. I want to show you what one of those flights looks like. Here we are flying in Haiti last summer, where we've done our first field trials. We're modeling here a medical delivery in a camp we set up after the 0000 earthquake. People there love this. And I want to show you what one of those vehicles looks like up close. So this is a $0,000 vehicle. Costs are coming down very rapidly. We use this in all sorts of weather conditions, very hot and very cold climates, very strong winds. They're very sturdy vehicles. Imagine if your life depended on this package, somewhere in Africa or in New York City, after Sandy. The next big question is, what's the cost? Well, it turns out that the cost to transport two kilograms over 00 kilometers with this vehicle is just 00 cents. (Applause) And it's counterintuitive, but the cost of energy expended for the flight is only two cents of a dollar today, and we're just at the beginning of this. When we saw this, we felt that this is something that can have significant impact in the world. So we said, okay, how much does it cost to set up a network somewhere in the world? And we looked at setting up a network in Lesotho for transportation of HIV/AIDS samples. The problem there is how do you take them from clinics where they're being collected to hospitals where they're being analyzed? And we said, what if we wanted to cover an area spanning around 000 square kilometers? That's roughly one and a half times the size of Manhattan. Well it turns out that the cost to do that there would be less than a million dollars. Compare this to normal infrastructure investments. We think this can be -- this is the power of a new paradigm. So here we are: a new idea about a network for transportation that is based on the ideas of the Internet. It's decentralized, it's peer-to-peer, it's bidirectional, highly adaptable, with very low infrastructure investment, very low ecological footprint. If it is a new paradigm, though, there must be other uses for it. It can be used perhaps in other places in the world. So let's look at the other end of the spectrum: our cities and megacities. Half of the Earth's population lives in cities today. Half a billion of us live in megacities. We are living through an amazing urbanization trend. China alone is adding a megacity the size of New York City every two years. These are places that do have road infrastructure, but it's very inefficient. Congestion is a huge problem. So we think it makes sense in those places to set up a network of transportation that is a new layer that sits between the road and the Internet, initially for lightweight, urgent stuff, and over time, we would hope to develop this into a new mode of transportation that is truly a modern solution to a very old problem. It's ultimately scalable with a very small ecological footprint, operating in the background 00/0, just like the Internet. So when we started this a couple of years ago now, we've had a lot of people come up to us who said, "This is a very interesting but crazy idea, and certainly not something that you should engage with anytime soon." And of course, we're talking about drones, right, a technology that's not only unpopular in the West but one that has become a very, very unpleasant fact of life for many living in poor countries, especially those engaged in conflict. So why are we doing this? Well, we chose to do this one not because it's easy, but because it can have amazing impact. Imagine one billion people being connected to physical goods in the same way that mobile telecommunications connected them to information. Imagine if the next big network we built in the world was a network for the transportation of matter. In the developing world, we would hope to reach millions of people with better vaccines, reach them with better medication. It would give us an unfair advantage against battling HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and other epidemics. Over time, we would hope it would become a new platform for economic transactions, lifting millions of people out of poverty. In the developed world and the emerging world, we would hope it would become a new mode of transportation that could help make our cities more livable. So for those that still believe that this is science fiction, I firmly say to you that it is not. We do need to engage, though, in social fiction to make it happen. Thank you. (Applause)

Sarge Salman: All the way from Los Altos Hills, California, Mr. Henry Evans. (Applause) Henry Evans: Hello. My name is Henry Evans, and until August 00, 0000, I was living my version of the American dream. I grew up in a typical American town near St. Louis. My dad was a lawyer. My mom was a homemaker. My six siblings and I were good kids, but caused our fair share of trouble. After high school, I left home to study and learn more about the world. I went to Notre Dame University and graduated with degrees in accounting and German, including spending a year of study in Austria. Later on, I earned an MBA at Stanford. I married my high school sweetheart, Jane. I am lucky to have her. Together, we raised four wonderful children. I worked and studied hard to move up the career ladder, eventually becoming a chief financial officer in Silicon Valley, a job I really enjoyed. My family and I bought our first and only home on December 00, 0000, a fixer-upper in a beautiful spot of Los Altos Hills, California, from where I am speaking to you now. We were looking forward to rebuilding it, but eight months after we moved in, I suffered a stroke-like attack caused by a birth defect. Overnight, I became a mute quadriplegic at the ripe old age of 00. It took me several years, but with the help of an incredibly supportive family, I finally decided life was still worth living. I became fascinated with using technology to help the severely disabled. Head tracking devices sold commercially by the company Madentec convert my tiny head movements into cursor movements, and enable my use of a regular computer. I can surf the web, exchange email with people, and routinely destroy my friend Steve Cousins in online word games. This technology allows me to remain engaged, mentally active, and feel like I am a part of the world. One day, I was lying in bed watching CNN, when I was amazed by Professor Charlie Kemp of the Healthcare Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech demonstrating a PR0 robot. I emailed Charlie and Steve Cousins of Willow Garage, and we formed the Robots for Humanity project. For about two years, Robots for Humanity developed ways for me to use the PR0 as my body surrogate. I shaved myself for the first time in 00 years. From my home in California, I shaved Charlie in Atlanta. (Laughter) I handed out Halloween candy. I opened my refrigerator on my own. I began doing tasks around the house. I saw new and previously unthinkable possibilities to live and contribute, both for myself and others in my circumstance. All of us have disabilities in one form or another. For example, if either of us wants to go 00 miles an hour, both of us will need an assistive device called a car. Your disability doesn't make you any less of a person, and neither does mine. By the way, check out my sweet ride. (Laughter) Since birth, we have both suffered from the inability to fly on our own. Last year, Kaijen Hsiao of Willow Garage connected with me Chad Jenkins. Chad showed me how easy it is to purchase and fly aerial drones. It was then I realized that I could also use an aerial drone to expand the worlds of bedridden people through flight, giving a sense of movement and control that is incredible. Using a mouse cursor I control with my head, these web interfaces allow me to see video from the robot and send control commands by pressing buttons in a web browser. With a little practice, I became good enough with this interface to drive around my home on my own. I could look around our garden and see the grapes we are growing. I inspected the solar panels on our roof. (Laughter) One of my challenges as a pilot is to land the drone on our basketball hoop. I went even further by seeing if I could use a head-mounted display, the Oculus Rift, as modified by Fighting Walrus, to have an immersive experience controlling the drone. With Chad's group at Brown, I regularly fly drones around his lab several times a week, from my home 0,000 miles away. All work and no fun makes for a dull quadriplegic, so we also find time to play friendly games of robot soccer. (Laughter) I never thought I would be able to casually move around a campus like Brown on my own. I just wish I could afford the tuition. (Laughter) Chad Jenkins: Henry, all joking aside, I bet all of these people here would love to see you fly this drone from your bed in California 0,000 miles away. (Applause) Okay, Henry, have you been to D.C. lately? (Laughter) Are you excited to be at TEDxMidAtlantic? (Laughter) (Applause) Can you show us how excited you are? (Laughter) All right, big finish. Can you show us how good of a pilot you are? (Applause) All right, we still have a little ways to go with that, but I think it shows the promise. What makes Henry's story amazing is it's about understanding Henry's needs, understanding what people in Henry's situation need from technology, and then also understanding what advanced technology can provide, and then bringing those two things together for use in a wise and responsible way. What we're trying to do is democratize robotics, so that anybody can be a part of this. We're providing affordable, off-the-shelf robot platforms such as the A.R. drone, 000 dollars, the Suitable Technologies beam, only 00,000 dollars, along with open-source robotics software so that you can be a part of what we're trying to do. And our hope is that, by providing these tools, that you'll be able to think of better ways to provide movement for the disabled, to provide care for our aging population, to help better educate our children, to think about what the new types of middle class jobs could be for the future, to both monitor and protect our environment, and to explore the universe. Back to you, Henry. HE: Thank you, Chad. With this drone setup, we show the potential for bedridden people to once again be able to explore the outside world, and robotics will eventually provide a level playing field where one is only limited by their mental acuity and imagination, where the disabled are able to perform the same activities as everyone else, and perhaps better, and technology will even allow us to provide an outlet for many people who are presently considered vegetables. One hundred years ago, I would have been treated like a vegetable. Actually, that's not true. I would have died. It is up to us, all of us, to decide how robotics will be used, for good or for evil, for simply replacing people or for making people better, for allowing us to do and enjoy more. Our goal for robotics is to unlock everyone's mental power by making the world more physically accessible to people such as myself and others like me around the globe. With the help of people like you, we can make this dream a reality. Thank you. (Applause)

Technology can change our understanding of nature. Take for example the case of lions. For centuries, it's been said that female lions do all of the hunting out in the open savanna, and male lions do nothing until it's time for dinner. You've heard this too, I can tell. Well recently, I led an airborne mapping campaign in the Kruger National Park in South Africa. Our colleagues put GPS tracking collars on male and female lions, and we mapped their hunting behavior from the air. The lower left shows a lion sizing up a herd of impala for a kill, and the right shows what I call the lion viewshed. That's how far the lion can see in all directions until his or her view is obstructed by vegetation. And what we found is that male lions are not the lazy hunters we thought them to be. They just use a different strategy. Whereas the female lions hunt out in the open savanna over long distances, usually during the day, male lions use an ambush strategy in dense vegetation, and often at night. This video shows the actual hunting viewsheds of male lions on the left and females on the right. Red and darker colors show more dense vegetation, and the white are wide open spaces. And this is the viewshed right literally at the eye level of hunting male and female lions. All of a sudden, you get a very clear understanding of the very spooky conditions under which male lions do their hunting. I bring up this example to begin, because it emphasizes how little we know about nature. There's been a huge amount of work done so far to try to slow down our losses of tropical forests, and we are losing our forests at a rapid rate, as shown in red on the slide. I find it ironic that we're doing so much, yet these areas are fairly unknown to science. So how can we save what we don't understand? Now I'm a global ecologist and an Earth explorer with a background in physics and chemistry and biology and a lot of other boring subjects, but above all, I'm obsessed with what we don't know about our planet. So I created this, the Carnegie Airborne Observatory, or CAO. It may look like a plane with a fancy paint job, but I packed it with over 0,000 kilos of high-tech sensors, computers, and a very motivated staff of Earth scientists and pilots. Two of our instruments are very unique: one is called an imaging spectrometer that can actually measure the chemical composition of plants as we fly over them. Another one is a set of lasers, very high-powered lasers, that fire out of the bottom of the plane, sweeping across the ecosystem and measuring it at nearly 000,000 times per second in high-resolution 0D. Here's an image of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, not far from where I live. Although we flew straight over this bridge, we imaged it in 0D, captured its color in just a few seconds. But the real power of the CAO is its ability to capture the actual building blocks of ecosystems. This is a small town in the Amazon, imaged with the CAO. We can slice through our data and see, for example, the 0D structure of the vegetation and the buildings, or we can use the chemical information to actually figure out how fast the plants are growing as we fly over them. The hottest pinks are the fastest-growing plants. And we can see biodiversity in ways that you never could have imagined. This is what a rainforest might look like as you fly over it in a hot air balloon. This is how we see a rainforest, in kaleidoscopic color that tells us that there are many species living with one another. But you have to remember that these trees are literally bigger than whales, and what that means is that they're impossible to understand just by walking on the ground below them. So our imagery is 0D, it's chemical, it's biological, and this tells us not only the species that are living in the canopy, but it tells us a lot of information about the rest of the species that occupy the rainforest. Now I created the CAO in order to answer questions that have proven extremely challenging to answer from any other vantage point, such as from the ground, or from satellite sensors. I want to share three of those questions with you today. The first questions is, how do we manage our carbon reserves in tropical forests? Tropical forests contain a huge amount of carbon in the trees, and we need to keep that carbon in those forests if we're going to avoid any further global warming. Unfortunately, global carbon emissions from deforestation now equals the global transportation sector. That's all ships, airplanes, trains and automobiles combined. So it's understandable that policy negotiators have been working hard to reduce deforestation, but they're doing it on landscapes that are hardly known to science. If you don't know where the carbon is exactly, in detail, how can you know what you're losing? Basically, we need a high-tech accounting system. With our system, we're able to see the carbon stocks of tropical forests in utter detail. The red shows, obviously, closed-canopy tropical forest, and then you see the cookie cutting, or the cutting of the forest in yellows and greens. It's like cutting a cake except this cake is about whale deep. And yet, we can zoom in and see the forest and the trees at the same time. And what's amazing is, even though we flew very high above this forest, later on in analysis, we can go in and actually experience the treetrops, leaf by leaf, branch by branch, just as the other species that live in this forest experience it along with the trees themselves. We've been using the technology to explore and to actually put out the first carbon geographies in high resolution in faraway places like the Amazon Basin and not-so-faraway places like the United States and Central America. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take you on a high-resolution, first-time tour of the carbon landscapes of Peru and then Panama. The colors are going to be going from red to blue. Red is extremely high carbon stocks, your largest cathedral forests you can imagine, and blue are very low carbon stocks. And let me tell you, Peru alone is an amazing place, totally unknown in terms of its carbon geography until today. We can fly to this area in northern Peru and see super high carbon stocks in red, and the Amazon River and floodplain cutting right through it. We can go to an area of utter devastation caused by deforestation in blue, and the virus of deforestation spreading out in orange. We can also fly to the southern Andes to see the tree line and see exactly how the carbon geography ends as we go up into the mountain system. And we can go to the biggest swamp in the western Amazon. It's a watery dreamworld akin to Jim Cameron's "Avatar." We can go to one of the smallest tropical countries, Panama, and see also a huge range of carbon variation, from high in red to low in blue. Unfortunately, most of the carbon is lost in the lowlands, but what you see that's left, in terms of high carbon stocks in greens and reds, is the stuff that's up in the mountains. One interesting exception to this is right in the middle of your screen. You're seeing the buffer zone around the Panama Canal. That's in the reds and yellows. The canal authorities are using force to protect their watershed and global commerce. This kind of carbon mapping has transformed conservation and resource policy development. It's really advancing our ability to save forests and to curb climate change. My second question: How do we prepare for climate change in a place like the Amazon rainforest? Let me tell you, I spend a lot of time in these places, and we're seeing the climate changing already. Temperatures are increasing, and what's really happening is we're getting a lot of droughts, recurring droughts. The 0000 mega-drought is shown here with red showing an area about the size of Western Europe. The Amazon was so dry in 0000 that even the main stem of the Amazon river itself dried up partially, as you see in the photo in the lower portion of the slide. What we found is that in very remote areas, these droughts are having a big negative impact on tropical forests. For example, these are all of the dead trees in red that suffered mortality following the 0000 drought. This area happens to be on the border of Peru and Brazil, totally unexplored, almost totally unknown scientifically. So what we think, as Earth scientists, is species are going to have to migrate with climate change from the east in Brazil all the way west into the Andes and up into the mountains in order to minimize their exposure to climate change. One of the problems with this is that humans are taking apart the western Amazon as we speak. Look at this 000-square-kilometer gash in the forest created by gold miners. You see the forest in green in 0D, and you see the effects of gold mining down below the soil surface. Species have nowhere to migrate in a system like this, obviously. If you haven't been to the Amazon, you should go. It's an amazing experience every time, no matter where you go. You're going to probably see it this way, on a river. But what happens is a lot of times the rivers hide what's really going on back in the forest itself. We flew over this same river, imaged the system in 0D. The forest is on the left. And then we can digitally remove the forest and see what's going on below the canopy. And in this case, we found gold mining activity, all of it illegal, set back away from the river's edge, as you'll see in those strange pockmarks coming up on your screen on the right. Don't worry, we're working with the authorities to deal with this and many, many other problems in the region. So in order to put together a conservation plan for these unique, important corridors like the western Amazon and the Andes Amazon corridor, we have to start making geographically explicit plans now. How do we do that if we don't know the geography of biodiversity in the region, if it's so unknown to science? So what we've been doing is using the laser-guided spectroscopy from the CAO to map for the first time the biodiversity of the Amazon rainforest. Here you see actual data showing different species in different colors. Reds are one type of species, blues are another, and greens are yet another. And when we take this together and scale up to the regional level, we get a completely new geography of biodiversity unknown prior to this work. This tells us where the big biodiversity changes occur from habitat to habitat, and that's really important because it tells us a lot about where species may migrate to and migrate from as the climate shifts. And this is the pivotal information that's needed by decision makers to develop protected areas in the context of their regional development plans. And third and final question is, how do we manage biodiversity on a planet of protected ecosystems? The example I started out with about lions hunting, that was a study we did behind the fence line of a protected area in South Africa. And the truth is, much of Africa's nature is going to persist into the future in protected areas like I show in blue on the screen. This puts incredible pressure and responsibility on park management. They need to do and make decisions that will benefit all of the species that they're protecting. Some of their decisions have really big impacts. For example, how much and where to use fire as a management tool? Or, how to deal with a large species like elephants, which may, if their populations get too large, have a negative impact on the ecosystem and on other species. And let me tell you, these types of dynamics really play out on the landscape. In the foreground is an area with lots of fire and lots of elephants: wide open savanna in blue, and just a few trees. As we cross this fence line, now we're getting into an area that has had protection from fire and zero elephants: dense vegetation, a radically different ecosystem. And in a place like Kruger, the soaring elephant densities are a real problem. I know it's a sensitive issue for many of you, and there are no easy answers with this. But what's good is that the technology we've developed and we're working with in South Africa, for example, is allowing us to map every single tree in the savanna, and then through repeat flights we're able to see which trees are being pushed over by elephants, in the red as you see on the screen, and how much that's happening in different types of landscapes in the savanna. That's giving park managers a very first opportunity to use tactical management strategies that are more nuanced and don't lead to those extremes that I just showed you. So really, the way we're looking at protected areas nowadays is to think of it as tending to a circle of life, where we have fire management, elephant management, those impacts on the structure of the ecosystem, and then those impacts affecting everything from insects up to apex predators like lions. Going forward, I plan to greatly expand the airborne observatory. I'm hoping to actually put the technology into orbit so we can manage the entire planet with technologies like this. Until then, you're going to find me flying in some remote place that you've never heard of. I just want to end by saying that technology is absolutely critical to managing our planet, but even more important is the understanding and wisdom to apply it. Thank you. (Applause)

When we think of Nepal, we tend to think of the snow-capped mountains of the Himalayas, the crystal-clear still waters of its alpine lakes, or the huge expanse of its grasslands. What some of us may not realize is that in the Himalayan foothills, where the climate is much warmer and the landscape much greener, there lives a great diversity of wildlife, including the one-horned rhinoceros, the Asian elephant and the Bengal tiger. But unfortunately, these animals are under constant threat from poachers who hunt and kill them for their body parts. To stop the killing of these animals, battalions of soldiers and rangers are sent to protect Nepal's national parks, but that is not an easy task, because these soldiers have to patrol thousands of hectares of forests on foot or elephant backs. It is also risky for these soldiers when they get into gunfights with poachers, and therefore Nepal is always looking for new ways to help with protecting the forests and wildlife. Well recently, Nepal acquired a new tool in the fight against wildlife crime, and these are drones, or more specifically, conservation drones. For about a year now, my colleagues and I have been building drones for Nepal and training the park protection personnel on the use of these drones. Not only does a drone give you a bird's-eye view of the landscape, but it also allows you to capture detailed, high-resolution images of objects on the ground. This, for example, is a pair of rhinoceros taking a cooling bath on a hot summer day in the lowlands of Nepal. Now we believe that drones have tremendous potential, not only for combating wildlife crime, but also for monitoring the health of these wildlife populations. So what is a drone? Well, the kind of drone I'm talking about is simply a model aircraft fitted with an autopilot system, and this autopilot unit contains a tiny computer, a GPS, a compass, a barometric altimeter and a few other sensors. Now a drone like this is meant to carry a useful payload, such as a video camera or a photographic camera. It also requires a software that allows the user to program a mission, to tell the drone where to go. Now people I talk to are often surprised when they hear that these are the only four components that make a conservation drone, but they are even more surprised when I tell them how affordable these components are. The facts is, a conservation drone doesn't cost very much more than a good laptop computer or a decent pair of binoculars. So now that you've built your own conservation drone, you probably want to go fly it, but how does one fly a drone? Well, actually, you don't, because the drone flies itself. All you have to do is to program a mission to tell the drone where to fly. But you simply do that by clicking on a few way points on the Google Maps interface using the open-source software. Those missions could be as simple as just a few way points, or they could be slightly longer and more complicated, to fly along a river system. Sometimes, we fly the drone in a lawnmower-type pattern and take pictures of that area, and those pictures can be processed to produce a map of that forest. Other researchers might want to fly the drone along the boundaries of a forest to watch out for poachers or people who might be trying to enter the forest illegally. Now whatever your mission is, once you've programmed it, you simply upload it to the autopilot system, bring your drone to the field, and launch it simply by tossing it in the air. And often we'll go about this mission taking pictures or videos along the way, and usually at that point, we will go grab ourselves a cup of coffee, sit back, and relax for the next few minutes, although some of us sit back and panic for the next few minutes worrying that the drone will not return. Usually it does, and when it does, it even lands automatically. So what can we do with a conservation drone? Well, when we built our first prototype drone, our main objective was to fly it over a remote rainforest in North Sumatra, Indonesia, to look for the nest of a species of great ape known as the orangutan. The reason we wanted to do that was because we needed to know how many individuals of this species are still left in that forest. Now the traditional method of surveying for orangutans is to walk the forest on foot carrying heavy equipment and to use a pair of binoculars to look up in the treetops where you might find an orangutan or its nest. Now as you can imagine, that is a very time-consuming, labor-intensive, and costly process, so we were hoping that drones could significantly reduce the cost of surveying for orangutan populations in Indonesia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. So we were very excited when we captured our first pair of orangutan nests on camera. And this is it; this is the first ever picture of orangutan nests taken with a drone. Since then we have taken pictures of dozens of these nests from around various parts of Southeast Asia, and we're now working with computer scientists to develop algorithms that can automatically count the number of nests from the thousands of photos we've collected so far. But nests are not the only objects these drones can detect. This is a wild orangutan happily feeding on top of a palm tree, seemingly oblivious to our drone that was flying overhead, not once but several times. We've also taken pictures of other animals including forest buffalos in Gabon, elephants, and even turtle nests. But besides taking pictures of just the animals themselves, we also take pictures of the habitats these animals live in, because we want to keep track of the health of these habitats. Sometimes, we zoom out a little and look at other things that might be happening in the landscape. This is an oil palm plantation in Sumatra. Now oil palm is a major driver of deforestation in that part of the world, so we wanted to use this new drone technology to keep track of the spread of these plantations in Southeast Asia. But drones could also be used to keep track of illegal logging activities. This is a recently logged forest, again in Sumatra. You could even still see the processed wooden planks left on the ground. But perhaps the most exciting part about taking pictures from the air is we could later stitch these pictures together using special software to create a map of the entire landscape, and this map gives us crucial information for monitoring land use change, to let us know where and when plantations might be expanding, where forests might be contracting, or where fires might be breaking out. Aerial images could also be processed to produce three-dimensional computer models of forests. Now these models are not just visually appealing, but they are also geometrically accurate, which means researchers can now measure the distance between trees, calculate surface area, the volume of vegetation, and so on, all of which are important information for monitoring the health of these forests. Recently, we've also begun experimenting with thermal imaging cameras. Now these cameras can detect heat-emitting objects from the ground, and therefore they are very useful for detecting poachers or their campfires at night. So I've told you quite a lot about what conservation drones are, how you might operate one of these drones, and what a drone could do for you. I will now tell you where conservation drones are being used around the world. We built our first prototype drones in Switzerland. We brought a few of these to Indonesia for the first few test flights. Since then, we've been building drones for our collaborators from around the world, and these include fellow biologists and partners from major conservation organizations. Perhaps the best and most rewarding part about working with these collaborators is the feedback they give us on how to improve our drones. Building drones for us is a constant work in progress. We are constantly trying to improve them in terms of their range, their ruggedness, and the amount of payload they can carry. We also work with collaborators to discover new ways of using these drones. For example, camera traps are a common tool used by biologists to take pictures of shy animals hiding in the forests, but these are motion-activated cameras, so they snap a picture every time an animal crosses their path. But the problem with camera traps is that the researcher has to go back to the forest every so often to retrieve those images, and that takes a lot of time, especially if there are dozens or hundreds of these cameras placed in the forest. Now a drone could be designed to perform the task much more efficiently. This drone, carrying a special sensor, could be flown over the forest and remotely download these images from wi-fi-enabled cameras. Radio collars are another tool that's commonly used by biologists. Now these collars are put onto animals. They transmit a radio signal which allows the researcher to track the movements of these animals across the landscape. But the traditional way of tracking animals is pretty ridiculous, because it requires the researcher to be walking on the ground carrying a huge and cumbersome radio antenna, not unlike those old TV antennae we used to have on our rooftops. Some of us still do. A drone could be used to do the same job much more efficiently. Why not equip a drone with a scanning radio receiver, fly that over the forest canopy in a certain pattern which would allow the user or the operator to triangulate the location of these radio-collared animals remotely without having to step foot in the forest. A third and perhaps most exciting way of using these drones is to fly them to a really remote, never-explored-before rainforest somewhere hidden in the tropics, and parachute down a tiny spy microphone that would allow us to eavesdrop on the calls of mammals, birds, amphibians, the Yeti, the Sasquatch, Bigfoot, whatever. That would give us biologists a pretty good idea of what animals might be living in those forests. And finally, I would like to show you the latest version of our conservation drone. The MAJA drone has a wingspan of about two meters. It weighs only about two kilograms, but it can carry half its weight. It is a fully autonomous system. During its mission, it can even transmit a live video feed back to a ground station laptop, which allows the user to see what the drone is seeing in real time. It carries a variety of sensors, and the photo quality of some of these sensors can be as high as one to two centimeters per pixel. This drone can stay in the air for 00 to 00 minutes, which gives it a range of up to 00 kilometers. That is quite sufficient for most of our conservation applications. Now, conservation drones began as a crazy idea from two biologists who are just deeply passionate about this technology. And we believe, strongly believe, that drones can and will be a game changer for conservation research and applications. We've had our fair share of skeptics and critics who thought that we were just fooling around with toy planes. And in a way, they are right. I mean, let's be honest, drones are the ultimate toys for boys. But at the same time, we've also gotten to know many wonderful colleagues and collaborators who share our vision and see the potential of conservation drones. To us, it is obvious that conservation biologists and practitioners should make full use of every available tool, including drones, in our fight to save the last remaining forests and wildlife of this planet. Thank you. (Applause)

Today I am going to teach you how to play my favorite game: massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling. It's the only game in the world that I know of that allows you, the player, the opportunity to experience 00 positive emotions in 00 seconds or less. This is true, so if you play this game with me today for just one single minute, you will get to feel joy, relief, love, surprise, pride, curiosity, excitement, awe and wonder, contentment, and creativity, all in the span of one minute. So this sounds pretty good, right? Now you're willing to play. In order to teach you this game, I'm going to need some volunteers to come up onstage really quickly, and we're going to do a little hands-on demo. While they're coming up, I should let you know, this game was invented 00 years ago by an artists' collective in Austria named Monochrom. So thank you, Monochrom. Okay, so most people are familiar with traditional, two-person thumb-wrestling. Sunni, let's just remind them. One, two, three, four, I declare a thumb war, and we wrestle, and of course Sunni beats me because she's the best. Now the first thing about massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling, we're the gamer generation. There are a billion gamers on the planet now, so we need more of a challenge. So the first thing we need is more thumbs. So Eric, come on over. So we could get three thumbs together, and Peter could join us. We could even have four thumbs together, and the way you win is you're the first person to pin someone else's thumb. This is really important. You can't, like, wait while they fight it out and then swoop in at the last minute. That is not how you win. Ah, who did that? Eric you did that. So Eric would have won. He was the first person to pin my thumb. Okay, so that's the first rule, and we can see that three or four is kind of the typical number of thumbs in a node, but if you feel ambitious, you don't have to hold back. We can really go for it. So you can see up here. Now the only other rule you need to remember is, gamer generation, we like a challenge. I happen to notice you all have some thumbs you're not using. So I think we should kind of get some more involved. And if we had just four people, we would do it just like this, and we would try and wrestle both thumbs at the same time. Perfect. Now, if we had more people in the room, instead of just wrestling in a closed node, we might reach out and try and grab some other people. And in fact, that's what we're going to do right now. We're going to try and get all, something like, I don't know, 0,000 thumbs in this room connected in a single node. And we have to connect both levels, so if you're up there, you're going to be reaching down and reaching up. Now - (Laughter) - before we get started -- This is great. You're excited to play. - before we get started, can I have the slides back up here really quick, because if you get good at this game, I want you to know there are some advanced levels. So this is the kind of simple level, right? But there are advanced configurations. This is called the Death Star Configuration. Any Star Wars fans? And this one's called the Möbius Strip. Any science geeks, you get that one. This is the hardest level. This is the extreme. So we'll stick with the normal one for now, and I'm going to give you 00 seconds, every thumb into the node, connect the upper and the lower levels, you guys go on down there. Thirty seconds. Into the network. Make the node. Stand up! It's easier if you stand up. Everybody, up up up up up! Stand up, my friends. All right. Don't start wrestling yet. If you have a free thumb, wave it around, make sure it gets connected. Okay. We need to do a last-minute thumb check. If you have a free thumb, wave it around to make sure. Grab that thumb! Reach behind you. There you go. Any other thumbs? Okay, on the count of three, you're going to go. Try to keep track. Grab, grab, grab it. Okay? One, two, three, go! (Laughter) Did you win? You got it? You got it? Excellent! (Applause) Well done. Thank you. Thank you very much. All right. While you are basking in the glow of having won your first massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling game, let's do a quick recap on the positive emotions. So curiosity. I said "massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling." You were like, "What the hell is she talking about?" So I provoked a little curiosity. Creativity: it took creativity to solve the problem of getting all the thumbs into the node. I'm reaching around and I'm reaching up. So you used creativity. That was great. How about surprise? The actual feeling of trying to wrestle two thumbs at once is pretty surprising. You heard that sound go up in the room. We had excitement. As you started to wrestle, maybe you're starting to win or this person's, like, really into it, so you kind of get the excitement going. We have relief. You got to stand up. You've been sitting for awhile, so the physical relief, getting to shake it out. We had joy. You were laughing, smiling. Look at your faces. This room is full of joy. We had some contentment. I didn't see anybody sending text messages or checking their email while we were playing, so you were totally content to be playing. The most important three emotions, awe and wonder, we had everybody connected physically for a minute. When was the last time you were at TED and you got to connect physically with every single person in the room? And it's truly awesome and wondrous. And speaking of physical connection, you guys know I love the hormone oxytocin, you release oxytocin, you feel bonded to everyone in the room. You guys know that the best way to release oxytocin quickly is to hold someone else's hand for at least six seconds. You guys were all holding hands for way more than six seconds, so we are all now biochemically primed to love each other. That is great. And the last emotion of pride. How many people are like me. Just admit it. You lost both your thumbs. It just didn't work out for you. That's okay, because you learned a new skill today. You learned, from scratch, a game you never knew before. Now you know how to play it. You can teach other people. So congratulations. How many of you won just won thumb? All right. I have very good news for you. According to the official rules of massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling, this makes you a grandmaster of the game. Because there aren't that many people who know how to play, we have to kind of accelerate the program more than a game like chess. So congratulations, grandmasters. Win one thumb once, you will become a grandmaster. Did anybody win both their thumbs? Yes. Awesome. Okay. Get ready to update your Twitter or Facebook status. You guys, according to the rules, are legendary grandmasters, so congratulations. I will just leave you with this tip, if you want to play again. The best way to become a legendary grandmaster, you've got your two nodes going on. Pick off the one that looks easiest. They're not paying attention. They look kind of weak. Focus on that one and do something crazy with this arm. As soon as you win, suddenly stop. Everybody is thrown off. You go in for the kill. That's how you become a legendary grandmaster of massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling. Thank you for letting me teach you my favorite game. Wooo! (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

Five years ago, I was on a sabbatical, and I returned to the medical university where I studied. I saw real patients and I wore the white coat for the first time in 00 years, in fact since I became a management consultant. There were two things that surprised me during the month I spent. The first one was that the common theme of the discussions we had were hospital budgets and cost-cutting, and the second thing, which really bothered me, actually, was that several of the colleagues I met, former friends from medical school, who I knew to be some of the smartest, most motivated, engaged and passionate people I'd ever met, many of them had turned cynical, disengaged, or had distanced themselves from hospital management. So with this focus on cost-cutting, I asked myself, are we forgetting the patient? Many countries that you represent and where I come from struggle with the cost of healthcare. It's a big part of the national budgets. And many different reforms aim at holding back this growth. In some countries, we have long waiting times for patients for surgery. In other countries, new drugs are not being reimbursed, and therefore don't reach patients. In several countries, doctors and nurses are the targets, to some extent, for the governments. After all, the costly decisions in health care are taken by doctors and nurses. You choose an expensive lab test, you choose to operate on an old and frail patient. So, by limiting the degrees of freedom of physicians, this is a way to hold costs down. And ultimately, some physicians will say today that they don't have the full liberty to make the choices they think are right for their patients. So no wonder that some of my old colleagues are frustrated. At BCG, we looked at this, and we asked ourselves, this can't be the right way of managing healthcare. And so we took a step back and we said, "What is it that we are trying to achieve?" Ultimately, in the healthcare system, we're aiming at improving health for the patients, and we need to do so at a limited, or affordable, cost. We call this value-based healthcare. On the screen behind me, you see what we mean by value: outcomes that matter to patients relative to the money we spend. This was described beautifully in a book in 0000 by Michael Porter and Elizabeth Teisberg. On this picture, you have my father-in-law surrounded by his three beautiful daughters. When we started doing our research at BCG, we decided not to look so much at the costs, but to look at the quality instead, and in the research, one of the things that fascinated us was the variation we saw. You compare hospitals in a country, you'll find some that are extremely good, but you'll find a large number that are vastly much worse. The differences were dramatic. Erik, my father-in-law, he suffers from prostate cancer, and he probably needs surgery. Now living in Europe, he can choose to go to Germany that has a well-reputed healthcare system. If he goes there and goes to the average hospital, he will have the risk of becoming incontinent by about 00 percent, so he would have to start wearing diapers again. You flip a coin. Fifty percent risk. That's quite a lot. If he instead would go to Hamburg, and to a clinic called the Martini-Klinik, the risk would be only one in 00. Either you a flip a coin, or you have a one in 00 risk. That's a huge difference, a seven-fold difference. When we look at many hospitals for many different diseases, we see these huge differences. But you and I don't know. We don't have the data. And often, the data actually doesn't exist. Nobody knows. So going the hospital is a lottery. Now, it doesn't have to be that way. There is hope. In the late '00s, there were a group of Swedish orthopedic surgeons who met at their annual meeting, and they were discussing the different procedures they used to operate hip surgery. To the left of this slide, you see a variety of metal pieces, artificial hips that you would use for somebody who needs a new hip. They all realized they had their individual way of operating. They all argued that, "My technique is the best," but none of them actually knew, and they admitted that. So they said, "We probably need to measure quality so we know and can learn from what's best." So they in fact spent two years debating, "So what is quality in hip surgery?" "Oh, we should measure this." "No, we should measure that." And they finally agreed. And once they had agreed, they started measuring, and started sharing the data. Very quickly, they found that if you put cement in the bone of the patient before you put the metal shaft in, it actually lasted a lot longer, and most patients would never have to be re-operated on in their lifetime. They published the data, and it actually transformed clinical practice in the country. Everybody saw this makes a lot of sense. Since then, they publish every year. Once a year, they publish the league table: who's best, who's at the bottom? And they visit each other to try to learn, so a continuous cycle of improvement. For many years, Swedish hip surgeons had the best results in the world, at least for those who actually were measuring, and many were not. Now I found this principle really exciting. So the physicians get together, they agree on what quality is, they start measuring, they share the data, they find who's best, and they learn from it. Continuous improvement. Now, that's not the only exciting part. That's exciting in itself. But if you bring back the cost side of the equation, and look at that, it turns out, those who have focused on quality, they actually also have the lowest costs, although that's not been the purpose in the first place. So if you look at the hip surgery story again, there was a study done a couple years ago where they compared the U.S. and Sweden. They looked at how many patients have needed to be re-operated on seven years after the first surgery. In the United States, the number was three times higher than in Sweden. So many unnecessary surgeries, and so much unnecessary suffering for all the patients who were operated on in that seven year period. Now, you can imagine how much savings there would be for society. We did a study where we looked at OECD data. OECD does, every so often, look at quality of care where they can find the data across the member countries. The United States has, for many diseases, actually a quality which is below the average in OECD. Now, if the American healthcare system would focus a lot more on measuring quality, and raise quality just to the level of average OECD, it would save the American people 000 billion U.S. dollars a year. That's 00 percent of the budget, of the healthcare budget of the country. Now you may say that these numbers are fantastic, and it's all logical, but is it possible? This would be a paradigm shift in healthcare, and I would argue that not only can it be done, but it has to be done. The agents of change are the doctors and nurses in the healthcare system. In my practice as a consultant, I meet probably a hundred or more than a hundred doctors and nurses and other hospital or healthcare staff every year. The one thing they have in common is they really care about what they achieve in terms of quality for their patients. Physicians are, like most of you in the audience, very competitive. They were always best in class. We were always best in class. And if somebody can show them that the result they perform for their patients is no better than what others do, they will do whatever it takes to improve. But most of them don't know. But physicians have another characteristic. They actually thrive from peer recognition. If a cardiologist calls another cardiologist in a competing hospital and discusses why that other hospital has so much better results, they will share. They will share the information on how to improve. So it is, by measuring and creating transparency, you get a cycle of continuous improvement, which is what this slide shows. Now, you may say this is a nice idea, but this isn't only an idea. This is happening in reality. We're creating a global community, and a large global community, where we'll be able to measure and compare what we achieve. Together with two academic institutions, Michael Porter at Harvard Business School, and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, BCG has formed something we call ICHOM. You may think that's a sneeze, but it's not a sneeze, it's an acronym. It stands for the International Consortium for Health Outcome Measurement. We're bringing together leading physicians and patients to discuss, disease by disease, what is really quality, what should we measure, and to make those standards global. They've worked -- four working groups have worked during the past year: cataracts, back pain, coronary artery disease, which is, for instance, heart attack, and prostate cancer. The four groups will publish their data in November of this year. That's the first time we'll be comparing apples to apples, not only within a country, but between countries. Next year, we're planning to do eight diseases, the year after, 00. In three years' time, we plan to have covered 00 percent of the disease burden. Compare apples to apples. Who's better? Why is that? Five months ago, I led a workshop at the largest university hospital in Northern Europe. They have a new CEO, and she has a vision: I want to manage my big institution much more on quality, outcomes that matter to patients. This particular day, we sat in a workshop together with physicians, nurses and other staff, discussing leukemia in children. The group discussed, how do we measure quality today? Can we measure it better than we do? We discussed, how do we treat these kids, what are important improvements? And we discussed what are the costs for these patients, can we do treatment more efficiently? There was an enormous energy in the room. There were so many ideas, so much enthusiasm. At the end of the meeting, the chairman of the department, he stood up. He looked over the group and he said -- first he raised his hand, I forgot that -- he raised his hand, clenched his fist, and then he said to the group, "Thank you. Thank you. Today, we're finally discussing what this hospital does the right way." By measuring value in healthcare, that is not only costs but outcomes that matter to patients, we will make staff in hospitals and elsewhere in the healthcare system not a problem but an important part of the solution. I believe measuring value in healthcare will bring about a revolution, and I'm convinced that the founder of modern medicine, the Greek Hippocrates, who always put the patient at the center, he would smile in his grave. Thank you. (Applause)

I would like to talk to you about a story about a small town kid. I don't know his name, but I do know his story. He lives in a small village in southern Somalia. His village is near Mogadishu. Drought drives the small village into poverty and to the brink of starvation. With nothing left for him there, he leaves for the big city, in this case, Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. When he arrives, there are no opportunities, no jobs, no way forward. He ends up living in a tent city on the outskirts of Mogadishu. Maybe a year passes, nothing. One day, he's approached by a gentleman who offers to take him to lunch, then to dinner, to breakfast. He meets this dynamic group of people, and they give him a break. He's given a bit of money to buy himself some new clothes, money to send back home to his family. He is introduced to this young woman. He eventually gets married. He starts this new life. He has a purpose in life. One beautiful day in Mogadishu, under an azure blue sky, a car bomb goes off. That small town kid with the big city dreams was the suicide bomber, and that dynamic group of people were al Shabaab, a terrorist organization linked to al Qaeda. So how does the story of a small town kid just trying to make it big in the city end up with him blowing himself up? He was waiting. He was waiting for an opportunity, waiting to begin his future, waiting for a way forward, and this was the first thing that came along. This was the first thing that pulled him out of what we call waithood. And his story repeats itself in urban centers around the world. It is the story of the disenfranchised, unemployed urban youth who sparks riots in Johannesburg, sparks riots in London, who reaches out for something other than waithood. For young people, the promise of the city, the big city dream is that of opportunity, of jobs, of wealth, but young people are not sharing in the prosperity of their cities. Often it's youth who suffer from the highest unemployment rates. By 0000, three out of five people living in cities will be under the age of 00. If we do not include young people in the growth of our cities, if we do not provide them opportunities, the story of waithood, the gateway to terrorism, to violence, to gangs, will be the story of cities 0.0. And in my city of birth, Mogadishu, 00 percent of young people suffer from unemployment. 00 percent don't work, don't go to school. They pretty much do nothing. I went back to Mogadishu last month, and I went to visit Madina Hospital, the hospital I was born in. I remember standing in front of that bullet-ridden hospital thinking, what if I had never left? What if I had been forced into that same state of waithood? Would I have become a terrorist? I'm not really sure about the answer. My reason for being in Mogadishu that month was actually to host a youth leadership and entrepreneurship summit. I brought together about 00 young Somali leaders. We sat down and brainstormed on solutions to the biggest challenges facing their city. One of the young men in the room was Aden. He went to university in Mogadishu, graduated. There were no jobs, no opportunities. I remember him telling me, because he was a college graduate, unemployed, frustrated, that he was the perfect target for al Shabaab and other terrorist organizations, to be recruited. They sought people like him out. But his story takes a different route. In Mogadishu, the biggest barrier to getting from point A to point B are the roads. Twenty-three years of civil war have completely destroyed the road system, and a motorbike can be the easiest way to get around. Aden saw an opportunity and seized it. He started a motorbike company. He began renting out motorbikes to local residents who couldn't normally afford them. He bought 00 bikes, with the help of family and friends, and his dream is to eventually expand to several hundred within the next three years. How is this story different? What makes his story different? I believe it is his ability to identify and seize a new opportunity. It's entrepreneurship, and I believe entrepreneurship can be the most powerful tool against waithood. It empowers young people to be the creators of the very economic opportunities they are so desperately seeking. And you can train young people to be entrepreneurs. I want to talk to you about a young man who attended one of my meetings, Mohamed Mohamoud, a florist. He was helping me train some of the young people at the summit in entrepreneurship and how to be innovative and how to create a culture of entrepreneurship. He's actually the first florist Mogadishu has seen in over 00 years, and until recently, until Mohamed came along, if you wanted flowers at your wedding, you used plastic bouquets shipped from abroad. If you asked someone, "When was the last time you saw fresh flowers?" for many who grew up under civil war, the answer would be, "Never." So Mohamed saw an opportunity. He started a landscaping and design floral company. He created a farm right outside of Mogadishu, and started growing tulips and lilies, which he said could survive the harsh Mogadishu climate. And he began delivering flowers to weddings, creating gardens at homes and businesses around the city, and he's now working on creating Mogadishu's first public park in 00 years. There's no public park in Mogadishu. He wants to create a space where families, young people, can come together, and, as he says, smell the proverbial roses. And he doesn't grow roses because they use too much water, by the way. So the first step is to inspire young people, and in that room, Mohamed's presence had a really profound impact on the youth in that room. They had never really thought about starting up a business. They've thought about working for an NGO, working for the government, but his story, his innovation, really had a strong impact on them. He forced them to look at their city as a place of opportunity. He empowered them to believe that they could be entrepreneurs, that they could be change makers. By the end of the day, they were coming up with innovative solutions to some of the biggest challenges facing their city. They came up with entrepreneurial solutions to local problems. So inspiring young people and creating a culture of entrepreneurship is a really great step, but young people need capital to make their ideas a reality. They need expertise and mentorship to guide them in developing and launching their businesses. Connect young people with the resources they need, provide them the support they need to go from ideation to creation, and you will create catalysts for urban growth. For me, entrepreneurship is more than just starting up a business. It's about creating a social impact. Mohamed is not simply selling flowers. I believe he is selling hope. His Peace Park, and that's what he calls it, when it's created, will actually transform the way people see their city. Aden hired street kids to help rent out and maintain those bikes for him. He gave them the opportunity to escape the paralysis of waithood. These young entrepreneurs are having a tremendous impact in their cities. So my suggestion is, turn youth into entrepreneurs, incubate and nurture their inherent innovation, and you will have more stories of flowers and Peace Parks than of car bombs and waithood. Thank you. (Applause)

So, stepping down out of the bus, I headed back to the corner to head west en route to a braille training session. It was the winter of 0000, and I had been blind for about a year. Things were going pretty well. Safely reaching the other side, I turned to the left, pushed the auto-button for the audible pedestrian signal, and waited my turn. As it went off, I took off and safely got to the other side. Stepping onto the sidewalk, I then heard the sound of a steel chair slide across the concrete sidewalk in front of me. I know there's a cafe on the corner, and they have chairs out in front, so I just adjusted to the left to get closer to the street. As I did, so slid the chair. I just figured I'd made a mistake, and went back to the right, and so slid the chair in perfect synchronicity. Now I was getting a little anxious. I went back to the left, and so slid the chair, blocking my path of travel. Now, I was officially freaking out. So I yelled, "Who the hell's out there? What's going on?" Just then, over my shout, I heard something else, a familiar rattle. It sounded familiar, and I quickly considered another possibility, and I reached out with my left hand, as my fingers brushed against something fuzzy, and I came across an ear, the ear of a dog, perhaps a golden retriever. Its leash had been tied to the chair as her master went in for coffee, and she was just persistent in her efforts to greet me, perhaps get a scratch behind the ear. Who knows, maybe she was volunteering for service. (Laughter) But that little story is really about the fears and misconceptions that come along with the idea of moving through the city without sight, seemingly oblivious to the environment and the people around you. So let me step back and set the stage a little bit. On St. Patrick's Day of 0000, I reported to the hospital for surgery to remove a brain tumor. The surgery was successful. Two days later, my sight started to fail. On the third day, it was gone. Immediately, I was struck by an incredible sense of fear, of confusion, of vulnerability, like anybody would. But as I had time to stop and think, I actually started to realize I had a lot to be grateful for. In particular, I thought about my dad, who had passed away from complications from brain surgery. He was 00. I was seven at the time. So although I had every reason to be fearful of what was ahead, and had no clue quite what was going to happen, I was alive. My son still had his dad. And besides, it's not like I was the first person ever to lose their sight. I knew there had to be all sorts of systems and techniques and training to have to live a full and meaningful, active life without sight. So by the time I was discharged from the hospital a few days later, I left with a mission, a mission to get out and get the best training as quickly as I could and get on to rebuilding my life. Within six months, I had returned to work. My training had started. I even started riding a tandem bike with my old cycling buddies, and was commuting to work on my own, walking through town and taking the bus. It was a lot of hard work. But what I didn't anticipate through that rapid transition was the incredible experience of the juxtaposition of my sighted experience up against my unsighted experience of the same places and the same people within such a short period of time. From that came a lot of insights, or outsights, as I called them, things that I learned since losing my sight. These outsights ranged from the trival to the profound, from the mundane to the humorous. As an architect, that stark juxtaposition of my sighted and unsighted experience of the same places and the same cities within such a short period of time has given me all sorts of wonderful outsights of the city itself. Paramount amongst those was the realization that, actually, cities are fantastic places for the blind. And then I was also surprised by the city's propensity for kindness and care as opposed to indifference or worse. And then I started to realize that it seemed like the blind seemed to have a positive influence on the city itself. That was a little curious to me. Let me step back and take a look at why the city is so good for the blind. Inherent with the training for recovery from sight loss is learning to rely on all your non-visual senses, things that you would otherwise maybe ignore. It's like a whole new world of sensory information opens up to you. I was really struck by the symphony of subtle sounds all around me in the city that you can hear and work with to understand where you are, how you need to move, and where you need to go. Similarly, just through the grip of the cane, you can feel contrasting textures in the floor below, and over time you build a pattern of where you are and where you're headed. Similarly, just the sun warming one side of your face or the wind at your neck gives you clues about your alignment and your progression through a block and your movement through time and space. But also, the sense of smell. Some districts and cities have their own smell, as do places and things around you, and if you're lucky, you can even follow your nose to that new bakery that you've been looking for. All this really surprised me, because I started to realize that my unsighted experienced was so far more multi-sensory than my sighted experience ever was. What struck me also was how much the city was changing around me. When you're sighted, everybody kind of sticks to themselves, you mind your own business. Lose your sight, though, and it's a whole other story. And I don't know who's watching who, but I have a suspicion that a lot of people are watching me. And I'm not paranoid, but everywhere I go, I'm getting all sorts of advice: Go here, move there, watch out for this. A lot of the information is good. Some of it's helpful. A lot of it's kind of reversed. You've got to figure out what they actually meant. Some of it's kind of wrong and not helpful. But it's all good in the grand scheme of things. But one time I was in Oakland walking along Broadway, and came to a corner. I was waiting for an audible pedestrian signal, and as it went off, I was just about to step out into the street, when all of a sudden, my right hand was just gripped by this guy, and he yanked my arm and pulled me out into the crosswalk and was dragging me out across the street, speaking to me in Mandarin. (Laughter) It's like, there was no escape from this man's death grip, but he got me safely there. What could I do? But believe me, there are more polite ways to offer assistance. We don't know you're there, so it's kind of nice to say "Hello" first. "Would you like some help?" But while in Oakland, I've really been struck by how much the city of Oakland changed as I lost my sight. I liked it sighted. It was fine. It's a perfectly great city. But once I lost my sight and was walking along Broadway, I was blessed every block of the way. "Bless you, man." "Go for it, brother." "God bless you." I didn't get that sighted. (Laughter) And even without sight, I don't get that in San Francisco. And I know it bothers some of my blind friends, it's not just me. Often it's thought that that's an emotion that comes up out of pity. I tend to think that it comes out of our shared humanity, out of our togetherness, and I think it's pretty cool. In fact, if I'm feeling down, I just go to Broadway in downtown Oakland, I go for a walk, and I feel better like that, in no time at all. But also that it illustrates how disability and blindness sort of cuts across ethnic, social, racial, economic lines. Disability is an equal-opportunity provider. Everybody's welcome. In fact, I've heard it said in the disability community that there are really only two types of people: There are those with disabilities, and there are those that haven't quite found theirs yet. It's a different way of thinking about it, but I think it's kind of beautiful, because it is certainly far more inclusive than the us-versus-them or the abled-versus-the-disabled, and it's a lot more honest and respectful of the fragility of life. So my final takeaway for you is that not only is the city good for the blind, but the city needs us. And I'm so sure of that that I want to propose to you today that the blind be taken as the prototypical city dwellers when imagining new and wonderful cities, and not the people that are thought about after the mold has already been cast. It's too late then. So if you design a city with the blind in mind, you'll have a rich, walkable network of sidewalks with a dense array of options and choices all available at the street level. If you design a city with the blind in mind, sidewalks will be predictable and will be generous. The space between buildings will be well-balanced between people and cars. In fact, cars, who needs them? If you're blind, you don't drive. (Laughter) They don't like it when you drive. (Laughter) If you design a city with the blind in mind, you design a city with a robust, accessible, well-connected mass transit system that connects all parts of the city and the region all around. If you design a city with the blind in mind, there'll be jobs, lots of jobs. Blind people want to work too. They want to earn a living. So, in designing a city for the blind, I hope you start to realize that it actually would be a more inclusive, a more equitable, a more just city for all. And based on my prior sighted experience, it sounds like a pretty cool city, whether you're blind, whether you have a disability, or you haven't quite found yours yet. So thank you. (Applause)

"Give me liberty or give me death." When Patrick Henry, the governor of Virginia, said these words in 0000, he could never have imagined just how much they would come to resonate with American generations to come. At the time, these words were earmarked and targeted against the British, but over the last 000 years, they've come to embody what many Westerners believe, that freedom is the most cherished value, and that the best systems of politics and economics have freedom embedded in them. Who could blame them? Over the past hundred years, the combination of liberal democracy and private capitalism has helped to catapult the United States and Western countries to new levels of economic development. In the United States over the past hundred years, incomes have increased 00 times, and hundreds of thousands of people have been moved out of poverty. Meanwhile, American ingenuity and innovation has helped to spur industrialization and also helped in the creation and the building of things like household appliances such as refrigerators and televisions, motor vehicles and even the mobile phones in your pockets. It's no surprise, then, that even at the depths of the private capitalism crisis, President Obama said, "The question before us is not whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and to expand freedom is unmatched." Thus, there's understandably a deep-seated presumption among Westerners that the whole world will decide to adopt private capitalism as the model of economic growth, liberal democracy, and will continue to prioritize political rights over economic rights. However, to many who live in the emerging markets, this is an illusion, and even though the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was signed in 0000, was unanimously adopted, what it did was to mask a schism that has emerged between developed and developing countries, and the ideological beliefs between political and economic rights. This schism has only grown wider. Today, many people who live in the emerging markets, where 00 percent of the world's population lives, believe that the Western obsession with political rights is beside the point, and what is actually important is delivering on food, shelter, education and healthcare. "Give me liberty or give me death" is all well and good if you can afford it, but if you're living on less than one dollar a day, you're far too busy trying to survive and to provide for your family than to spend your time going around trying to proclaim and defend democracy. Now, I know many people in this room and around the world will think, "Well actually, this is hard to grasp," because private capitalism and liberal democracy are held sacrosanct. But I ask you today, what would you do if you had to choose? What if you had to choose between a roof over your head and the right to vote? Over the last 00 years, I've had the privilege to travel to over 00 countries, many of them in the emerging markets, in Latin America, Asia, and my own continent of Africa. I've met with presidents, dissidents, policymakers, lawyers, teachers, doctors and the man on the street, and through these conversations, it's become clear to me that many people in the emerging markets believe that there's actually a split occurring between what people believe ideologically in terms of politics and economics in the West and that which people believe in the rest of the world. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying people in the emerging markets don't understand democracy, nor am I saying that they wouldn't ideally like to pick their presidents or their leaders. Of course they would. However, I am saying that on balance, they worry more about where their living standard improvements are going to come from, and how it is their governments can deliver for them, than whether or not the government was elected by democracy. The fact of the matter is that this has become a very poignant question because there is for the first time in a long time a real challenge to the Western ideological systems of politics and economics, and this is a system that is embodied by China. And rather than have private capitalism, they have state capitalism. Instead of liberal democracy, they have de-prioritized the democratic system. And they have also decided to prioritize economic rights over political rights. I put it to you today that it is this system that is embodied by China that is gathering momentum amongst people in the emerging markets as the system to follow, because they believe increasingly that it is the system that will promise the best and fastest improvements in living standards in the shortest period of time. If you will indulge me, I will spend a few moments explaining to you first why economically they've come to this belief. First of all, it's China's economic performance over the past 00 years. She's been able to produce record economic growth and meaningfully move many people out of poverty, specifically putting a meaningful dent in poverty by moving over 000 million people out of indigence. It's not just in economics, but it's also in terms of living standards. We see that in China, 00 percent of people had secondary school access. Today, it's closer to 00 percent. So in its totality, economic improvement has been quite significant. Second, China has been able to meaningfully improve its income inequality without changing the political construct. Today, the United States and China are the two leading economies in the world. They have vastly different political systems and different economic systems, one with private capitalism, another one broadly with state capitalism. However, these two countries have the identical GINI Coefficient, which is a measure of income equality. Perhaps what is more disturbing is that China's income equality has been improving in recent times, whereas that of the United States has been declining. Thirdly, people in the emerging markets look at China's amazing and legendary infrastructure rollout. This is not just about China building roads and ports and railways in her own country -- she's been able to build 00,000 kilometers of road network in China and surpass that of the United States -- but even if you look to places like Africa, China has been able to help tar the distance of Cape Town to Cairo, which is 0,000 miles, or three times the distance of New York to California. Now this is something that people can see and point to. Perhaps it's no surprise that in a 0000 Pew survey, when surveyed, Africans in 00 countries said they thought that the Chinese were doing amazing things to improve their livelihoods by wide margins, by as much as 00 percent. Finally, China is also providing innovative solutions to age-old social problems that the world faces. If you travel to Mogadishu, Mexico City or Mumbai, you find that dilapidated infrastructure and logistics continue to be a stumbling block to the delivery of medicine and healthcare in the rural areas. However, through a network of state-owned enterprises, the Chinese have been able to go into these rural areas, using their companies to help deliver on these healthcare solutions. Ladies and gentlemen, it's no surprise that around the world, people are pointing at what China is doing and saying, "I like that. I want that. I want to be able to do what China's doing. That is the system that seems to work." I'm here to also tell you that there are lots of shifts occurring around what China is doing in the democratic stance. In particular, there is growing doubt among people in the emerging markets, when people now believe that democracy is no longer to be viewed as a prerequisite for economic growth. In fact, countries like Taiwan, Singapore, Chile, not just China, have shown that actually, it's economic growth that is a prerequisite for democracy. In a recent study, the evidence has shown that income is the greatest determinant of how long a democracy can last. The study found that if your per capita income is about 0,000 dollars a year, your democracy will last about eight and a half years. If your per capita income is between 0,000 and 0,000 dollars per year, then you're likely to only get 00 years of democracy. And only if your per capita income is above 0,000 dollars a year will you have democracy come hell or high water. What this is telling us is that we need to first establish a middle class that is able to hold the government accountable. But perhaps it's also telling us that we should be worried about going around the world and shoehorning democracy, because ultimately we run the risk of ending up with illiberal democracies, democracies that in some sense could be worse than the authoritarian governments that they seek to replace. The evidence around illiberal democracies is quite depressing. Freedom House finds that although 00 percent of the world's countries today are democratic, 00 percent of those countries are illiberal in the sense that people don't have free speech or freedom of movement. But also, we're finding from Freedom House in a study that they published last year that freedom has been on the decline every year for the past seven years. What this says is that for people like me who care about liberal democracy, is we've got to find a more sustainable way of ensuring that we have a sustainable form of democracy in a liberal way, and that has its roots in economics. But it also says that as China moves toward being the largest economy in the world, something that is expected to happen by experts in 0000, that this schism between the political and economic ideologies of the West and the rest is likely to widen. What might that world look like? Well, the world could look like more state involvement and state capitalism; greater protectionisms of nation-states; but also, as I just pointed out a moment ago, ever-declining political rights and individual rights. The question that is left for us in general is, what then should the West be doing? And I suggest that they have two options. The West can either compete or cooperate. If the West chooses to compete with the Chinese model, and in effect go around the world and continue to try and push an agenda of private capitalism and liberal democracy, this is basically going against headwinds, but it also would be a natural stance for the West to take because in many ways it is the antithesis of the Chinese model of de-prioritizing democracy, and state capitalism. Now the fact of the matter is, if the West decides to compete, it will create a wider schism. The other option is for the West to cooperate, and by cooperating I mean giving the emerging market countries the flexibility to figure out in an organic way what political and economic system works best for them. Now I'm sure some of you in the room will be thinking, well, this is like ceding to China, and this is a way, in other words, for the West to take a back seat. But I put it to you that if the United States and European countries want to remain globally influential, they may have to consider cooperating in the short term in order to compete, and by that, they might have to focus more aggressively on economic outcomes to help create the middle class and therefore be able to hold government accountable and create the democracies that we really want. The fact of the matter is that instead of going around the world and haranguing countries for engaging with China, the West should be encouraging its own businesses to trade and invest in these regions. Instead of criticizing China for bad behavior, the West should be showing how it is that their own system of politics and economics is the superior one. And instead of shoehorning democracy around the world, perhaps the West should take a leaf out of its own history book and remember that it takes a lot of patience in order to develop the models and the systems that you have today. Indeed, the Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer reminds us that it took the United States nearly 000 years from the time that the Constitution was written for there to be equal rights in the United States. Some people would argue that today there is still no equal rights. In fact, there are groups who would argue that they still do not have equal rights under the law. At its very best, the Western model speaks for itself. It's the model that put food on the table. It's the refrigerators. It put a man on the moon. But the fact of the matter is, although people back in the day used to point at the Western countries and say, "I want that, I like that," there's now a new person in town in the form of a country, China. Today, generations are looking at China and saying, "China can produce infrastructure, China can produce economic growth, and we like that." Because ultimately, the question before us, and the question before seven billion people on the planet is, how can we create prosperity? People who care and will pivot towards the model of politics and economics in a very rational way, to those models that will ensure that they can have better living standards in the shortest period of time. As you leave here today, I would like to leave you with a very personal message, which is what it is that I believe we should be doing as individuals, and this is really about being open-minded, open-minded to the fact that our hopes and dreams of creating prosperity for people around the world, creating and meaningfully putting a dent in poverty for hundreds of millions of people, has to be based in being open-minded, because these systems have good things and they have bad things. Just to illustrate, I went into my annals of myself. That's a picture of me. Awww. (Laughter) I was born and raised in Zambia in 0000. At the time of my birth, blacks were not issued birth certificates, and that law only changed in 0000. This is an affidavit from the Zambian government. I bring this to you to tell you that in 00 years, I've gone from not being recognized as a human being to standing in front of the illustrious TED crowd today to talk to you about my views. In this vein, we can increase economic growth. We can meaningfully put a dent in poverty. But also, it's going to require that we look at our assumptions, assumptions and strictures that we've grown up with around democracy, around private capitalism, around what creates economic growth and reduces poverty and creates freedoms. We might have to tear those books up and start to look at other options and be open-minded to seek the truth. Ultimately, it's about transforming the world and making it a better place. Thank you very much. (Applause)

So why do we learn mathematics? Essentially, for three reasons: calculation, application, and last, and unfortunately least in terms of the time we give it, inspiration. Mathematics is the science of patterns, and we study it to learn how to think logically, critically and creatively, but too much of the mathematics that we learn in school is not effectively motivated, and when our students ask, "Why are we learning this?" then they often hear that they'll need it in an upcoming math class or on a future test. But wouldn't it be great if every once in a while we did mathematics simply because it was fun or beautiful or because it excited the mind? Now, I know many people have not had the opportunity to see how this can happen, so let me give you a quick example with my favorite collection of numbers, the Fibonacci numbers. (Applause) Yeah! I already have Fibonacci fans here. That's great. Now these numbers can be appreciated in many different ways. From the standpoint of calculation, they're as easy to understand as one plus one, which is two. Then one plus two is three, two plus three is five, three plus five is eight, and so on. Indeed, the person we call Fibonacci was actually named Leonardo of Pisa, and these numbers appear in his book "Liber Abaci," which taught the Western world the methods of arithmetic that we use today. In terms of applications, Fibonacci numbers appear in nature surprisingly often. The number of petals on a flower is typically a Fibonacci number, or the number of spirals on a sunflower or a pineapple tends to be a Fibonacci number as well. In fact, there are many more applications of Fibonacci numbers, but what I find most inspirational about them are the beautiful number patterns they display. Let me show you one of my favorites. Suppose you like to square numbers, and frankly, who doesn't? (Laughter) Let's look at the squares of the first few Fibonacci numbers. So one squared is one, two squared is four, three squared is nine, five squared is 00, and so on. Now, it's no surprise that when you add consecutive Fibonacci numbers, you get the next Fibonacci number. Right? That's how they're created. But you wouldn't expect anything special to happen when you add the squares together. But check this out. One plus one gives us two, and one plus four gives us five. And four plus nine is 00, nine plus 00 is 00, and yes, the pattern continues. In fact, here's another one. Suppose you wanted to look at adding the squares of the first few Fibonacci numbers. Let's see what we get there. So one plus one plus four is six. Add nine to that, we get 00. Add 00, we get 00. Add 00, we get 000. Now look at those numbers. Those are not Fibonacci numbers, but if you look at them closely, you'll see the Fibonacci numbers buried inside of them. Do you see it? I'll show it to you. Six is two times three, 00 is three times five, 00 is five times eight, two, three, five, eight, who do we appreciate? (Laughter) Fibonacci! Of course. Now, as much fun as it is to discover these patterns, it's even more satisfying to understand why they are true. Let's look at that last equation. Why should the squares of one, one, two, three, five and eight add up to eight times 00? I'll show you by drawing a simple picture. We'll start with a one-by-one square and next to that put another one-by-one square. Together, they form a one-by-two rectangle. Beneath that, I'll put a two-by-two square, and next to that, a three-by-three square, beneath that, a five-by-five square, and then an eight-by-eight square, creating one giant rectangle, right? Now let me ask you a simple question: what is the area of the rectangle? Well, on the one hand, it's the sum of the areas of the squares inside it, right? Just as we created it. It's one squared plus one squared plus two squared plus three squared plus five squared plus eight squared. Right? That's the area. On the other hand, because it's a rectangle, the area is equal to its height times its base, and the height is clearly eight, and the base is five plus eight, which is the next Fibonacci number, 00. Right? So the area is also eight times 00. Since we've correctly calculated the area two different ways, they have to be the same number, and that's why the squares of one, one, two, three, five and eight add up to eight times 00. Now, if we continue this process, we'll generate rectangles of the form 00 by 00, 00 by 00, and so on. Now check this out. If you divide 00 by eight, you get 0.000. And if you divide the larger number by the smaller number, then these ratios get closer and closer to about 0.000, known to many people as the Golden Ratio, a number which has fascinated mathematicians, scientists and artists for centuries. Now, I show all this to you because, like so much of mathematics, there's a beautiful side to it that I fear does not get enough attention in our schools. We spend lots of time learning about calculation, but let's not forget about application, including, perhaps, the most important application of all, learning how to think. If I could summarize this in one sentence, it would be this: Mathematics is not just solving for x, it's also figuring out why. 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 0. 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 -- 000,000 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, 00 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 00, 0000, for Yahoo on the March 00, 0000, 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)

I am a neuroscientist with a mixed background in physics and medicine. My lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology focuses on spinal cord injury, which affects more than 00,000 people around the world every year, with dramatic consequences for affected individuals, whose life literally shatters in a matter of a handful of seconds. And for me, the Man of Steel, Christopher Reeve, has best raised the awareness on the distress of spinal cord injured people. And this is how I started my own personal journey in this field of research, working with the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation. I still remember this decisive moment. It was just at the end of a regular day of work with the foundation. Chris addressed us, the scientists and experts, "You have to be more pragmatic. When leaving your laboratory tomorrow, I want you to stop by the rehabilitation center to watch injured people fighting to take a step, struggling to maintain their trunk. And when you go home, think of what you are going to change in your research on the following day to make their lives better." These words, they stuck with me. This was more than 00 years ago, but ever since, my laboratory has followed the pragmatic approach to recovery after spinal cord injury. And my first step in this direction was to develop a new model of spinal cord injury that would more closely mimic some of the key features of human injury while offering well-controlled experimental conditions. And for this purpose, we placed two hemisections on opposite sides of the body. They completely interrupt the communication between the brain and the spinal cord, thus leading to complete and permanent paralysis of the leg. But, as observed, after most injuries in humans, there is this intervening gap of intact neural tissue through which recovery can occur. But how to make it happen? Well, the classical approach consists of applying intervention that would promote the growth of the severed fiber to the original target. And while this certainly remained the key for a cure, this seemed extraordinarily complicated to me. To reach clinical fruition rapidly, it was obvious: I had to think about the problem differently. It turned out that more than 000 years of research on spinal cord physiology, starting with the Nobel Prize Sherrington, had shown that the spinal cord, below most injuries, contained all the necessary and sufficient neural networks to coordinate locomotion, but because input from the brain is interrupted, they are in a nonfunctional state, like kind of dormant. My idea: We awaken this network. And at the time, I was a post-doctoral fellow in Los Angeles, after completing my Ph.D. in France, where independent thinking is not necessarily promoted. (Laughter) I was afraid to talk to my new boss, but decided to muster up my courage. I knocked at the door of my wonderful advisor, Reggie Edgerton, to share my new idea. He listened to me carefully, and responded with a grin. "Why don't you try?" And I promise to you, this was such an important moment in my career, when I realized that the great leader believed in young people and new ideas. And this was the idea: I'm going to use a simplistic metaphor to explain to you this complicated concept. Imagine that the locomotor system is a car. The engine is the spinal cord. The transmission is interrupted. The engine is turned off. How could we re-engage the engine? First, we have to provide the fuel; second, press the accelerator pedal; third, steer the car. It turned out that there are known neural pathways coming from the brain that play this very function during locomotion. My idea: Replace this missing input to provide the spinal cord with the kind of intervention that the brain would deliver naturally in order to walk. For this, I leveraged 00 years of past research in neuroscience, first to replace the missing fuel with pharmacological agents that prepare the neurons in the spinal cord to fire, and second, to mimic the accelerator pedal with electrical stimulation. So here imagine an electrode implanted on the back of the spinal cord to deliver painless stimulation. It took many years, but eventually we developed an electrochemical neuroprosthesis that transformed the neural network in the spinal cord from dormant to a highly functional state. Immediately, the paralyzed rat can stand. As soon as the treadmill belt starts moving, the animal shows coordinated movement of the leg, but without the brain. Here what I call "the spinal brain" cognitively processes sensory information arising from the moving leg and makes decisions as to how to activate the muscle in order to stand, to walk, to run, and even here, while sprinting, instantly stand if the treadmill stops moving. This was amazing. I was completely fascinated by this locomotion without the brain, but at the same time so frustrated. This locomotion was completely involuntary. The animal had virtually no control over the legs. Clearly, the steering system was missing. And it then became obvious from me that we had to move away from the classical rehabilitation paradigm, stepping on a treadmill, and develop conditions that would encourage the brain to begin voluntary control over the leg. With this in mind, we developed a completely new robotic system to support the rat in any direction of space. Imagine, this is really cool. So imagine the little 000-gram rat attached at the extremity of this 000-kilo robot, but the rat does not feel the robot. The robot is transparent, just like you would hold a young child during the first insecure steps. Let me summarize: The rat received a paralyzing lesion of the spinal cord. The electrochemical neuroprosthesis enabled a highly functional state of the spinal locomotor networks. The robot provided the safe environment to allow the rat to attempt anything to engage the paralyzed legs. And for motivation, we used what I think is the most powerful pharmacology of Switzerland: fine Swiss chocolate. (Laughter) Actually, the first results were very, very, very disappointing. Here is my best physical therapist completely failing to encourage the rat to take a single step, whereas the same rat, five minutes earlier, walked beautifully on the treadmill. We were so frustrated. But you know, one of the most essential qualities of a scientist is perseverance. We insisted. We refined our paradigm, and after several months of training, the otherwise paralyzed rat could stand, and whenever she decided, initiated full weight-bearing locomotion to sprint towards the rewards. This is the first recovery ever observed of voluntary leg movement after an experimental lesion of the spinal cord leading to complete and permanent paralysis. In fact -- (Applause) Thank you. In fact, not only could the rat initiate and sustain locomotion on the ground, they could even adjust leg movement, for example, to resist gravity in order to climb a staircase. I can promise you this was such an emotional moment in my laboratory. It took us 00 years of hard work to reach this goal. But the remaining question was, how? I mean, how is it possible? And here, what we found was completely unexpected. This novel training paradigm encouraged the brain to create new connections, some relay circuits that relay information from the brain past the injury and restore cortical control over the locomotor networks below the injury. And here, you can see one such example, where we label the fibers coming from the brain in red. This blue neuron is connected with the locomotor center, and what this constellation of synaptic contacts means is that the brain is reconnected with the locomotor center with only one relay neuron. But the remodeling was not restricted to the lesion area. It occurred throughout the central nervous system, including in the brain stem, where we observed up to 000-percent increase in the density of fibers coming from the brain. We did not aim to repair the spinal cord, yet we were able to promote one of the more extensive remodeling of axonal projections ever observed in the central nervous system of adult mammal after an injury. And there is a very important message hidden behind this discovery. They are the result of a young team of very talented people: physical therapists, neurobiologists, neurosurgeons, engineers of all kinds, who have achieved together what would have been impossible by single individuals. This is truly a trans-disciplinary team. They are working so close to each other that there is horizontal transfer of DNA. We are creating the next generation of M.D.'s and engineers capable of translating discoveries all the way from bench to bedside. And me? I am only the maestro who orchestrated this beautiful symphony. Now, I am sure you are all wondering, aren't you, will this help injured people? Me too, every day. The truth is that we don't know enough yet. This is certainly not a cure for spinal cord injury, but I begin to believe that this may lead to an intervention to improve recovery and people's quality of life. I would like you all to take a moment and dream with me. Imagine a person just suffered a spinal cord injury. After a few weeks of recovery, we will implant a programmable pump to deliver a personalized pharmacological cocktail directly to the spinal cord. At the same time, we will implant an electrode array, a sort of second skin covering the area of the spinal cord controlling leg movement, and this array is attached to an electrical pulse generator that delivers stimulations that are tailored to the person's needs. This defines a personalized electrochemical neuroprosthesis that will enable locomotion during training with a newly designed supporting system. And my hope is that after several months of training, there may be enough remodeling of residual connection to allow locomotion without the robot, maybe even without pharmacology or stimulation. My hope here is to be able to create the personalized condition to boost the plasticity of the brain and the spinal cord. And this is a radically new concept that may apply to other neurological disorders, what I termed "personalized neuroprosthetics," where by sensing and stimulating neural interfaces, I implanted throughout the nervous system, in the brain, in the spinal cord, even in peripheral nerves, based on patient-specific impairments. But not to replace the lost function, no -- to help the brain help itself. And I hope this enticed your imagination, because I can promise to you this is not a matter of whether this revolution will occur, but when. And remember, we are only as great as our imagination, as big as our dream. Thank you. (Applause)

I was about 00 years old on a camping trip with my dad in the Adirondack Mountains, a wilderness area in the northern part of New York State. It was a beautiful day. The forest was sparkling. The sun made the leaves glow like stained glass, and if it weren't for the path we were following, we could almost pretend we were the first human beings to ever walk that land. We got to our campsite. It was a lean-to on a bluff looking over a crystal, beautiful lake, when I discovered a horror. Behind the lean-to was a dump, maybe 00 feet square with rotting apple cores and balled-up aluminum foil, and a dead sneaker. And I was astonished, I was very angry, and I was deeply confused. The campers who were too lazy to take out what they had brought in, who did they think would clean up after them? That question stayed with me, and it simplified a little. Who cleans up after us? However you configure or wherever you place the us, who cleans up after us in Istanbul? Who cleans up after us in Rio or in Paris or in London? Here in New York, the Department of Sanitation cleans up after us, to the tune of 00,000 tons of garbage and 0,000 tons of recyclables every day. I wanted to get to know them as individuals. I wanted to understand who takes the job. What's it like to wear the uniform and bear that burden? So I started a research project with them. I rode in the trucks and walked the routes and interviewed people in offices and facilities all over the city, and I learned a lot, but I was still an outsider. I needed to go deeper. So I took the job as a sanitation worker. I didn't just ride in the trucks now. I drove the trucks. And I operated the mechanical brooms and I plowed the snow. It was a remarkable privilege and an amazing education. Everyone asks about the smell. It's there, but it's not as prevalent as you think, and on days when it is really bad, you get used to it rather quickly. The weight takes a long time to get used to. I knew people who were several years on the job whose bodies were still adjusting to the burden of bearing on your body tons of trash every week. Then there's the danger. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, sanitation work is one of the 00 most dangerous occupations in the country, and I learned why. You're in and out of traffic all day, and it's zooming around you. It just wants to get past you, so it's often the motorist is not paying attention. That's really bad for the worker. And then the garbage itself is full of hazards that often fly back out of the truck and do terrible harm. I also learned about the relentlessness of trash. When you step off the curb and you see a city from behind a truck, you come to understand that trash is like a force of nature unto itself. It never stops coming. It's also like a form of respiration or circulation. It must always be in motion. And then there's the stigma. You put on the uniform, and you become invisible until someone is upset with you for whatever reason like you've blocked traffic with your truck, or you're taking a break too close to their home, or you're drinking coffee in their diner, and they will come and scorn you, and tell you that they don't want you anywhere near them. I find the stigma especially ironic, because I strongly believe that sanitation workers are the most important labor force on the streets of the city, for three reasons. They are the first guardians of public health. If they're not taking away trash efficiently and effectively every day, it starts to spill out of its containments, and the dangers inherent to it threaten us in very real ways. Diseases we've had in check for decades and centuries burst forth again and start to harm us. The economy needs them. If we can't throw out the old stuff, we have no room for the new stuff, so then the engines of the economy start to sputter when consumption is compromised. I'm not advocating capitalism, I'm just pointing out their relationship. And then there's what I call our average, necessary quotidian velocity. By that I simply mean how fast we're used to moving in the contemporary day and age. We usually don't care for, repair, clean, carry around our coffee cup, our shopping bag, our bottle of water. We use them, we throw them out, we forget about them, because we know there's a workforce on the other side that's going to take it all away. So I want to suggest today a couple of ways to think about sanitation that will perhaps help ameliorate the stigma and bring them into this conversation of how to craft a city that is sustainable and humane. Their work, I think, is kind of liturgical. They're on the streets every day, rhythmically. They wear a uniform in many cities. You know when to expect them. And their work lets us do our work. They are almost a form of reassurance. The flow that they maintain keeps us safe from ourselves, from our own dross, our cast-offs, and that flow must be maintained always no matter what. On the day after September 00 in 0000, I heard the growl of a sanitation truck on the street, and I grabbed my infant son and I ran downstairs and there was a man doing his paper recycling route like he did every Wednesday. And I tried to thank him for doing his work on that day of all days, but I started to cry. And he looked at me, and he just nodded, and he said, "We're going to be okay. We're going to be okay." It was a little while later that I started my research with sanitation, and I met that man again. His name is Paulie, and we worked together many times, and we became good friends. I want to believe that Paulie was right. We are going to be okay. But in our effort to reconfigure how we as a species exist on this planet, we must include and take account of all the costs, including the very real human cost of the labor. And we also would be well informed to reach out to the people who do that work and get their expertise on how do we think about, how do we create systems around sustainability that perhaps take us from curbside recycling, which is a remarkable success across 00 years, across the United States and countries around the world, and lift us up to a broader horizon where we're looking at other forms of waste that could be lessened from manufacturing and industrial sources. Municipal waste, what we think of when we talk about garbage, accounts for three percent of the nation's waste stream. It's a remarkable statistic. So in the flow of your days, in the flow of your lives, next time you see someone whose job is to clean up after you, take a moment to acknowledge them. Take a moment to say thank you. (Applause)

In December of 0000, 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 00 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 00 and 000,000 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 00 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 00 and 000 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 00 billion and 00 billion dollars. To put these numbers in perspective, Microsoft has yearly revenues of 00 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 00 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 00-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. [#000 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)

It is said that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, and I believe this is true, especially when I hear President Obama often talk about the Korean education system as a benchmark of success. Well, I can tell you that, in the rigid structure and highly competitive nature of the Korean school system, also known as pressure cooker, not everyone can do well in that environment. While many people responded in different ways about our education system, my response to the high-pressure environment was making bows with pieces of wood found near my apartment building. Why bows? I'm not quite sure. Perhaps, in the face of constant pressure, my caveman instinct of survival has connected with the bows. If you think about it, the bow has really helped drive human survival since prehistoric times. The area within three kilometers of my home used to be a mulberry forest during the Joseon dynasty, where silkworms were fed with mulberry leaves. In order to raise the historical awareness of this fact, the government has planted mulberry trees. The seeds from these trees also have spread by birds here and there nearby the soundproof walls of the city expressway that has been built around the 0000 Olympics. The area near these walls, which nobody bothers to pay attention to, had been left free from major intervention, and this is where I first found my treasures. As I fell deeper into bow making, I began to search far and beyond my neighborhood. When I went on school field trips, family vacations, or simply on my way home from extracurricular classes, I wandered around wooded areas and gathered tree branches with the tools that I sneaked inside my school bag. And they would be somethings like saws, knives, sickles and axes that I covered up with a piece of towel. I would bring the branches home, riding buses and subways, barely holding them in my hands. And I did not bring the tools here to Long Beach. Airport security. (Laughter) In the privacy of my room, covered in sawdust, I would saw, trim and polish wood all night long until a bow took shape. One day, I was changing the shape of a bamboo piece and ended up setting the place on fire. Where? The rooftop of my apartment building, a place where 00 families call home. A customer from a department store across from my building called 000, and I ran downstairs to tell my mom with half of my hair burned. I want to take this opportunity to tell my mom, in the audience today: Mom, I was really sorry, and I will be more careful with open fire from now on. My mother had to do a lot of explaining, telling people that her son did not commit a premeditated arson. I also researched extensively on bows around the world. In that process, I tried to combine the different bows from across time and places to create the most effective bow. I also worked with many different types of wood, such as maple, yew and mulberry, and did many shooting experiments in the wooded area near the urban expressway that I mentioned before. The most effective bow for me would be like this. One: Curved tips can maximize the springiness when you draw and shoot the arrow. Two: Belly is drawn inward for higher draw weight, which means more power. Three: Sinew used in the outer layer of the limb for maximum tension storage. And four: Horn used to store energy in compression. After fixing, breaking, redesigning, mending, bending and amending, my ideal bow began to take shape, and when it was finally done, it looked like this. I was so proud of myself for inventing a perfect bow on my own. This is a picture of Korean traditional bows taken from a museum, and see how my bow resembles them. Thanks to my ancestors for robbing me of my invention. (Laughter) Through bowmaking, I came in contact with part of my heritage. Learning the information that has accumulated over time and reading the message left by my ancestors were better than any consolation therapy or piece of advice any living adults could give me. You see, I searched far and wide, but never bothered to look close and near. From this realization, I began to take interest in Korean history, which had never inspired me before. In the end, the grass is often greener on my side of the fence, although we don't realize it. Now, I am going to show you how my bow works. And let's see how this one works. This is a bamboo bow, with 00-pound draw weights. (Noise of shooting arrow) (Applause) A bow may function in a simple mechanism, but in order to make a good bow, a great amount of sensitivity is required. You need to console and communicate with the wood material. Each fiber in the wood has its own reason and function for being, and only through cooperation and harmony among them comes a great bow. I may be an [odd] student with unconventional interests, but I hope I am making a contribution by sharing my story with all of you. My ideal world is a place where no one is left behind, where everyone is needed exactly where they are, like the fibers and the tendons in a bow, a place where the strong is flexible and the vulnerable is resilient. The bow resembles me, and I resemble the bow. Now, I am shooting a part of myself to you. No, better yet, a part of my mind has just been shot over to your mind. Did it strike you? Thank you. (Applause)

Three years ago, I was standing about a hundred yards from Chernobyl nuclear reactor number four. My Geiger counter dosimeter, which measures radiation, was going berserk, and the closer I got, the more frenetic it became, and frantic. My God. I was there covering the 00th anniversary of the world's worst nuclear accident, as you can see by the look on my face, reluctantly so, but with good reason, because the nuclear fire that burned for 00 days back in 0000 released 000 times as much radiation as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and the sarcophagus, which is the covering over reactor number four, which was hastily built 00 years ago, now sits cracked and rusted and leaking radiation. So I was filming. I just wanted to get the job done and get out of there fast. But then, I looked into the distance, and I saw some smoke coming from a farmhouse, and I'm thinking, who could be living here? I mean, after all, Chernobyl's soil, water and air, are among the most highly contaminated on Earth, and the reactor sits at the the center of a tightly regulated exclusion zone, or dead zone, and it's a nuclear police state, complete with border guards. You have to have dosimeter at all times, clicking away, you have to have a government minder, and there's draconian radiation rules and constant contamination monitoring. The point being, no human being should be living anywhere near the dead zone. But they are. It turns out an unlikely community of some 000 people are living inside the zone. They're called self-settlers. And almost all of them are women, the men having shorter lifespans in part due to overuse of alcohol, cigarettes, if not radiation. Hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated at the time of the accident, but not everybody accepted that fate. The women in the zone, now in their 00s and 00s, are the last survivors of a group who defied authorities and, it would seem, common sense, and returned to their ancestral homes inside the zone. They did so illegally. As one woman put it to a soldier who was trying to evacuate her for a second time, "Shoot me and dig the grave. Otherwise, I'm going home." Now why would they return to such deadly soil? I mean, were they unaware of the risks or crazy enough to ignore them, or both? The thing is, they see their lives and the risks they run decidedly differently. Now around Chernobyl, there are scattered ghost villages, eerily silent, strangely charming, bucolic, totally contaminated. Many were bulldozed under at the time of the accident, but a few are left like this, kind of silent vestiges to the tragedy. Others have a few residents in them, one or two "babushkas," or "babas," which are the Russian and Ukrainian words for grandmother. Another village might have six or seven residents. So this is the strange demographic of the zone -- isolated alone together. And when I made my way to that piping chimney I'd seen in the distance, I saw Hanna Zavorotnya, and I met her. She's the self-declared mayor of Kapavati village, population eight. (Laughter) And she said to me, when I asked her the obvious, "Radiation doesn't scare me. Starvation does." And you have to remember, these women have survived the worst atrocities of the 00th century. Stalin's enforced famines of the 0000s, the Holodomor, killed millions of Ukrainians, and they faced the Nazis in the '00s, who came through slashing, burning, raping, and in fact many of these women were shipped to Germany as forced labor. So when a couple decades into Soviet rule, Chernobyl happened, they were unwilling to flee in the face of an enemy that was invisible. So they returned to their villages and are told they're going to get sick and die soon, but five happy years, their logic goes, is better than 00 stuck in a high rise on the outskirts of Kiev, separated from the graves of their mothers and fathers and babies, the whisper of stork wings on a spring afternoon. For them, environmental contamination may not be the worst sort of devastation. It turns out this holds true for other species as well. Wild boar, lynx, moose, they've all returned to the region in force, the very real, very negative effects of radiation being trumped by the upside of a mass exodus of humans. The dead zone, it turns out, is full of life. And there is a kind of heroic resilience, a kind of plain-spoken pragmatism to those who start their day at 0 a.m. pulling water from a well and end it at midnight poised to beat a bucket with a stick and scare off wild boar that might mess with their potatoes, their only company a bit of homemade moonshine vodka. And there's a patina of simple defiance among them. "They told us our legs would hurt, and they do. So what?" I mean, what about their health? The benefits of hardy, physical living, but an environment made toxic by a complicated, little-understood enemy, radiation. It's incredibly difficult to parse. Health studies from the region are conflicting and fraught. The World Health Organization puts the number of Chernobyl-related deaths at 0,000, eventually. Greenpeace and other organizations put that number in the tens of thousands. Now everybody agrees that thyroid cancers are sky high, and that Chernobyl evacuees suffer the trauma of relocated peoples everywhere: higher levels of anxiety, depression, alcoholism, unemployment and, importantly, disrupted social networks. Now, like many of you, I have moved maybe 00, 00 times in my life. Home is a transient concept. I have a deeper connection to my laptop than any bit of soil. So it's hard for us to understand, but home is the entire cosmos of the rural babushka, and connection to the land is palpable. And perhaps because these Ukrainian women were schooled under the Soviets and versed in the Russian poets, aphorisms about these ideas slip from their mouths all the time. "If you leave, you die." "Those who left are worse off now. They are dying of sadness." "Motherland is motherland. I will never leave." What sounds like faith, soft faith, may actually be fact, because the surprising truth -- I mean, there are no studies, but the truth seems to be that these women who returned to their homes and have lived on some of the most radioactive land on Earth for the last 00 years, have actually outlived their counterparts who accepted relocation, by some estimates up to 00 years. How could this be? Here's a theory: Could it be that those ties to ancestral soil, the soft variables reflected in their aphorisms, actually affect longevity? The power of motherland so fundamental to that part of the world seems palliative. Home and community are forces that rival even radiation. Now radiation or not, these women are at the end of their lives. In the next decade, the zone's human residents will be gone, and it will revert to a wild, radioactive place, full only of animals and occasionally daring, flummoxed scientists. But the spirit and existence of the babushkas, whose numbers have been halved in the three years I've known them, will leave us with powerful new templates to think about and grapple with, about the relative nature of risk, about transformative connections to home, and about the magnificent tonic of personal agency and self-determination. Thank you. (Applause)

I was in New York during Hurricane Sandy, and this little white dog called Maui was staying with me. Half the city was dark because of a power cut, and I was living on the dark side. Now, Maui was terrified of the dark, so I had to carry him up the stairs, actually down the stairs first, for his walk, and then bring him back up. I was also hauling gallons of bottles of water up to the seventh floor every day. And through all of this, I had to hold a torch between my teeth. The stores nearby were out of flashlights and batteries and bread. For a shower, I walked 00 blocks to a branch of my gym. But these were not the major preoccupations of my day. It was just as critical for me to be the first person in at a cafe nearby with extension cords and chargers to juice my multiple devices. I started to prospect under the benches of bakeries and the entrances of pastry shops for plug points. I wasn't the only one. Even in the rain, people stood between Madison and 0th Avenue under their umbrellas charging their cell phones from outlets on the street. Nature had just reminded us that it was stronger than all our technology, and yet here we were, obsessed about being wired. I think there's nothing like a crisis to tell you what's really important and what's not, and Sandy made me realize that our devices and their connectivity matter to us right up there with food and shelter. The self as we once knew it no longer exists, and I think that an abstract, digital universe has become a part of our identity, and I want to talk to you about what I think that means. I'm a novelist, and I'm interested in the self because the self and fiction have a lot in common. They're both stories, interpretations. You and I can experience things without a story. We might run up the stairs too quickly and we might get breathless. But the larger sense that we have of our lives, the slightly more abstract one, is indirect. Our story of our life is based on direct experience, but it's embellished. A novel needs scene after scene to build, and the story of our life needs an arc as well. It needs months and years. Discrete moments from our lives are its chapters. But the story is not about these chapters. It's the whole book. It's not only about the heartbreak and the happiness, the victories and the disappointments, but it's because how because of these, and sometimes, more importantly, in spite of these, we find our place in the world and we change it and we change ourselves. Our story, therefore, needs two dimensions of time: a long arc of time that is our lifespan, and the timeframe of direct experience that is the moment. Now the self that experiences directly can only exist in the moment, but the one that narrates needs several moments, a whole sequence of them, and that's why our full sense of self needs both immersive experience and the flow of time. Now, the flow of time is embedded in everything, in the erosion of a grain of sand, in the budding of a little bud into a rose. Without it, we would have no music. Our own emotions and state of mind often encode time, regret or nostalgia about the past, hope or dread about the future. I think that technology has altered that flow of time. The overall time that we have for our narrative, our lifespan, has been increasing, but the smallest measure, the moment, has shrunk. It has shrunk because our instruments enable us in part to measure smaller and smaller units of time, and this in turn has given us a more granular understanding of the material world, and this granular understanding has generated reams of data that our brains can no longer comprehend and for which we need more and more complicated computers. All of this to say that the gap between what we can perceive and what we can measure is only going to widen. Science can do things with and in a picosecond, but you and I are never going to have the inner experience of a millionth of a millionth of a second. You and I answer only to nature's rhythm and flow, to the sun, the moon and the seasons, and this is why we need that long arc of time with the past, the present and the future to see things for what they are, to separate signal from noise and the self from sensations. We need time's arrow to understand cause and effect, not just in the material world, but in our own intentions and our motivations. What happens when that arrow goes awry? What happens when time warps? So many of us today have the sensation that time's arrow is pointing everywhere and nowhere at once. This is because time doesn't flow in the digital world in the same way that it does in the natural one. We all know that the Internet has shrunk space as well as time. Far away over there is now here. News from India is a stream on my smartphone app whether I'm in New York or New Delhi. And that's not all. Your last job, your dinner reservations from last year, your former friends, lie on a flat plain with today's friends, because the Internet also archives, and it warps the past. With no distinction left between the past, the present and the future, and the here or there, we are left with this moment everywhere, this moment that I'll call the digital now. Just how can we prioritize in the landscape of the digital now? This digital now is not the present, because it's always a few seconds ahead, with Twitter streams that are already trending and news from other time zones. This isn't the now of a shooting pain in your foot or the second that you bite into a pastry or the three hours that you lose yourself in a great book. This now bears very little physical or psychological reference to our own state. Its focus, instead, is to distract us at every turn on the road. Every digital landmark is an invitation to leave what you are doing now to go somewhere else and do something else. Are you reading an interview by an author? Why not buy his book? Tweet it. Share it. Like it. Find other books exactly like his. Find other people reading those books. Travel can be liberating, but when it is incessant, we become permanent exiles without repose. Choice is freedom, but not when it's constantly for its own sake. Not just is the digital now far from the present, but it's in direct competition with it, and this is because not just am I absent from it, but so are you. Not just are we absent from it, but so is everyone else. And therein lies its greatest convenience and horror. I can order foreign language books in the middle of the night, shop for Parisian macarons, and leave video messages that get picked up later. At all times, I can operate at a different rhythm and pace from you, while I sustain the illusion that I'm tapped into you in real time. Sandy was a reminder of how such an illusion can shatter. There were those with power and water, and those without. There are those who went back to their lives, and those who are still displaced after so many months. For some reason, technology seems to perpetuate the illusion for those who have it that everyone does, and then, like an ironic slap in the face, it makes it true. For example, it's said that there are more people in India with access to cell phones than toilets. Now if this rift, which is already so great in many parts of the world, between the lack of infrastructure and the spread of technology, isn't somehow bridged, there will be ruptures between the digital and the real. For us as individuals who live in the digital now and spend most of our waking moments in it, the challenge is to live in two streams of time that are parallel and almost simultaneous. How does one live inside distraction? We might think that those younger than us, those who are born into this, will adapt more naturally. Possibly, but I remember my childhood. I remember my grandfather revising the capitals of the world with me. Buda and Pest were separated by the Danube, and Vienna had a Spanish riding school. If I were a child today, I could easily learn this information with apps and hyperlinks, but it really wouldn't be the same, because much later, I went to Vienna, and I went to the Spanish riding school, and I could feel my grandfather right beside me. Night after night, he took me up on the terrace, on his shoulders, and pointed out Jupiter and Saturn and the Great Bear to me. And even here, when I look at the Great Bear, I get back that feeling of being a child, hanging onto his head and trying to balance myself on his shoulder, and I can get back that feeling of being a child again. What I had with my grandfather was wrapped so often in information and knowledge and fact, but it was about so much more than information or knowledge or fact. Time-warping technology challenges our deepest core, because we are able to archive the past and some of it becomes hard to forget, even as the current moment is increasingly unmemorable. We want to clutch, and we are left instead clutching at a series of static moments. They're like soap bubbles that disappear when we touch them. By archiving everything, we think that we can store it, but time is not data. It cannot be stored. You and I know exactly what it means like to be truly present in a moment. It might have happened while we were playing an instrument, or looking into the eyes of someone we've known for a very long time. At such moments, our selves are complete. The self that lives in the long narrative arc and the self that experiences the moment become one. The present encapsulates the past and a promise for the future. The present joins a flow of time from before and after. I first experienced these feelings with my grandmother. I wanted to learn to skip, and she found an old rope and she tucked up her sari and she jumped over it. I wanted to learn to cook, and she kept me in the kitchen, cutting, cubing and chopping for a whole month. My grandmother taught me that things happen in the time they take, that time can't be fought, and because it will pass and it will move, we owe the present moment our full attention. Attention is time. One of my yoga instructors once said that love is attention, and definitely from my grandmother, love and attention were one and the same thing. The digital world cannibalizes time, and in doing so, I want to suggest that what it threatens is the completeness of ourselves. It threatens the flow of love. But we don't need to let it. We can choose otherwise. We've seen again and again just how creative technology can be, and in our lives and in our actions, we can choose those solutions and those innovations and those moments that restore the flow of time instead of fragmenting it. We can slow down and we can tune in to the ebb and flow of time. We can choose to take time back. Thank you. (Applause)

I'm going to start by asking you a question: Is anyone familiar with the blue algae problem? Okay, so most of you are. I think we can all agree it's a serious issue. Nobody wants to drink blue algae-contaminated water, or swim in a blue algae-infested lake. Right? I hope you won't be disappointed, but today, I won't be talking about blue algae. Instead, I'll be talking about the main cause at the root of this issue, which I will be referring to as the phosphorus crisis. Why have I chosen to talk to you about the phosphorus crisis today? For the simple reason that nobody else is talking about it. And by the end of my presentation, I hope that the general public will be more aware of this crisis and this issue. Now, the problem is that if I ask, why do we find ourselves in this situation with blue algae? The answer is that it comes from how we farm. We use fertilizers in our farming, chemical fertilizers. Why do we use chemical fertilizers in agriculture? Basically, to help plants grow and to produce a better yield. The issue is that this is set to engender an environmental problem that is without precedent. Before going further, let me give you a crash course in plant biology. So, what does a plant need in order to grow? A plant, quite simply, needs light, it needs CO0, but even more importantly, it needs nutrients, which it draws from the soil. Several of these nutrients are essential chemical elements: phosphorus, nitrogen and calcium. So, the plant's roots will extract these resources. Today I'll be focusing on a major problem that is linked to phosphorus. Why phosphorus in particular? Because it is the most problematic chemical element. By the end of my presentation, you will have seen what these problems are, and where we are today. Phosphorus is a chemical element that is essential to life. This is a very important point. I'd like everyone to understand precisely what the phosphorus issue is. Phosphorus is a key component in several molecules, in many of our molecules of life. Experts in the field will know that cellular communication is phosphorus-based -- phosphorylation, dephosphorylation. Cell membranes are phosphorus-based: These are called phospholipids. The energy in all living things, ATP, is phosphorus-based. And more importantly still, phosphorus is a key component of DNA, something everyone is familiar with, and which is shown in this image. DNA is our genetic heritage. It is extremely important, and once again, phosphorus is a key player. Now, where do we find this phosphorus? As humans, where do we find it? As I explained earlier, plants extract phosphorus from the soil, through water. So, we humans get it from the things we eat: plants, vegetables, fruits, and also from eggs, meat and milk. It's true that some humans eat better than others. Some are happier than others. And now, looking at this picture, which speaks for itself, we see modern agriculture, which I also refer to as intensive agriculture. Intensive agriculture is based on the use of chemical fertilizers. Without them, we would not manage to produce enough to feed the world's population. Speaking of humans, there are currently 0 billion of us on Earth. In less than 00 years, there will be 0 billion of us. And the question is a simple one: Do we have enough phosphorus to feed our future generations? So, in order to understand these issues, where do we find our phosphorus? Let me explain. But first, let's just suppose that we are using 000 percent of a given dose of phosphorus. Only 00 percent of this 000 percent goes to the plant. Eighty-five percent is lost. It goes into the soil, ending its journey in the lakes, resulting in lakes with extra phosphorus, which leads to the blue algae problem. So, you'll see there's a problem here, something that is illogical. A hundred percent of the phosphorus is used, but only 00 percent goes to the plant. You're going to tell me it's wasteful. Yes, it is. What is worse is that it is very expensive. Nobody wants to throw their money out the window, but unfortunately that's what is happening here. Eighty percent of each dose of phosphorus is lost. Modern agriculture depends on phosphorus. And because in order to get 00 percent of it to the plant, all the rest is lost, we have to add more and more. Now, where will we get this phosphorus from? Basically, we get it out of mines. This is the cover of an extraordinary article published in Nature in 0000, which really launched the discussion about the phosphorus crisis. Phosphorus, a nutrient essential to life, which is becoming increasingly scarce, yet nobody is talking about it. And everyone agrees: Politicians and scientists are in agreement that we are headed for a phosphorus crisis. What you are seeing here is an open-pit mine in the U.S., and to give you an idea of the dimensions of this mine, if you look in the top right-hand corner, the little crane you can see, that is a giant crane. So that really puts it into perspective. So, we get phosphorus from mines. And if I make a comparison with oil, there's an oil crisis, we talk about it, we talk about global warming, yet we never mention the phosphorus crisis. To come back to the oil problem, oil is something we can replace. We can use biofuels, or solar power, or hydropower, but phosphorus is an essential element, indispensable to life, and we can't replace it. What is the current state of the world's phosphorus reserves? This graph gives you a rough idea of where we are today. The black line represents predictions for phosphorus reserves. In 0000, we'll reach the peak. By the end of this century, it will all be gone. The dotted line shows where we are today. As you can see, they meet in 0000, I'll be retired by then. But we are indeed heading for a major crisis, and I'd like people to become aware of this problem. Do we have a solution? What are we to do? We are faced with a paradox. Less and less phosphorus will be available. By 0000 there will be 0 billion of us, and according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, we will need to produce twice as much food in 0000 than we do today. So, we will have less phosphorus, but we'll need to produce more food. What should we do? It truly is a paradoxical situation. Do we have a solution, or an alternative which will allow us to optimize phosphorus use? Remember that 00 percent is destined to be lost. The solution I'm offering today is one that has existed for a very long time, even before plants existed on Earth, and it's a microscopic mushroom that is very mysterious, very simple, and yet also extremely complex. I've been fascinated by this little mushroom for over 00 years now. It has led me to further my research and to use it as a model for my laboratory research. This mushroom exists in symbiosis with the roots. By symbiosis, I mean a bidirectional and mutually beneficial association which is also called mycorrhiza. This slide illustrates the elements of a mycorrhiza. You're looking at the root of wheat, one of the world's most important plants. Normally, a root will find phosphorus all by itself. It will go in search of phosphorus, but only within the one millimeter which surrounds it. Beyond one millimeter, the root is ineffective. It cannot go further in its search for phosphorus. Now, imagine this tiny, microscopic mushroom. It grows much faster, and is much better designed to seek out phosphorus. It can go beyond the root's one-millimeter scope to seek out phosphorus. I haven't invented anything at all; it's a biotechnology that has existed for 000 million years. And over time, this mushroom has evolved and adapted to seek out even the tiniest trace of phosphorus, and to put it to use, to make it available to the plant. What you're seeing here, in the real world, is a carrot root, and the mushroom with its very fine filaments. Looking closer, we can see that this mushroom is very gentle in its penetration. It will proliferate between the root's cells, eventually penetrating a cell and starting to form a typical arbuscular structure, which will considerably increase the exchange interface between the plant and the mushroom. And it is through this structure that mutual exchanges will occur. It's a win-win trade: I give you phosphorus, and you feed me. True symbiosis. Now let's add a mycorrhiza plant into the diagram I used earlier. And instead of using a 000 percent dose, I'm going to reduce it to 00 percent. You'll see that of this 00 percent, most will benefit the plant, more than 00 percent. A very small amount of phosphorus will remain in the soil. That's completely natural. What's more is that in certain cases, we don't even need to add phosphorus. If you recall the graphs I showed you earlier, 00 percent of phosphorus is lost in the soil, and the plants are unable to access it. Even though it is present in the soil, it is in insoluble form. The plant is only able to seek out soluble forms. The mushroom is capable of dissolving this insoluble form and making it available for the plant to use. To further support my argument, here is a picture that speaks for itself. These are trials in a field of sorghum. On the left side, you see the yield produced using conventional agriculture, with a 000 percent phosphorus dose. On the other side, the dose was reduced to 00 percent, and just look at the yield. With only a half-dose, we achieved a better yield. This is to show you that this method works. And in some cases, in Cuba, Mexico and India, the dose can be reduced to 00 percent, and in several other cases, there's no need to add any phosphorus at all, because the mushrooms are so well adapted to finding phosphorus and drawing it from the soil. This is an example of soy production in Canada. Mycorrhiza was used in one field but not in the other. And here, where blue indicates a better yield, and yellow a weaker yield. The black rectangle is the plot from which the mycorrhiza was added. In other words, as I already said, I have invented nothing. Mycorrhiza has existed for 000 million years, and it has even helped modern-day plant species to diversify. So, this it isn't something that is still undergoing lab tests. Mycorrhiza exists, it works, it's produced at an industrial scale and commercialized worldwide. The problem is that people are not aware of it. People like food producers and farmers are still not aware of this problem. We have a technology that works, and one that, if used correctly, will alleviate some of the pressure we are putting on the world's phosphorus reserves. In conclusion, I am a scientist and a dreamer. I'm passionate about this topic. So if you were to ask me what my retirement dream is, which will be at the moment we reach that phosphorus peak, it would be that we use one label, "Made with mycorrhiza," and that my children and grandchildren buy products bearing that label too. Thank you for your attention. (Applause)

Have you ever asked yourselves why it is that companies, the really cool companies, the innovative ones, the creative, new economy-type companies -- Apple, Google, Facebook -- are coming out of one particular country, the United States of America? Usually when I say this, someone says, "Spotify! That's Europe." But, yeah. It has not had the impact that these other companies have had. Now what I do is I'm an economist, and I actually study the relationship between innovation and economic growth at the level of the company, the industry and the nation, and I work with policymakers worldwide, especially in the European Commission, but recently also in interesting places like China, and I can tell you that that question is on the tip of all of their tongues: Where are the European Googles? What is the secret behind the Silicon Valley growth model, which they understand is different from this old economy growth model? And what is interesting is that often, even if we're in the 00st century, we kind of come down in the end to these ideas of market versus state. It's talked about in these modern ways, but the idea is that somehow, behind places like Silicon Valley, the secret have been different types of market-making mechanisms, the private initiative, whether this be about a dynamic venture capital sector that's actually able to provide that high-risk finance to these innovative companies, the gazelles as we often call them, which traditional banks are scared of, or different types of really successful commercialization policies which actually allow these companies to bring these great inventions, their products, to the market and actually get over this really scary Death Valley period in which many companies instead fail. But what really interests me, especially nowadays and because of what's happening politically around the world, is the language that's used, the narrative, the discourse, the images, the actual words. So we often are presented with the kind of words like that the private sector is also much more innovative because it's able to think out of the box. They are more dynamic. Think of Steve Jobs' really inspirational speech to the 0000 graduating class at Stanford, where he said to be innovative, you've got to stay hungry, stay foolish. Right? So these guys are kind of the hungry and foolish and colorful guys, right? And in places like Europe, it might be more equitable, we might even be a bit better dressed and eat better than the U.S., but the problem is this damn public sector. It's a bit too big, and it hasn't actually allowed these things like dynamic venture capital and commercialization to actually be able to really be as fruitful as it could. And even really respectable newspapers, some that I'm actually subscribed to, the words they use are, you know, the state as this Leviathan. Right? This monster with big tentacles. They're very explicit in these editorials. They say, "You know, the state, it's necessary to fix these little market failures when you have public goods or different types of negative externalities like pollution, but you know what, what is the next big revolution going to be after the Internet? We all hope it might be something green, or all of this nanotech stuff, and in order for that stuff to happen," they say -- this was a special issue on the next industrial revolution -- they say, "the state, just stick to the basics, right? Fund the infrastructure. Fund the schools. Even fund the basic research, because this is popularly recognized, in fact, as a big public good which private companies don't want to invest in, do that, but you know what? Leave the rest to the revolutionaries." Those colorful, out-of-the-box kind of thinkers. They're often called garage tinkerers, because some of them actually did some things in garages, even though that's partly a myth. And so what I want to do with you in, oh God, only 00 minutes, is to really think again this juxtaposition, because it actually has massive, massive implications beyond innovation policy, which just happens to be the area that I often talk with with policymakers. It has huge implications, even with this whole notion that we have on where, when and why we should actually be cutting back on public spending and different types of public services which, of course, as we know, are increasingly being outsourced because of this juxtaposition. Right? I mean, the reason that we need to maybe have free schools or charter schools is in order to make them more innovative without being emburdened by this heavy hand of the state curriculum, or something. So these kind of words are constantly, these juxtapositions come up everywhere, not just with innovation policy. And so to think again, there's no reason that you should believe me, so just think of some of the smartest revolutionary things that you have in your pockets and do not turn it on, but you might want to take it out, your iPhone. Ask who actually funded the really cool, revolutionary thinking-out-of-the-box things in the iPhone. What actually makes your phone a smartphone, basically, instead of a stupid phone? So the Internet, which you can surf the web anywhere you are in the world; GPS, where you can actually know where you are anywhere in the world; the touchscreen display, which makes it also a really easy-to-use phone for anybody. These are the very smart, revolutionary bits about the iPhone, and they're all government-funded. And the point is that the Internet was funded by DARPA, U.S. Department of Defense. GPS was funded by the military's Navstar program. Even Siri was actually funded by DARPA. The touchscreen display was funded by two public grants by the CIA and the NSF to two public university researchers at the University of Delaware. Now, you might be thinking, "Well, she's just said the word 'defense' and 'military' an awful lot," but what's really interesting is that this is actually true in sector after sector and department after department. So the pharmaceutical industry, which I am personally very interested in because I've actually had the fortune to study it in quite some depth, is wonderful to be asking this question about the revolutionary versus non-revolutionary bits, because each and every medicine can actually be divided up on whether it really is revolutionary or incremental. So the new molecular entities with priority rating are the revolutionary new drugs, whereas the slight variations of existing drugs -- Viagra, different color, different dosage -- are the less revolutionary ones. And it turns out that a full 00 percent of the new molecular entities with priority rating are actually funded in boring, Kafkian public sector labs. This doesn't mean that Big Pharma is not spending on innovation. They do. They spend on the marketing part. They spend on the D part of R&D. They spend an awful lot on buying back their stock, which is quite problematic. In fact, companies like Pfizer and Amgen recently have spent more money in buying back their shares to boost their stock price than on R&D, but that's a whole different TED Talk which one day I'd be fascinated to tell you about. Now, what's interesting in all of this is the state, in all these examples, was doing so much more than just fixing market failures. It was actually shaping and creating markets. It was funding not only the basic research, which again is a typical public good, but even the applied research. It was even, God forbid, being a venture capitalist. So these SBIR and SDTR programs, which give small companies early-stage finance have not only been extremely important compared to private venture capital, but also have become increasingly important. Why? Because, as many of us know, V.C. is actually quite short-term. They want their returns in three to five years. Innovation takes a much longer time than that, 00 to 00 years. And so this whole notion -- I mean, this is the point, right? Who's actually funding the hard stuff? Of course, it's not just the state. The private sector does a lot. But the narrative that we've always been told is the state is important for the basics, but not really providing that sort of high-risk, revolutionary thinking out of the box. In all these sectors, from funding the Internet to doing the spending, but also the envisioning, the strategic vision, for these investments, it was actually coming within the state. The nanotechnology sector is actually fascinating to study this, because the word itself, nanotechnology, came from within government. And so there's huge implications of this. First of all, of course I'm not someone, this old-fashioned person, market versus state. What we all know in dynamic capitalism is that what we actually need are public-private partnerships. But the point is, by constantly depicting the state part as necessary but actually -- pffff -- a bit boring and often a bit dangerous kind of Leviathan, I think we've actually really stunted the possibility to build these public-private partnerships in a really dynamic way. Even the words that we often use to justify the "P" part, the public part -- well, they're both P's -- with public-private partnerships is in terms of de-risking. What the public sector did in all these examples I just gave you, and there's many more, which myself and other colleagues have been looking at, is doing much more than de-risking. It's kind of been taking on that risk. Bring it on. It's actually been the one thinking out of the box. But also, I'm sure you all have had experience with local, regional, national governments, and you're kind of like, "You know what, that Kafkian bureaucrat, I've met him." That whole juxtaposition thing, it's kind of there. Well, there's a self-fulfilling prophecy. By talking about the state as kind of irrelevant, boring, it's sometimes that we actually create those organizations in that way. So what we have to actually do is build these entrepreneurial state organizations. DARPA, that funded the Internet and Siri, actually thought really hard about this, how to welcome failure, because you will fail. You will fail when you innovative. One out of 00 experiments has any success. And the V.C. guys know this, and they're able to actually fund the other losses from that one success. And this brings me, actually, probably, to the biggest implication, and this has huge implications beyond innovation. If the state is more than just a market fixer, if it actually is a market shaper, and in doing that has had to take on this massive risk, what happened to the reward? We all know, if you've ever taken a finance course, the first thing you're taught is sort of the risk-reward relationship, and so some people are foolish enough or probably smart enough if they have time to wait, to actually invest in stocks, because they're higher risk which over time will make a greater reward than bonds, that whole risk-reward thing. Well, where's the reward for the state of having taken on these massive risks and actually been foolish enough to have done the Internet? The Internet was crazy. It really was. I mean, the probability of failure was massive. You had to be completely nuts to do it, and luckily, they were. Now, we don't even get to this question about rewards unless you actually depict the state as this risk-taker. And the problem is that economists often think, well, there is a reward back to the state. It's tax. You know, the companies will pay tax, the jobs they create will create growth so people who get those jobs and their incomes rise will come back to the state through the tax mechanism. Well, unfortunately, that's not true. Okay, it's not true because many of the jobs that are created go abroad. Globalization, and that's fine. We shouldn't be nationalistic. Let the jobs go where they have to go, perhaps. I mean, one can take a position on that. But also these companies that have actually had this massive benefit from the state -- Apple's a great example. They even got the first -- well, not the first, but 000,000 dollars actually went to Apple, the company, through this SBIC program, which predated the SBIR program, as well as, as I said before, all the technologies behind the iPhone. And yet we know they legally, as many other companies, pay very little tax back. So what we really need to actually rethink is should there perhaps be a return-generating mechanism that's much more direct than tax. Why not? It could happen perhaps through equity. This, by the way, in the countries that are actually thinking about this strategically, countries like Finland in Scandinavia, but also in China and Brazil, they're retaining equity in these investments. Sitra funded Nokia, kept equity, made a lot of money, it's a public funding agency in Finland, which then funded the next round of Nokias. The Brazilian Development Bank, which is providing huge amounts of funds today to clean technology, they just announced a 00 billion program for the future on this, is retaining equity in these investments. So to put it provocatively, had the U.S. government thought about this, and maybe just brought back just something called an innovation fund, you can bet that, you know, if even just .00 percent of the profits from what the Internet produced had come back to that innovation fund, there would be so much more money to spend today on green technology. Instead, many of the state budgets which in theory are trying to do that are being constrained. But perhaps even more important, we heard before about the one percent, the 00 percent. If the state is thought about in this more strategic way, as one of the lead players in the value creation mechanism, because that's what we're talking about, right? Who are the different players in creating value in the economy, and is the state's role, has it been sort of dismissed as being a backseat player? If we can actually have a broader theory of value creation and allow us to actually admit what the state has been doing and reap something back, it might just be that in the next round, and I hope that we all hope that the next big revolution will in fact be green, that that period of growth will not only be smart, innovation-led, not only green, but also more inclusive, so that the public schools in places like Silicon Valley can actually also benefit from that growth, because they have not. Thank you. (Applause)

My work focuses on the connection of both thinking about our community life being part of the environment where architecture grows from the natural local conditions and traditions. Today I brought two recent projects as an example of this. Both projects are in emerging countries, one in Ethiopia and another one in Tunisia. And also they have in common that the different analyses from different perspectives becomes an essential part of the final piece of architecture. The first example started with an invitation to design a multistory shopping mall in Ethiopia's capital city Addis Ababa. And this is the type of building we were shown as an example, to my team and myself, of what we had to design. At first, the first thing I thought was, I want to run away. (Laughter) After seeing a few of these buildings -- there are many in the city -- we realized that they have three very big points. First, these buildings, they are almost empty because they have very large shops where people cannot afford to buy things. Second, they need tons of energy to perform because of the skin treatment with glass that creates heat in the inside, and then you need a lot of cooling. In a city where this shouldn't happen because they have really mild weather that ranges from 00 to 00 degrees the whole year. And third is that their image has nothing to do with Africa and with Ethiopia. It is a pity in a place that has such rich culture and traditions. Also during our first visit to Ethiopia, I was really captivated by the old merkato that is this open-air structure where thousands of people, they go and buy things every day from small vendors. And also it has this idea of the public space that uses the outdoors to create activity. So I thought, this is what I really want to design, not a shopping mall. But the question was how we could do a multistory, contemporary building with these principles. The next challenge was when we looked at the site, that is, in a really growing area of the city, where most of these buildings that you see in the image, they were not there. And it's also between two parallel streets that don't have any connection for hundreds of meters. So the first thing we did was to create a connection between these two streets, putting all the entrances of the building. And this extends with an inclined atrium that creates an open-air space in the building that self-protects itself with its own shape from the sun and the rain. And around this void we placed this idea of the market with small shops, that change in each floor because of the shape of the void. I also thought, how to close the building? And I really wanted to find a solution that would respond to the local climate conditions. And I started thinking about the textile like a shell made of concrete with perforations that would let the air in, and also the light, but in a filtered way. And then the inspiration came from these beautiful patterns of the Ethiopian women's dresses. That they have fractal geometry properties and this helped me to shape the whole facade. And we are building that with these small prefabricated pieces that are the windows that let the air and the light in a controlled way inside the building. And this is complemented by these small colored glasses that use the light from the inside of the building to light up the building at night. With these ideas it was not easy first to convince the developers because they were like, "This is not a shopping mall. We didn't ask for that." But then we all realized that this idea of the market happened to be a lot more profitable than the idea of the shopping mall because basically they had more shops to sell. And also that the idea of the facade was much, much cheaper, not only because of the material compared with the glass, but also because we didn't need to have air conditioning anymore. So we created some budget savings that we used to implement the project. And the first implementation was to think about how we could make the building self-sufficient in terms of energy in a city that has electricity cuts almost every day. So we created a huge asset by placing photovoltaics there on the roof. And then under those panels we thought about the roof like a new public space with gathering areas and bars that would create this urban oasis. And these porches on the roof, all together they collect the water to reuse for sanitation on the inside. Hopefully by the beginning of next year, because we are already on the fifth floor of the construction. The second example is a master plan of 0,000 apartments and facilities in the city of Tunis. And for doing such a big project, the biggest project I've ever designed, I really needed to understand the city of Tunis, but also its surroundings and the tradition and culture. During that analysis I paid special attention to the medina that is this 0,000-year-old structure that used to be closed by a wall, opened by twelve different gates, connected by almost straight lines. When I went to the site, the first design operation we did was to extend the existing streets, creating 00 initial blocks similar in size and characteristics to the ones we have in Barcelona and other cities in Europe with these courtyards. On top of that, we selected some strategic points reminded of this idea of the gates and connecting them by straight lines, and this modified this initial pattern. And the last operation was to think about the cell, the small cell of the project, like the apartment, as an essential part of the master plan. And for that I thought, what would be the best orientation in the Mediterranean climate for an apartment? And it's north-south, because it creates a thermal difference between both sides of the house and then a natural ventilation. So we overlap a pattern that makes sure that most of the apartments are perfectly oriented in that direction. And this is the result that is almost like a combination of the European block and the Arab city. It has these blocks with courtyards, and then on the ground floor you have all these connections for the pedestrians. And also it responds to the local regulations that establish a higher density on the upper levels and a lower density on the ground floor. And it also reinforces this idea of the gates. The volume has this connecting shape that shades itself with three different types of apartments and also lets the light go on the ground floor in a very dense neighborhood And in the courtyards there are the different facilities, such as a gym and a kindergarten and close by, a series of commercial [spaces] that bring activity to the ground floor. The roof, which is my favorite space of the project is almost like giving back to the community the space taken by the construction. And it's where all the neighbors, they can go up and socialize, and do activities such as having a two-kilometer run in the morning, jumping from one building to another. These two examples, they have a common approach in the design process. And also, they are in emerging countries where you can see the cities literally growing. In these cities, the impact of architecture in people's lives of today and tomorrow changes the local communities and economies at the same speed as the buildings grow. For this reason, I see even more importance to look at architecture finding simple but affordable solutions that enhance the relationship between the community and the environment and that aim to connect nature and people. Thank you very much. (Applause)

So last year, on the Fourth of July, experiments at the Large Hadron Collider discovered the Higgs boson. It was a historical day. There's no doubt that from now on, the Fourth of July will be remembered not as the day of the Declaration of Independence, but as the day of the discovery of the Higgs boson. Well, at least, here at CERN. But for me, the biggest surprise of that day was that there was no big surprise. In the eye of a theoretical physicist, the Higgs boson is a clever explanation of how some elementary particles gain mass, but it seems a fairly unsatisfactory and incomplete solution. Too many questions are left unanswered. The Higgs boson does not share the beauty, the symmetry, the elegance, of the rest of the elementary particle world. For this reason, the majority of theoretical physicists believe that the Higgs boson could not be the full story. We were expecting new particles and new phenomena accompanying the Higgs boson. Instead, so far, the measurements coming from the LHC show no signs of new particles or unexpected phenomena. Of course, the verdict is not definitive. In 0000, the LHC will almost double the energy of the colliding protons, and these more powerful collisions will allow us to explore further the particle world, and we will certainly learn much more. But for the moment, since we have found no evidence for new phenomena, let us suppose that the particles that we know today, including the Higgs boson, are the only elementary particles in nature, even at energies much larger than what we have explored so far. Let's see where this hypothesis is going to lead us. We will find a surprising and intriguing result about our universe, and to explain my point, let me first tell you what the Higgs is about, and to do so, we have to go back to one tenth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. And according to the Higgs theory, at that instant, a dramatic event took place in the universe. Space-time underwent a phase transition. It was something very similar to the phase transition that occurs when water turns into ice below zero degrees. But in our case, the phase transition is not a change in the way the molecules are arranged inside the material, but is about a change of the very fabric of space-time. During this phase transition, empty space became filled with a substance that we now call Higgs field. And this substance may seem invisible to us, but it has a physical reality. It surrounds us all the time, just like the air we breathe in this room. And some elementary particles interact with this substance, gaining energy in the process. And this intrinsic energy is what we call the mass of a particle, and by discovering the Higgs boson, the LHC has conclusively proved that this substance is real, because it is the stuff the Higgs bosons are made of. And this, in a nutshell, is the essence of the Higgs story. But this story is far more interesting than that. By studying the Higgs theory, theoretical physicists discovered, not through an experiment but with the power of mathematics, that the Higgs field does not necessarily exist only in the form that we observe today. Just like matter can exist as liquid or solid, so the Higgs field, the substance that fills all space-time, could exist in two states. Besides the known Higgs state, there could be a second state in which the Higgs field is billions and billions times denser than what we observe today, and the mere existence of another state of the Higgs field poses a potential problem. This is because, according to the laws of quantum mechanics, it is possible to have transitions between two states, even in the presence of an energy barrier separating the two states, and the phenomenon is called, quite appropriately, quantum tunneling. Because of quantum tunneling, I could disappear from this room and reappear in the next room, practically penetrating the wall. But don't expect me to actually perform the trick in front of your eyes, because the probability for me to penetrate the wall is ridiculously small. You would have to wait a really long time before it happens, but believe me, quantum tunneling is a real phenomenon, and it has been observed in many systems. For instance, the tunnel diode, a component used in electronics, works thanks to the wonders of quantum tunneling. But let's go back to the Higgs field. If the ultra-dense Higgs state existed, then, because of quantum tunneling, a bubble of this state could suddenly appear in a certain place of the universe at a certain time, and it is analogous to what happens when you boil water. Bubbles of vapor form inside the water, then they expand, turning liquid into gas. In the same way, a bubble of the ultra-dense Higgs state could come into existence because of quantum tunneling. The bubble would then expand at the speed of light, invading all space, and turning the Higgs field from the familiar state into a new state. Is this a problem? Yes, it's a big a problem. We may not realize it in ordinary life, but the intensity of the Higgs field is critical for the structure of matter. If the Higgs field were only a few times more intense, we would see atoms shrinking, neutrons decaying inside atomic nuclei, nuclei disintegrating, and hydrogen would be the only possible chemical element in the universe. And the Higgs field, in the ultra-dense Higgs state, is not just a few times more intense than today, but billions of times, and if space-time were filled by this Higgs state, all atomic matter would collapse. No molecular structures would be possible, no life. So, I wonder, is it possible that in the future, the Higgs field will undergo a phase transition and, through quantum tunneling, will be transformed into this nasty, ultra-dense state? In other words, I ask myself, what is the fate of the Higgs field in our universe? And the crucial ingredient necessary to answer this question is the Higgs boson mass. And experiments at the LHC found that the mass of the Higgs boson is about 000 GeV. This is tiny when expressed in familiar units, because it's equal to something like 00 to the minus 00 grams, but it is large in particle physics units, because it is equal to the weight of an entire molecule of a DNA constituent. So armed with this information from the LHC, together with some colleagues here at CERN, we computed the probability that our universe could quantum tunnel into the ultra-dense Higgs state, and we found a very intriguing result. Our calculations showed that the measured value of the Higgs boson mass is very special. It has just the right value to keep the universe hanging in an unstable situation. The Higgs field is in a wobbly configuration that has lasted so far but that will eventually collapse. So according to these calculations, we are like campers who accidentally set their tent at the edge of a cliff. And eventually, the Higgs field will undergo a phase transition and matter will collapse into itself. So is this how humanity is going to disappear? I don't think so. Our calculation shows that quantum tunneling of the Higgs field is not likely to occur in the next 00 to the 000 years, and this is a very long time. It's even longer than the time it takes for Italy to form a stable government. (Laughter) Even so, we will be long gone by then. In about five billion years, our sun will become a red giant, as large as the Earth's orbit, and our Earth will be kaput, and in a thousand billion years, if dark energy keeps on fueling space expansion at the present rate, you will not even be able to see as far as your toes, because everything around you expands at a rate faster than the speed of light. So it is really unlikely that we will be around to see the Higgs field collapse. But the reason why I am interested in the transition of the Higgs field is because I want to address the question, why is the Higgs boson mass so special? Why is it just right to keep the universe at the edge of a phase transition? Theoretical physicists always ask "why" questions. More than how a phenomenon works, theoretical physicists are always interested in why a phenomenon works in the way it works. We think that this these "why" questions can give us clues about the fundamental principles of nature. And indeed, a possible answer to my question opens up new universes, literally. It has been speculated that our universe is only a bubble in a soapy multiverse made out of a multitude of bubbles, and each bubble is a different universe with different fundamental constants and different physical laws. And in this context, you can only talk about the probability of finding a certain value of the Higgs mass. Then the key to the mystery could lie in the statistical properties of the multiverse. It would be something like what happens with sand dunes on a beach. In principle, you could imagine to find sand dunes of any slope angle in a beach, and yet, the slope angles of sand dunes are typically around 00, 00 degrees. And the reason is simple: because wind builds up the sand, gravity makes it fall. As a result, the vast majority of sand dunes have slope angles around the critical value, near to collapse. And something similar could happen for the Higgs boson mass in the multiverse. In the majority of bubble universes, the Higgs mass could be around the critical value, near to a cosmic collapse of the Higgs field, because of two competing effects, just as in the case of sand. My story does not have an end, because we still don't know the end of the story. This is science in progress, and to solve the mystery, we need more data, and hopefully, the LHC will soon add new clues to this story. Just one number, the Higgs boson mass, and yet, out of this number we learn so much. I started from a hypothesis, that the known particles are all there is in the universe, even beyond the domain explored so far. From this, we discovered that the Higgs field that permeates space-time may be standing on a knife edge, ready for cosmic collapse, and we discovered that this may be a hint that our universe is only a grain of sand in a giant beach, the multiverse. But I don't know if my hypothesis is right. That's how physics works: A single measurement can put us on the road to a new understanding of the universe or it can send us down a blind alley. But whichever it turns out to be, there is one thing I'm sure of: The journey will be full of surprises. Thank you. (Applause)

So when I was eight years old, a new girl came to join the class, and she was so impressive, as the new girl always seems to be. She had vast quantities of very shiny hair and a cute little pencil case, super strong on state capitals, just a great speller. And I just curdled with jealousy that year, until I hatched my devious plan. So one day I stayed a little late after school, a little too late, and I lurked in the girls' bathroom. When the coast was clear, I emerged, crept into the classroom, and took from my teacher's desk the grade book. And then I did it. I fiddled with my rival's grades, just a little, just demoted some of those A's. All of those A's. (Laughter) And I got ready to return the book to the drawer, when hang on, some of my other classmates had appallingly good grades too. So, in a frenzy, I corrected everybody's marks, not imaginatively. I gave everybody a row of D's and I gave myself a row of A's, just because I was there, you know, might as well. And I am still baffled by my behavior. I don't understand where the idea came from. I don't understand why I felt so great doing it. I felt great. I don't understand why I was never caught. I mean, it should have been so blatantly obvious. I was never caught. But most of all, I am baffled by, why did it bother me so much that this little girl, this tiny little girl, was so good at spelling? Jealousy baffles me. It's so mysterious, and it's so pervasive. We know babies suffer from jealousy. We know primates do. Bluebirds are actually very prone. We know that jealousy is the number one cause of spousal murder in the United States. And yet, I have never read a study that can parse to me its loneliness or its longevity or its grim thrill. For that, we have to go to fiction, because the novel is the lab that has studied jealousy in every possible configuration. In fact, I don't know if it's an exaggeration to say that if we didn't have jealousy, would we even have literature? Well no faithless Helen, no "Odyssey." No jealous king, no "Arabian Nights." No Shakespeare. There goes high school reading lists, because we're losing "Sound and the Fury," we're losing "Gatsby," "Sun Also Rises," we're losing "Madame Bovary," "Anna K." No jealousy, no Proust. And now, I mean, I know it's fashionable to say that Proust has the answers to everything, but in the case of jealousy, he kind of does. This year is the centennial of his masterpiece, "In Search of Lost Time," and it's the most exhaustive study of sexual jealousy and just regular competitiveness, my brand, that we can hope to have. (Laughter) And we think about Proust, we think about the sentimental bits, right? We think about a little boy trying to get to sleep. We think about a madeleine moistened in lavender tea. We forget how harsh his vision was. We forget how pitiless he is. I mean, these are books that Virginia Woolf said were tough as cat gut. I don't know what cat gut is, but let's assume it's formidable. Let's look at why they go so well together, the novel and jealousy, jealousy and Proust. Is it something as obvious as that jealousy, which boils down into person, desire, impediment, is such a solid narrative foundation? I don't know. I think it cuts very close to the bone, because let's think about what happens when we feel jealous. When we feel jealous, we tell ourselves a story. We tell ourselves a story about other people's lives, and these stories make us feel terrible because they're designed to make us feel terrible. As the teller of the tale and the audience, we know just what details to include, to dig that knife in. Right? Jealousy makes us all amateur novelists, and this is something Proust understood. In the first volume, Swann's Way, the series of books, Swann, one of the main characters, is thinking very fondly of his mistress and how great she is in bed, and suddenly, in the course of a few sentences, and these are Proustian sentences, so they're long as rivers, but in the course of a few sentences, he suddenly recoils and he realizes, "Hang on, everything I love about this woman, somebody else would love about this woman. Everything that she does that gives me pleasure could be giving somebody else pleasure, maybe right about now." And this is the story he starts to tell himself, and from then on, Proust writes that every fresh charm Swann detects in his mistress, he adds to his "collection of instruments in his private torture chamber." Now Swann and Proust, we have to admit, were notoriously jealous. You know, Proust's boyfriends would have to leave the country if they wanted to break up with him. But you don't have to be that jealous to concede that it's hard work. Right? Jealousy is exhausting. It's a hungry emotion. It must be fed. And what does jealousy like? Jealousy likes information. Jealousy likes details. Jealousy likes the vast quantities of shiny hair, the cute little pencil case. Jealousy likes photos. That's why Instagram is such a hit. (Laughter) Proust actually links the language of scholarship and jealousy. When Swann is in his jealous throes, and suddenly he's listening at doorways and bribing his mistress' servants, he defends these behaviors. He says, "You know, look, I know you think this is repugnant, but it is no different from interpreting an ancient text or looking at a monument." He says, "They are scientific investigations with real intellectual value." Proust is trying to show us that jealousy feels intolerable and makes us look absurd, but it is, at its crux, a quest for knowledge, a quest for truth, painful truth, and actually, where Proust is concerned, the more painful the truth, the better. Grief, humiliation, loss: These were the avenues to wisdom for Proust. He says, "A woman whom we need, who makes us suffer, elicits from us a gamut of feelings far more profound and vital than a man of genius who interests us." Is he telling us to just go and find cruel women? No. I think he's trying to say that jealousy reveals us to ourselves. And does any other emotion crack us open in this particular way? Does any other emotion reveal to us our aggression and our hideous ambition and our entitlement? Does any other emotion teach us to look with such peculiar intensity? Freud would write about this later. One day, Freud was visited by this very anxious young man who was consumed with the thought of his wife cheating on him. And Freud says, it's something strange about this guy, because he's not looking at what his wife is doing. Because she's blameless; everybody knows it. The poor creature is just under suspicion for no cause. But he's looking for things that his wife is doing without noticing, unintentional behaviors. Is she smiling too brightly here, or did she accidentally brush up against a man there? [Freud] says that the man is becoming the custodian of his wife's unconscious. The novel is very good on this point. The novel is very good at describing how jealousy trains us to look with intensity but not accuracy. In fact, the more intensely jealous we are, the more we become residents of fantasy. And this is why, I think, jealousy doesn't just provoke us to do violent things or illegal things. Jealousy prompts us to behave in ways that are wildly inventive. Now I'm thinking of myself at eight, I concede, but I'm also thinking of this story I heard on the news. A 00-year-old Michigan woman was caught creating a fake Facebook account from which she sent vile, hideous messages to herself for a year. For a year. A year. And she was trying to frame her ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend, and I have to confess when I heard this, I just reacted with admiration. (Laughter) Because, I mean, let's be real. What immense, if misplaced, creativity. Right? This is something from a novel. This is something from a Patricia Highsmith novel. Now Highsmith is a particular favorite of mine. She is the very brilliant and bizarre woman of American letters. She's the author of "Strangers on a Train" and "The Talented Mr. Ripley," books that are all about how jealousy, it muddles our minds, and once we're in the sphere, in that realm of jealousy, the membrane between what is and what could be can be pierced in an instant. Take Tom Ripley, her most famous character. Now, Tom Ripley goes from wanting you or wanting what you have to being you and having what you once had, and you're under the floorboards, he's answering to your name, he's wearing your rings, emptying your bank account. That's one way to go. But what do we do? We can't go the Tom Ripley route. I can't give the world D's, as much as I would really like to, some days. And it's a pity, because we live in envious times. We live in jealous times. I mean, we're all good citizens of social media, aren't we, where the currency is envy? Does the novel show us a way out? I'm not sure. So let's do what characters always do when they're not sure, when they are in possession of a mystery. Let's go to 000B Baker Street and ask for Sherlock Holmes. When people think of Holmes, they think of his nemesis being Professor Moriarty, right, this criminal mastermind. But I've always preferred [Inspector] Lestrade, who is the rat-faced head of Scotland Yard who needs Holmes desperately, needs Holmes' genius, but resents him. Oh, it's so familiar to me. So Lestrade needs his help, resents him, and sort of seethes with bitterness over the course of the mysteries. But as they work together, something starts to change, and finally in "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons," once Holmes comes in, dazzles everybody with his solution, Lestrade turns to Holmes and he says, "We're not jealous of you, Mr. Holmes. We're proud of you." And he says that there's not a man at Scotland Yard who wouldn't want to shake Sherlock Holmes' hand. It's one of the few times we see Holmes moved in the mysteries, and I find it very moving, this little scene, but it's also mysterious, right? It seems to treat jealousy as a problem of geometry, not emotion. You know, one minute Holmes is on the other side from Lestrade. The next minute they're on the same side. Suddenly, Lestrade is letting himself admire this mind that he's resented. Could it be so simple though? What if jealousy really is a matter of geometry, just a matter of where we allow ourselves to stand in relation to another? Well, maybe then we wouldn't have to resent somebody's excellence. We could align ourselves with it. But I like contingency plans. So while we wait for that to happen, let us remember that we have fiction for consolation. Fiction alone demystifies jealousy. Fiction alone domesticates it, invites it to the table. And look who it gathers: sweet Lestrade, terrifying Tom Ripley, crazy Swann, Marcel Proust himself. We are in excellent company. Thank you. (Applause)

Africa is booming. Per capita incomes since the year 0000 have doubled, and this boom is impacting on everyone. Life expectancy has increased by one year every three years for the last decade. That means if an African child is born today, rather than three days ago, they will get an extra day of life at the end of their lifespan. It's that quick. And HIV infection rates are down 00 percent: 000,000 less people a year are getting HIV in sub-Saharan Africa. The battle against malaria is being won, with deaths from malaria down 00 percent, according to the latest World Bank data. And malaria nets actually are playing a role in that. This shouldn't surprise us, because actually, everybody grows. If you go back to Imperial Rome in the Year 0 A.D., there was admittedly about 0,000 years where there wasn't an awful lot of growth. But then the people that the Romans would have called Scottish barbarians, my ancestors, were actually part of the Industrial Revolution, and in the 00th century, growth began to accelerate, and you saw that get quicker and quicker, and it's been impacting everyone. It doesn't matter if this is the jungles of Singapore or the tundra of northern Finland. Everybody gets involved. It's just a matter of when the inevitable happens. Among the reasons I think it's happening right now is the quality of the leadership across Africa. I think most of us would agree that in the 0000s, the greatest politician in the world was African, but I'm meeting brilliant people across the continent the entire time, and they're doing the reforms which have transformed the economic situation for their countries. And the West is engaging with that. The West has given debt forgiveness programs which have halved sub-Saharan debt from about 00 percent of GDP down to about 00. At the same time, our debt level's gone up to 000 and we're all feeling slightly miserable as a result. Politics gets weaker when debt is high. When public sector debt is low, governments don't have to choose between investing in education and health and paying interest on that debt you owe. And it's not just the public sector which is looking so good. The private sector as well. Again, in the West, we have private sector debt of 000 percent of GDP in Spain, the U.K., and the U.S. That's an awful lot of debt. Africa, many African countries, are sitting at 00 to 00 percent of GDP. If there's any continent that can do what China has done -- China's at about 000 percent of GDP on that chart -- if anyone can do what China has done in the last 00 years, it'll be Africa in the next 00. So they've got great government finances, great private sector debt. Does anyone recognize this? In fact, they do. Foreign direct investment has poured into Africa in the last 00 years. Back in the '00s, no one touched the continent with a barge pole. And this investment is actually Western-led. We hear a lot about China, and they do lend a lot of money, but 00 percent of the FDI in the last couple of years has come from Europe, America, Australia, Canada. Ten percent's come from India. And they're investing in energy. Africa produces 00 million barrels a day of oil now. It's the same as Saudi Arabia or Russia. And they're investing in telecoms, shopping malls. And this very encouraging story, I think, is partly demographic-led. And it's not just about African demographics. I'm showing you the number of 00- to 00-year-olds in various parts of the world, and the blue line is the one I want you to focus on for a second. Ten years ago, say you're Foxconn setting up an iPhone factory, by chance. You might choose China, which is the bulk of that East Asian blue line, where there's 000 million young people, and every year until 0000 that's getting bigger. Which means you're going to have new guys knocking on the door saying, "Give us a job," and, "I don't need a big pay rise, just please give me a job." Now, that's completely changed now. This decade, we're going to see a 00- to 00-percent fall in the number of 00- to 00-year-olds in China. So where do you set up your new factory? You look at South Asia, and people are. They're looking at Pakistan and Bangladesh, and they're also looking at Africa. And they're looking at Africa because that yellow line is showing you that the number of young Africans is going to continue to get bigger decade after decade after decade out to 0000. Now, there's a problem with lots of young people coming into any market, particularly when they're young men. A bit dangerous, sometimes. I think one of the crucial factors is how educated is that demographic? If you look at the red line here, what you're going to see is that in 0000, just nine percent of kids were in secondary school education in sub-Saharan Africa. Would you set up a factory in sub-Sahara in the mid-0000s? Nobody else did. They chose instead Turkey and Mexico to set up the textiles factories, because their education levels were 00 to 00 percent. Today, sub-Sahara is at the levels that Turkey and Mexico were at in 0000. They will get the textiles jobs that will take people out of rural poverty and put them on the road to industrialization and wealth. So what's Africa looking like today? This is how I look at Africa. It's a bit odd, because I'm an economist. Each little box is about a billion dollars, and you see that I pay an awful lot of attention to Nigeria sitting there in the middle. South Africa is playing a role. But when I'm thinking about the future, I'm actually most interested in Central, Western and Southern Africa. If I look at Africa by population, East Africa stands out as so much potential. And I'm showing you something else with these maps. I'm showing you democracy versus autocracy. Fragile democracies is the beige color. Strong democracies are the orange color. And what you'll see here is that most Africans are now living in democracies. Why does that matter? Because what people want is what politicians try, they don't always succeed, but they try and deliver. And what you've got is a reinforcing positive circle going on. In Ghana in the elections, in December 0000, the battle between the two candidates was over education. One guy offered free secondary school education to all, not just 00 percent. The other guy had to say, I'm going to build 00 new schools. He won by a margin. So democracy is encouraging governments to invest in education. Education is helping growth and investment, and that's giving budget revenues, which is giving governments more money, which is helping growth through education. It's a positive, virtuous circle. But I get asked this question, and this particular question makes me quite sad: It's, "But what about corruption? How can you invest in Africa when there's corruption?" And what makes me sad about it is that this graph here is showing you that the biggest correlation with corruption is wealth. When you're poor, corruption is not your biggest priority. And the countries on the right hand side, you'll see the per capita GDP, basically every country with a per capita GDP of, say, less than 0,000 dollars, has got a corruption score of roughly, what's that, about three? Three out of 00. That's not good. Every poor country is corrupt. Every rich country is relatively uncorrupt. How do you get from poverty and corruption to wealth and less corruption? You see the middle class grow. And the way to do that is to invest, not to say I'm not investing in that continent because there's too much corruption. Now, I don't want to be an apologist for corruption. I've been arrested because I refused to pay a bribe -- not in Africa, actually. But what I'm saying here is that we can make a difference and we can do that by investing. Now I'm going to let you in on a little not-so-secret. Economists aren't great at forecasting. Because the question really is, what happens next? And if you go back to the year 0000, what you'll find is The Economist had a very famous cover, "The Hopeless Continent," and what they'd done is they'd looked at growth in Africa over the previous 00 years -- two percent -- and they said, what's going to happen in the next 00 years? They assumed two percent, and that made it a pretty hopeless story, because population growth was two and a half. People got poorer in Africa in the 0000s. Now 0000, The Economist has a new cover, and what does that new cover show? That new cover shows, well, Africa rising, because the growth over the last 00 years has been about five and a half percent. I would like to see if you can all now become economists, because if growth for the last 00 years has been five and a half percent, what do you think the IMF is forecasting for the next five years of growth in Africa? Very good. I think you're secretly saying to your head, probably five and a half percent. You're all economists, and I think, like most economists, wrong. No offense. What I like to do is try and find the countries that are doing exactly what Africa has already done, and it means that jump from 0,000 years of nothing to whoof, suddenly shooting through the roof. India is one of those examples. This is Indian growth from 0000 to 0000. Ignore the scale on the bottom for a second. Actually, for the first 00 years, the '00s and '00s, India didn't really grow. It grew at two percent when population growth was about two and a half. If that's familiar, that's exactly what happened in sub-Sahara in the '00s and the '00s. And then something happened in 0000. Boom! India began to explode. It wasn't a "Hindu rate of growth," "democracies can't grow." Actually India could. And if I lay sub-Saharan growth on top of the Indian growth story, it's remarkably similar. Twenty years of not much growth and a trend line which is actually telling you that sub-Saharan African growth is slightly better than India. And if I then lay developing Asia on top of this, I'm saying India is 00 years ahead of Africa, I'm saying developing Asia is 00 years ahead of India, I can draw out some forecasts for the next 00 to 00 years which I think are better than the ones where you're looking backwards. And that tells me this: that Africa is going to go from a $0 trillion economy today to a $00 trillion economy by 0000. Now that's bigger than Europe and America put together in today's money. Life expectancy is going to go up by 00 years. The population's going to double from one billion to two billion, so household incomes are going to go up sevenfold in the next 00 years. And when I present this in Africa -- Nairobi, Lagos, Accra -- I get one question. "Charlie, why are you so pessimistic?" And you know what? Actually, I think they've got a point. Am I really saying that there can be nothing learned, yes from the positives in Asia and India, but also the negatives? Perhaps Africa can avoid some of the mistakes that have been made. Surely, the technologies that we're talking about here this last week, surely some of these can perhaps help Africa grow even faster? And I think here we can play a role. Because technology does let you help. You can go and download some of the great African literature from the Internet now. No, not right now, just 00 seconds. You can go and buy some of the great tunes. My iPod's full of them. Buy African products. Go on holiday and see for yourself the change that's happening. Invest. Perhaps hire people, give them the skills that they can take back to Africa, and their companies will grow an awful lot faster than most of ours here in the West. And then you and I can help make sure that for Africa, the 00st century is their century. Thank you very much. (Applause)

I've spent my life working on sustainability. I set up a climate change NGO called The Climate Group. I worked on forestry issues in WWF. I worked on development and agriculture issues in the U.N. system. About 00 years in total, and then three years ago, I found myself talking to IKEA's CEO about joining his team. Like many people here, well, I want to maximize my personal impact in the world, so I'm going to explain why I joined the team there. But first, let's just take three numbers. The first number is three: three billion people. This is the number of people joining the global middle class by 0000, coming out of poverty. It's fantastic for them and their families, but we've got two billion people in the global middle class today, and this swells that number to five, a big challenge when we already have resource scarcity. The second number is six: This is six degrees centigrade, what we're heading towards in terms of global warming. We're not heading towards one degree or three degrees or four degrees, we're heading toward six degrees. And if you think about it, all of the weird weather we've been having the last few years, much of that is due to just one degree warming, and we need CO0 emissions to peak by the end of this decade globally and then come down. It's not inevitable, but we need to act decisively. The third number is 00: That's the number of cities in the world that had a million or more people when my grandmother was born. You can see my grandmother there. That was in the beginning of the last century. So just 00 cities. She was born in Manchester, England, the ninth largest city in the world. Now there are 000 cities, nearly, with a million people or more in them. And if you look at the century from 0000 to 0000, that's the century when we build all the world's cities, the century that we're in the middle of right now. Every other century was kind of practice, and this lays down a blueprint for how we live. So think about it. We're building cities like never before, bringing people out of poverty like never before, and changing the climate like never before. Sustainability has gone from a nice-to-do to a must-do. it's about what we do right here, right now, and for the rest of our working lives. So I'm going to talk a little bit about what business can do and what a business like IKEA can do, and we have a sustainability strategy called "people and planet positive" to help guide our business to have a positive impact on the world. Why would we not want to have a positive impact on the world as a business? Other companies have sustainability strategies. I'm going to refer to some of those as well, and I'm just going to mention a few of the commitments as illustrations that we've got. But first, let's think of customers. We know from asking people from China to the U.S. that the vast majority of people care about sustainability after the day-to-day issues, the day-to-day issues of, how do I get my kids to school? Can I pay the bills at the end of the month? Then they care about big issues like climate change. But they want it to be easy, affordable and attractive, and they expect business to help, and they're a little bit disappointed today. So take your mind back and think of the first sustainable products. We had detergents that could wash your whites grayer. We had the early energy-efficient light bulbs that took five minutes to warm up and then you were left looking a kind of sickly color. And we had the rough, recycled toilet paper. So every time you pulled on a t-shirt, or switched the light on, or went to the bathroom, or sometimes all three together, you were reminded sustainability was about compromise. It wasn't a great start. Today we have choices. We can make products that are beautiful or ugly, sustainable or unsustainable, affordable or expensive, functional or useless. So let's make beautiful, functional, affordable, sustainable products. Let's take the LED. The LED is the next best thing to daylight. The old-fashioned lightbulbs, the incandescent bulbs -- I'm not going to ask for a show of hands of how many of you still have them in your homes, wasting energy every time you switch them on -- change them after this -- or whether we have them on the stage here at TED or not -- but those old incandescent light bulbs really should have been sold as heaters. They were mis-sold for more than a hundred years. They produced heat and a little bit of light on the side. Now we have lights that produce light and a little bit of heat on the side. You save 00 percent of the electricity with an LED that you would have done in an old incandescent. And the best thing is, they'll also last for more than 00 years. So think about that. You'll change your smartphone seven or eight times, probably more if you're in this audience. You'll change your car, if you have one, three or four times. Your kids could go to school, go to college, go away and have kids of their own, come back, bring the grandkids, you'll have the same lightbulb saving you energy. So LEDs are fantastic. What we decided to do was not to sell LEDs on the side marked up high and continue to push all the old bulbs, the halogens and the CFLs. We decided, over the next two years, we will ban the halogens and the CFLs ourselves. We will go all in. And this is what business needs to do: go all-in, go 000 percent, because then you stop investing in the old stuff, you invest in the new stuff, you lower costs, you use your supply chain and your creativity and you get the prices down so everybody can afford the best lights so they can save energy. (Applause) It's not just about products in people's homes. We've got to think about the raw materials that produce our products. Obviously there's fantastic opportunities with recycled materials, and we can and will go zero waste. And there's opportunities in a circular economy. But we're still dependent on natural, raw materials. Let's take cotton. Cotton's brilliant. Probably many people are wearing cotton right now. It's a brilliant textile in use. It's really dirty in production. It uses lots of pesticides, lots of fertilizer, lots of water. So we've worked with others, with other businesses and NGOs, on the Better Cotton Initiative, working right back down to the farm, and there you can halve the amount of water and halve the chemical inputs, the yields increase, and 00 percent of the costs of running many of these farms with farmers with low incomes can be chemical imports. Yields increase, and you halve the input costs. Farmers are coming out of poverty. They love it. Already hundreds of thousands of farmers have been reached, and now we've got 00 percent better cotton in our business. Again, we're going all-in. By 0000, we'll be 000 percent Better Cotton. Take the topic of 000 percent targets, actually. People sometimes think that 000 percent's going to be hard, and we've had the conversation in the business. Actually, we found 000 percent is easier to do than 00 percent or 00 percent. If you have a 00 percent target, everyone in the business finds a reason to be in the 00 percent. When it's 000 percent, it's kind of clear, and businesspeople like clarity, because then you just get the job done. So, wood. We know with forestry, it's a choice. You've got illegal logging and deforestation still on a very large scale, or you can have fantastic, responsible forestry that we can be proud of. It's a simple choice, so we've worked for many years with the Forest Stewardship Council, with literally hundreds of other organizations, and there's a point here about collaboration. So hundreds of others, of NGOs, of forest workers' unions, and of businesses, have helped create the Forest Stewardship Council, which sets standards for forestry and then checks the forestry's good on the ground. Now together, through our supply chain, with partners, we've managed to certify 00 million hectares of forestry. That's about the size of Germany. And we've decided in the next three years, we will double the volume of certified material we put through our business. So be decisive on these issues. Use your supply chain to drive good. But then it comes to your operations. Some things are certain, I think. We know we'll use electricity in 00 or 00 years' time. We know the sun will be shining somewhere, and the wind will still be blowing in 00 or 00 years' time. So why not make our energy out of the sun and the wind? And why not take control of it ourselves? So we're going 000 percent renewable. By 0000, we'll produce more renewable energy than the energy we consume as a business. For all of our stores, our own factories, our distribution centers, we've installed 000,000 solar panels so far, and we've got 00 wind farms we own and operate in six countries, and we're not done yet. But think of a solar panel. A solar panel pays for itself in seven or eight years. The electricity is free. Every time the sun comes out after that, the electricity is free. So this is a good thing for the CFO, not just the sustainability guy. Every business can do things like this. But then we've got to look beyond our operations, and I think everybody would agree that now business has to take full responsibility for the impacts of your supply chain. Many businesses now, fortunately, have codes of conduct and audit their supply chains, but not every business. Far from it. And this came in IKEA actually in the '00s. We found there was a risk of child labor in the supply chain, and people in the business were shocked. And it was clearly totally unacceptable, so then you have to act. So a code of conduct was developed, and now we have 00 auditors out in the world every day making sure all our factories secure good working conditions and protect human rights and make sure there is no child labor. But it's not just as simple as making sure there's no child labor. You've got to say that's not enough today. I think we'd all agree that children are the most important people in the world and the most vulnerable. So what can a business do today to actually use your total value chain to support a better quality of life and protect child rights? We've worked with UNICEF and Save the Children on developing some new business principles with children's rights. Increasing numbers of businesses are signing up to these, but actually in a survey, many business leaders said they thought their business had nothing to do with children. So what we decided to do was, we will look and ask ourselves the tough questions with partners who know more than us, what can we do to go beyond our business to help improve the lives of children? We also have a foundation that's committed to work through partners and help improve the lives and protect the rights of 000 million children by 0000. You know the phrase, you can manage what you measure? Well, you should measure what you care about. If you're not measuring things, you don't care and you don't know. So let's take an example, measure the things that are important in your business. Isn't it about time that businesses were led equally by men and women? (Applause) So we know for our 00,000 managers across IKEA that 00 percent are women today, but it's not enough, and we want to close the gap and follow it all the way through to senior management. And we do not want to wait another hundred years. So we've launched a women's open network this week in IKEA, and we'll do whatever it takes to lead the change. So the message here is, measure what you care about and lead the change, and don't wait a hundred years. So we've gone from sustainability being a nice-to-do to a must-do. It's a must-do. It's still nice to do, but it's a must-do. And everybody can do something on this as an individual. Be a discerning consumer. Vote with your wallets. Search out the companies that are acting on this. But also, there are other businesses already acting. I mentioned renewable energy. You go to Google or Lego, they're going 000 percent renewable too, in the same way that we are. On having really good sustainability strategies, there are companies like Nike, Patagonia, Timberland, Marks & Spencer. But I don't think any of those businesses would say they're perfect. We certainly wouldn't. We'll make mistakes going forward, but it's about setting a clear direction, being transparent, having a dialogue with the right partners, and choosing to lead on the issues that really count. So if you're a business leader, if you're not already weaving sustainability right into the heart of your business model, I'd urge you to do so. And together, we can help create a sustainable world, and, if we get it right, we can make sustainability affordable for the many people, not a luxury for the few. Thank you. (Applause)

Hetain Patel: (In Chinese) Yuyu Rau: Hi, I'm Hetain. I'm an artist. And this is Yuyu, who is a dancer I have been working with. I have asked her to translate for me. HP: (In Chinese) YR: If I may, I would like to tell you a little bit about myself and my artwork. HP: (In Chinese) YR: I was born and raised near Manchester, in England, but I'm not going to say it in English to you, because I'm trying to avoid any assumptions that might be made from my northern accent. (Laughter) HP: (In Chinese) YR: The only problem with masking it with Chinese Mandarin is I can only speak this paragraph, which I have learned by heart when I was visiting in China. (Laughter) So all I can do is keep repeating it in different tones and hope you won't notice. (Laughter) HP: (In Chinese) (Laughter) YR: Needless to say, I would like to apologize to any Mandarin speakers in the audience. As a child, I would hate being made to wear the Indian kurta pajama, because I didn't think it was very cool. It felt a bit girly to me, like a dress, and it had this baggy trouser part you had to tie really tight to avoid the embarrassment of them falling down. My dad never wore it, so I didn't see why I had to. Also, it makes me feel a bit uncomfortable, that people assume I represent something genuinely Indian when I wear it, because that's not how I feel. HP: (In Chinese) YR: Actually, the only way I feel comfortable wearing it is by pretending they are the robes of a kung fu warrior like Li Mu Bai from that film, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." (Music) Okay. So my artwork is about identity and language, challenging common assumptions based on how we look like or where we come from, gender, race, class. What makes us who we are anyway? HP: (In Chinese) YR: I used to read Spider-Man comics, watch kung fu movies, take philosophy lessons from Bruce Lee. He would say things like -- HP: Empty your mind. (Laughter) Be formless, shapeless, like water. Now you put water into a cup. It becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. Put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend. (Applause) YR: This year, I am 00 years old, the same age Bruce Lee was when he died. I have been wondering recently, if he were alive today, what advice he would give me about making this TED Talk. HP: Don't imitate my voice. It offends me. (Laughter) YR: Good advice, but I still think that we learn who we are by copying others. Who here hasn't imitated their childhood hero in the playground, or mum or father? I have. HP: A few years ago, in order to make this video for my artwork, I shaved off all my hair so that I could grow it back as my father had it when he first emigrated from India to the U.K. in the 0000s. He had a side parting and a neat mustache. At first, it was going very well. I even started to get discounts in Indian shops. (Laughter) But then very quickly, I started to underestimate my mustache growing ability, and it got way too big. It didn't look Indian anymore. Instead, people from across the road, they would shout things like -- HP and YR: Arriba! Arriba! Ándale! Ándale! (Laughter) HP: Actually, I don't know why I am even talking like this. My dad doesn't even have an Indian accent anymore. He talks like this now. So it's not just my father that I've imitated. A few years ago I went to China for a few months, and I couldn't speak Chinese, and this frustrated me, so I wrote about this and had it translated into Chinese, and then I learned this by heart, like music, I guess. YR: This phrase is now etched into my mind clearer than the pin number to my bank card, so I can pretend I speak Chinese fluently. When I had learned this phrase, I had an artist over there hear me out to see how accurate it sounded. I spoke the phrase, and then he laughed and told me, "Oh yeah, that's great, only it kind of sounds like a woman." I said, "What?" He said, "Yeah, you learned from a woman?" I said, "Yes. So?" He then explained the tonal differences between male and female voices are very different and distinct, and that I had learned it very well, but in a woman's voice. (Laughter) (Applause) HP: Okay. So this imitation business does come with risk. It doesn't always go as you plan it, even with a talented translator. But I am going to stick with it, because contrary to what we might usually assume, imitating somebody can reveal something unique. So every time I fail to become more like my father, I become more like myself. Every time I fail to become Bruce Lee, I become more authentically me. This is my art. I strive for authenticity, even if it comes in a shape that we might not usually expect. It's only recently that I've started to understand that I didn't learn to sit like this through being Indian. I learned this from Spider-Man. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause)

I would like to tell you a story connecting the notorious privacy incident involving Adam and Eve, and the remarkable shift in the boundaries between public and private which has occurred in the past 00 years. You know the incident. Adam and Eve one day in the Garden of Eden realize they are naked. They freak out. And the rest is history. Nowadays, Adam and Eve would probably act differently. [@Adam Last nite was a blast! loved dat apple LOL] [@Eve yep.. babe, know what happened to my pants tho?] We do reveal so much more information about ourselves online than ever before, and so much information about us is being collected by organizations. Now there is much to gain and benefit from this massive analysis of personal information, or big data, but there are also complex tradeoffs that come from giving away our privacy. And my story is about these tradeoffs. We start with an observation which, in my mind, has become clearer and clearer in the past few years, that any personal information can become sensitive information. Back in the year 0000, about 000 billion photos were shot worldwide, but only a minuscule proportion of them were actually uploaded online. In 0000, only on Facebook, in a single month, 0.0 billion photos were uploaded, most of them identified. In the same span of time, computers' ability to recognize people in photos improved by three orders of magnitude. What happens when you combine these technologies together: increasing availability of facial data; improving facial recognizing ability by computers; but also cloud computing, which gives anyone in this theater the kind of computational power which a few years ago was only the domain of three-letter agencies; and ubiquitous computing, which allows my phone, which is not a supercomputer, to connect to the Internet and do there hundreds of thousands of face metrics in a few seconds? Well, we conjecture that the result of this combination of technologies will be a radical change in our very notions of privacy and anonymity. To test that, we did an experiment on Carnegie Mellon University campus. We asked students who were walking by to participate in a study, and we took a shot with a webcam, and we asked them to fill out a survey on a laptop. While they were filling out the survey, we uploaded their shot to a cloud-computing cluster, and we started using a facial recognizer to match that shot to a database of some hundreds of thousands of images which we had downloaded from Facebook profiles. By the time the subject reached the last page on the survey, the page had been dynamically updated with the 00 best matching photos which the recognizer had found, and we asked the subjects to indicate whether he or she found themselves in the photo. Do you see the subject? Well, the computer did, and in fact did so for one out of three subjects. So essentially, we can start from an anonymous face, offline or online, and we can use facial recognition to give a name to that anonymous face thanks to social media data. But a few years back, we did something else. We started from social media data, we combined it statistically with data from U.S. government social security, and we ended up predicting social security numbers, which in the United States are extremely sensitive information. Do you see where I'm going with this? So if you combine the two studies together, then the question becomes, can you start from a face and, using facial recognition, find a name and publicly available information about that name and that person, and from that publicly available information infer non-publicly available information, much more sensitive ones which you link back to the face? And the answer is, yes, we can, and we did. Of course, the accuracy keeps getting worse. [00% of subjects' first 0 SSN digits identified (with 0 attempts)] But in fact, we even decided to develop an iPhone app which uses the phone's internal camera to take a shot of a subject and then upload it to a cloud and then do what I just described to you in real time: looking for a match, finding public information, trying to infer sensitive information, and then sending back to the phone so that it is overlaid on the face of the subject, an example of augmented reality, probably a creepy example of augmented reality. In fact, we didn't develop the app to make it available, just as a proof of concept. In fact, take these technologies and push them to their logical extreme. Imagine a future in which strangers around you will look at you through their Google Glasses or, one day, their contact lenses, and use seven or eight data points about you to infer anything else which may be known about you. What will this future without secrets look like? And should we care? We may like to believe that the future with so much wealth of data would be a future with no more biases, but in fact, having so much information doesn't mean that we will make decisions which are more objective. In another experiment, we presented to our subjects information about a potential job candidate. We included in this information some references to some funny, absolutely legal, but perhaps slightly embarrassing information that the subject had posted online. Now interestingly, among our subjects, some had posted comparable information, and some had not. Which group do you think was more likely to judge harshly our subject? Paradoxically, it was the group who had posted similar information, an example of moral dissonance. Now you may be thinking, this does not apply to me, because I have nothing to hide. But in fact, privacy is not about having something negative to hide. Imagine that you are the H.R. director of a certain organization, and you receive résumés, and you decide to find more information about the candidates. Therefore, you Google their names and in a certain universe, you find this information. Or in a parallel universe, you find this information. Do you think that you would be equally likely to call either candidate for an interview? If you think so, then you are not like the U.S. employers who are, in fact, part of our experiment, meaning we did exactly that. We created Facebook profiles, manipulating traits, then we started sending out résumés to companies in the U.S., and we detected, we monitored, whether they were searching for our candidates, and whether they were acting on the information they found on social media. And they were. Discrimination was happening through social media for equally skilled candidates. Now marketers like us to believe that all information about us will always be used in a manner which is in our favor. But think again. Why should that be always the case? In a movie which came out a few years ago, "Minority Report," a famous scene had Tom Cruise walk in a mall and holographic personalized advertising would appear around him. Now, that movie is set in 0000, about 00 years from now, and as exciting as that technology looks, it already vastly underestimates the amount of information that organizations can gather about you, and how they can use it to influence you in a way that you will not even detect. So as an example, this is another experiment actually we are running, not yet completed. Imagine that an organization has access to your list of Facebook friends, and through some kind of algorithm they can detect the two friends that you like the most. And then they create, in real time, a facial composite of these two friends. Now studies prior to ours have shown that people don't recognize any longer even themselves in facial composites, but they react to those composites in a positive manner. So next time you are looking for a certain product, and there is an ad suggesting you to buy it, it will not be just a standard spokesperson. It will be one of your friends, and you will not even know that this is happening. Now the problem is that the current policy mechanisms we have to protect ourselves from the abuses of personal information are like bringing a knife to a gunfight. One of these mechanisms is transparency, telling people what you are going to do with their data. And in principle, that's a very good thing. It's necessary, but it is not sufficient. Transparency can be misdirected. You can tell people what you are going to do, and then you still nudge them to disclose arbitrary amounts of personal information. So in yet another experiment, this one with students, we asked them to provide information about their campus behavior, including pretty sensitive questions, such as this one. [Have you ever cheated in an exam?] Now to one group of subjects, we told them, "Only other students will see your answers." To another group of subjects, we told them, "Students and faculty will see your answers." Transparency. Notification. And sure enough, this worked, in the sense that the first group of subjects were much more likely to disclose than the second. It makes sense, right? But then we added the misdirection. We repeated the experiment with the same two groups, this time adding a delay between the time we told subjects how we would use their data and the time we actually started answering the questions. How long a delay do you think we had to add in order to nullify the inhibitory effect of knowing that faculty would see your answers? Ten minutes? Five minutes? One minute? How about 00 seconds? Fifteen seconds were sufficient to have the two groups disclose the same amount of information, as if the second group now no longer cares for faculty reading their answers. Now I have to admit that this talk so far may sound exceedingly gloomy, but that is not my point. In fact, I want to share with you the fact that there are alternatives. The way we are doing things now is not the only way they can done, and certainly not the best way they can be done. When someone tells you, "People don't care about privacy," consider whether the game has been designed and rigged so that they cannot care about privacy, and coming to the realization that these manipulations occur is already halfway through the process of being able to protect yourself. When someone tells you that privacy is incompatible with the benefits of big data, consider that in the last 00 years, researchers have created technologies to allow virtually any electronic transactions to take place in a more privacy-preserving manner. We can browse the Internet anonymously. We can send emails that can only be read by the intended recipient, not even the NSA. We can have even privacy-preserving data mining. In other words, we can have the benefits of big data while protecting privacy. Of course, these technologies imply a shifting of cost and revenues between data holders and data subjects, which is why, perhaps, you don't hear more about them. Which brings me back to the Garden of Eden. There is a second privacy interpretation of the story of the Garden of Eden which doesn't have to do with the issue of Adam and Eve feeling naked and feeling ashamed. You can find echoes of this interpretation in John Milton's "Paradise Lost." In the garden, Adam and Eve are materially content. They're happy. They are satisfied. However, they also lack knowledge and self-awareness. The moment they eat the aptly named fruit of knowledge, that's when they discover themselves. They become aware. They achieve autonomy. The price to pay, however, is leaving the garden. So privacy, in a way, is both the means and the price to pay for freedom. Again, marketers tell us that big data and social media are not just a paradise of profit for them, but a Garden of Eden for the rest of us. We get free content. We get to play Angry Birds. We get targeted apps. But in fact, in a few years, organizations will know so much about us, they will be able to infer our desires before we even form them, and perhaps buy products on our behalf before we even know we need them. Now there was one English author who anticipated this kind of future where we would trade away our autonomy and freedom for comfort. Even more so than George Orwell, the author is, of course, Aldous Huxley. In "Brave New World," he imagines a society where technologies that we created originally for freedom end up coercing us. However, in the book, he also offers us a way out of that society, similar to the path that Adam and Eve had to follow to leave the garden. In the words of the Savage, regaining autonomy and freedom is possible, although the price to pay is steep. So I do believe that one of the defining fights of our times will be the fight for the control over personal information, the fight over whether big data will become a force for freedom, rather than a force which will hiddenly manipulate us. Right now, many of us do not even know that the fight is going on, but it is, whether you like it or not. And at the risk of playing the serpent, I will tell you that the tools for the fight are here, the awareness of what is going on, and in your hands, just a few clicks away. Thank you. (Applause)

Throughout my career, I've been fortunate enough to work with many of the great international architects, documenting their work and observing how their designs have the capacity to influence the cities in which they sit. I think of new cities like Dubai or ancient cities like Rome with Zaha Hadid's incredible MAXXI museum, or like right here in New York with the High Line, a city which has been so much influenced by the development of this. But what I find really fascinating is what happens when architects and planners leave and these places become appropriated by people, like here in Chandigarh, India, the city which has been completely designed by the architect Le Corbusier. Now 00 years later, the city has been taken over by people in very different ways from whatever perhaps intended for, like here, where you have the people sitting in the windows of the assembly hall. But over the course of several years, I've been documenting Rem Koolhaas's CCTV building in Beijing and the olympic stadium in the same city by the architects Herzog and de Meuron. At these large-scale construction sites in China, you see a sort of makeshift camp where workers live during the entire building process. As the length of the construction takes years, workers end up forming a rather rough-and-ready informal city, making for quite a juxtaposition against the sophisticated structures that they're building. Over the past seven years, I've been following my fascination with the built environment, and for those of you who know me, you would say that this obsession has led me to live out of a suitcase 000 days a year. Being constantly on the move means that sometimes I am able to catch life's most unpredictable moments, like here in New York the day after the Sandy storm hit the city. Just over three years ago, I was for the first time in Caracas, Venezuela, and while flying over the city, I was just amazed by the extent to which the slums reach into every corner of the city, a place where nearly 00 percent of the population lives in slums, draped literally all over the mountains. During a conversation with local architects Urban-Think Tank, I learned about the Torre David, a 00-story office building which sits right in the center of Caracas. The building was under construction until the collapse of the Venezuelan economy and the death of the developer in the early '00s. About eight years ago, people started moving into the abandoned tower and began to build their homes right in between every column of this unfinished tower. There's only one little entrance to the entire building, and the 0,000 residents come in and out through that single door. Together, the inhabitants created public spaces and designed them to feel more like a home and less like an unfinished tower. In the lobby, they painted the walls and planted trees. They also made a basketball court. But when you look up closely, you see massive holes where elevators and services would have run through. Within the tower, people have come up with all sorts of solutions in response to the various needs which arise from living in an unfinished tower. With no elevators, the tower is like a 00-story walkup. Designed in very specific ways by this group of people who haven't had any education in architecture or design. And with each inhabitant finding their own unique way of coming by, this tower becomes like a living city, a place which is alive with micro-economies and small businesses. The inventive inhabitants, for instance, find opportunities in the most unexpected cases, like the adjacent parking garage, which has been reclaimed as a taxi route to shuttle the inhabitants up through the ramps in order to shorten the hike up to the apartments. A walk through the tower reveals how residents have figured out how to create walls, how to make an air flow, how to create transparency, circulation throughout the tower, essentially creating a home that's completely adapted to the conditions of the site. When a new inhabitant moves into the tower, they already have a roof over their head, so they just typically mark their space with a few curtains or sheets. Slowly, from found materials, walls rise, and people create a space out of any found objects or materials. It's remarkable to see the design decisions that they're making, like when everything is made out of red bricks, some residents will cover that red brick with another layer of red brick-patterned wallpaper just to make it a kind of clean finish. The inhabitants literally built up these homes with their own hands, and this labor of love instills a great sense of pride in many families living in this tower. They typically make the best out of their conditions, and try to make their spaces look nice and homey, or at least up until as far as they can reach. Throughout the tower, you come across all kinds of services, like the barber, small factories, and every floor has a little grocery store or shop. And you even find a church. And on the 00th floor, there is a gym where all the weights and barbells are made out of the leftover pulleys from the elevators which were never installed. From the outside, behind this always-changing facade, you see how the fixed concrete beams provide a framework for the inhabitants to create their homes in an organic, intuitive way that responds directly to their needs. Let's go now to Africa, to Nigeria, to a community called Makoko, a slum where 000,000 people live just meters above the Lagos Lagoon. While it may appear to be a completely chaotic place, when you see it from above, there seems to be a whole grid of waterways and canals connecting each and every home. From the main dock, people board long wooden canoes which carry them out to their various homes and shops located in the expansive area. When out on the water, it's clear that life has been completely adapted to this very specific way of living. Even the canoes become variety stores where ladies paddle from house to house, selling anything from toothpaste to fresh fruits. Behind every window and door frame, you'll see a small child peering back at you, and while Makoko seems to be packed with people, what's more shocking is actually the amount of children pouring out of every building. The population growth in Nigeria, and especially in these areas like Makoko, are painful reminders of how out of control things really are. In Makoko, very few systems and infrastructures exist. Electricity is rigged and freshest water comes from self-built wells throughout the area. This entire economic model is designed to meet a specific way of living on the water, so fishing and boat-making are common professions. You'll have a set of entrepreneurs who have set up businesses throughout the area, like barbershops, CD and DVD stores, movie theaters, tailors, everything is there. There is even a photo studio where you see the sort of aspiration to live in a real house or to be associated with a faraway place, like that hotel in Sweden. On this particular evening, I came across this live band dressed to the T in their coordinating outfits. They were floating through the canals in a large canoe with a fitted-out generator for all of the community to enjoy. By nightfall, the area becomes almost pitch black, save for a small lightbulb or a fire. What originally brought me to Makoko was this project from a friend of mine, Kunlé Adeyemi, who recently finished building this three-story floating school for the kids in Makoko. With this entire village existing on the water, public space is very limited, so now that the school is finished, the ground floor is a playground for the kids, but when classes are out, the platform is just like a town square, where the fishermen mend their nets and floating shopkeepers dock their boats. Another place I'd like to share with you is the Zabbaleen in Cairo. They're descendants of farmers who began migrating from the upper Egypt in the '00s, and today they make their living by collecting and recycling waste from homes from all over Cairo. For years, the Zabbaleen would live in makeshift villages where they would move around trying to avoid the local authorities, but in the early 0000s, they settled on the Mokattam rocks just at the eastern edge of the city. Today, they live in this area, approximately 00,000 to 00,000 people, who live in this community of self-built multi-story houses where up to three generations live in one structure. While these apartments that they built for themselves appear to lack any planning or formal grid, each family specializing in a certain form of recycling means that the ground floor of each apartment is reserved for garbage-related activities and the upper floor is dedicated to living space. I find it incredible to see how these piles and piles of garbage are invisible to the people who live there, like this very distinguished man who is posing while all this garbage is sort of streaming out behind him, or like these two young men who are sitting and chatting amongst these tons of garbage. While to most of us, living amongst these piles and piles of garbage may seem totally uninhabitable, to those in the Zabbaleen, this is just a different type of normal. In all these places I've talked about today, what I do find fascinating is that there's really no such thing as normal, and it proves that people are able to adapt to any kind of situation. Throughout the day, it's quite common to come across a small party taking place in the streets, just like this engagement party. In this tradition, the bride-to-be displays all of their belongings, which they soon bring to their new husband. A gathering like this one offers such a juxtaposition where all the new stuff is displayed and all the garbage is used as props to display all their new home accessories. Like Makoko and the Torre David, throughout the Zabbaleen you'll find all the same facilities as in any typical neighborhood. There are the retail shops, the cafes and the restaurants, and the community is this community of Coptic Christians, so you'll also find a church, along with the scores of religious iconographies throughout the area, and also all the everyday services like the electronic repair shops, the barbers, everything. Visiting the homes of the Zabbaleen is also full of surprises. While from the outside, these homes look like any other informal structure in the city, when you step inside, you are met with all manner of design decisions and interior decoration. Despite having limited access to space and money, the homes in the area are designed with care and detail. Every apartment is unique, and this individuality tells a story about each family's circumstances and values. Many of these people take their homes and interior spaces very seriously, putting a lot of work and care into the details. The shared spaces are also treated in the same manner, where walls are decorated in faux marble patterns. But despite this elaborate decor, sometimes these apartments are used in very unexpected ways, like this home which caught my attention while all the mud and the grass was literally seeping out under the front door. When I was let in, it appeared that this fifth-floor apartment was being transformed into a complete animal farm, where six or seven cows stood grazing in what otherwise would be the living room. But then in the apartment across the hall from this cow shed lives a newly married couple in what locals describe as one of the nicest apartments in the area. The attention to this detail astonished me, and as the owner of the home so proudly led me around this apartment, from floor to ceiling, every part was decorated. But if it weren't for the strangely familiar stomach-churning odor that constantly passes through the apartment, it would be easy to forget that you are standing next to a cow shed and on top of a landfill. What moved me the most was that despite these seemingly inhospitable conditions, I was welcomed with open arms into a home that was made with love, care, and unreserved passion. Let's move across the map to China, to an area called Shanxi, Henan and Gansu. In a region famous for the soft, porous Loess Plateau soil, there lived until recently an estimated 00 million people in these houses underground. These dwellings are called the yaodongs. Through this architecture by subtraction, these yaodongs are built literally inside of the soil. In these villages, you see an entirely altered landscape, and hidden behind these mounds of dirt are these square, rectangular houses which sit seven meters below the ground. When I asked people why they were digging their houses from the ground, they simply replied that they are poor wheat and apple farmers who didn't have the money to buy materials, and this digging out was their most logical form of living. From Makoko to Zabbaleen, these communities have approached the tasks of planning, design and management of their communities and neighborhoods in ways that respond specifically to their environment and circumstances. Created by these very people who live, work and play in these particular spaces, these neighborhoods are intuitively designed to make the most of their circumstances. In most of these places, the government is completely absent, leaving inhabitants with no choice but to reappropriate found materials, and while these communities are highly disadvantaged, they do present examples of brilliant forms of ingenuity, and prove that indeed we have the ability to adapt to all manner of circumstances. What makes places like the Torre David particularly remarkable is this sort of skeleton framework where people can have a foundation where they can tap into. Now imagine what these already ingenious communities could create themselves, and how highly particular their solutions would be, if they were given the basic infrastructures that they could tap into. Today, you see these large residential development projects which offer cookie-cutter housing solutions to massive amounts of people. From China to Brazil, these projects attempt to provide as many houses as possible, but they're completely generic and simply do not work as an answer to the individual needs of the people. I would like to end with a quote from a friend of mine and a source of inspiration, Zita Cobb, the founder of the wonderful Shorefast Foundation, based out of Fogo Island, Newfoundland. She says that "there's this plague of sameness which is killing the human joy," and I couldn't agree with her more. Thank you. (Applause)

So I'd like you to come back with me just for a few minutes to a dark night in China, the night I met my husband. It was a city so long ago that it was still called Peking. So I went to a party. I sat down next to a stout, middle-aged man with owl glasses and a bow tie, and he turned out to be a Fulbright scholar, there in China specifically to study Sino-Soviet relations. What a gift it was to the eager, young foreign correspondent that I was then. I'd pump him for information, I'm mentally scribbling notes for the stories I plan to write. I talk to him for hours. Only months later, I discover who he really was. He was the China representative for the American Soybean Association. "I don't understand. Soybeans? You told me you were a Fulbright scholar." "Well, how long would you have talked to me if I told you we're in soybeans?" (Laughter) I said, "You jerk." Only jerk wasn't the word I used. I said, "You could've gotten me fired." And he said, "Let's get married." (Laughter) "Travel the world and have lots of kids." So we did. (Laughter) (Applause) And what an alive man Terence Bryan Foley turned out to be. He was a Chinese scholar who later, in his 00s, got a Ph.D. in Chinese history. He spoke six languages, he played 00 musical instruments, he was a licensed pilot, he had once been a San Francisco cable car operator, he was an expert in swine nutrition, dairy cattle, Dixieland jazz, film noir, and we did travel the country, and the world, and we did have a lot of kids. We followed my job, and it seemed like there was nothing that we couldn't do. So when we found the cancer, it doesn't seem strange to us at all that without saying a word to each other, we believed that, if we were smart enough and strong enough and brave enough, and we worked hard enough, we could keep him from dying ever. And for years, it seemed like we were succeeding. The surgeon emerged from the surgery. What'd he say? He said what surgeons always say: "We got it all." Then there was a setback when the pathologists looked at the kidney cancer closely. It turned out to be a rare, exceedingly aggressive type, with a diagnosis that was almost universally fatal in several weeks at most. And yet, he did not die. Mysteriously, he lived on. He coached Little League for our son. He built a playhouse for our daughter. And meanwhile, I'm burying myself in the Internet looking for specialists. I'm looking for a cure. So a year goes by before the cancer, as cancers do, reappears, and with it comes another death sentence, this time nine months. So we try another treatment, aggressive, nasty. It makes him so sick, he has to quit it, yet still he lives on. Then another year goes by. Two years go by. More specialists. We take the kids to Italy. We take the kids to Australia. And then more years pass, and the cancer begins to grow. This time, there's new treatments on the horizon. They're exotic. They're experimental. They're going to attack the cancer in new ways. So he enters a clinical trial, and it works. The cancer begins to shrink, and for the third time, we've dodged death. So now I ask you, how do I feel when the time finally comes and there's another dark night, sometime between midnight and 0 a.m.? This time it's on the intensive care ward when a twentysomething resident that I've never met before tells me that Terence is dying, perhaps tonight. So what do I say when he says, "What do you want me to do?" There's another drug out there. It's newer. It's more powerful. He started it just two weeks ago. Perhaps there's still hope ahead. So what do I say? I say, "Keep him alive if you can." And Terence died six days later. So we fought, we struggled, we triumphed. It was an exhilarating fight, and I'd repeat the fight today without a moment's hesitation. We fought together, we lived together. It turned what could have been seven of the grimmest years of our life into seven of the most glorious. It was also an expensive fight. It was the kind of fight and the kind of choices that everyone here agrees pump up the cost of end-of-life care, and of healthcare for all of us. And for me, for us, we pushed the fight right over the edge, and I never got the chance to say to him what I say to him now almost every day: "Hey, buddy, it was a hell of a ride." We never got the chance to say goodbye. We never thought it was the end. We always had hope. So what do we make of all of this? Being a journalist, after Terence died, I wrote a book, "The Cost Of Hope." I wrote it because I wanted to know why I did what I did, why he did what he did, why everyone around us did what they did. And what did I discover? Well, one of the things I discovered is that experts think that one answer to what I did at the end was a piece of paper, the advance directive, to help families get past the seemingly irrational choices. Yet I had that piece of paper. We both did. And they were readily available. I had them right at hand. Both of them said the same thing: Do nothing if there is no further hope. I knew Terence's wishes as clearly and as surely as I knew my own. Yet we never got to no further hope. Even with that clear-cut paper in our hands, we just kept redefining hope. I believed I could keep him from dying, and I'd be embarrassed to say that if I hadn't seen so many people and have talked to so many people who have felt exactly the same way. Right up until days before his death, I felt strongly and powerfully, and, you might say, irrationally, that I could keep him from dying ever. Now, what do the experts call this? They say it's denial. It's a strong word, isn't it? Yet I will tell you that denial isn't even close to a strong enough word to describe what those of us facing the death of our loved ones go through. And I hear the medical professionals say, "Well, we'd like to do such-and-such, but the family's in denial. The family won't listen to reason. They're in denial. How can they insist on this treatment at the end? It's so clear, yet they're in denial." Now, I think this maybe isn't a very useful way of thinking. It's not just families either. The medical professionals too, you out there, you're in denial too. You want to help. You want to fix. You want to do. You've succeeded in everything you've done, and having a patient die, well, that must feel like failure. I saw it firsthand. Just days before Terence died, his oncologist said, "Tell Terence that better days are just ahead." Days before he died. Yet Ira Byock, the director of palliative medicine at Dartmouth said, "You know, the best doctor in the world has never succeeded in making anyone immortal." So what the experts call "denial," I call "hope," and I'd like to borrow a phrase from my friends in software design. You just redefine denial and hope, and it becomes a feature of being human. It's not a bug. It's a feature. (Laughter) So we need to think more constructively about this very common, very profound and very powerful human emotion. It's part of the human condition, and yet our system and our thinking isn't built to accommodate it. So Terence told me a story on that long-ago night, and I believed it. Maybe I wanted to believe it. And during Terence's illness, I, we, we wanted to believe the story of our fight together too. Giving up the fight -- for that's how it felt, it felt like giving up -- meant giving up not only his life but also our story, our story of us as fighters, the story of us as invincible, and for the doctors, the story of themselves as healers. So what do we need? Maybe we don't need a new piece of paper. Maybe we need a new story, not a story about giving up the fight or of hopelessness, but rather a story of victory and triumph, of a valiant battle and, eventually, a graceful retreat, a story that acknowledges that not even the greatest general defeats every foe, that no doctor has ever succeeded in making anyone immortal, and that no wife, no matter how hard she tried, has ever stopped even the bravest, wittiest and most maddeningly lovable husband from dying when it was his time to go. People did mention hospice, but I wouldn't listen. Hospice was for people who were dying, and Terence wasn't dying. As a result, he spent just four days in hospice, which I'm sure, as you all know, is a pretty typical outcome, and we never said goodbye because we were unprepared for the end. We have a noble path to curing the disease, patients and doctors alike, but there doesn't seem to be a noble path to dying. Dying is seen as failing, and we had a heroic narrative for fighting together, but we didn't have a heroic narrative for letting go. So maybe we need a narrative for acknowledging the end, and for saying goodbye, and maybe our new story will be about a hero's fight, and a hero's goodbye. Terence loved poetry, and the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy is one of my favorite poets. So I'll give you a couple lines from him. This is a poem about Mark Antony. You know Mark Antony, the conquering hero, Cleopatra's guy? Actually, one of Cleopatra's guys. And he's been a pretty good general. He's won all the fights, he's eluded all the people that are out to get him, and yet this time, finally, he's come to the city of Alexandria and realized he's lost. The people are leaving. They're playing instruments. They're singing. And suddenly he knows he's been defeated. And he suddenly knows he's been deserted by the gods, and it's time to let go. And the poet tells him what to do. He tells him how to say a noble goodbye, a goodbye that's fit for a hero. "As if long-prepared, as if courageous, as it becomes you who were worthy of such a city, approach the window with a firm step, and with emotion, but not with the entreaties or the complaints of a coward, as a last enjoyment, listen to the sounds, the exquisite instruments of the musical troops, and bid her farewell, the Alexandria you are losing." That's a goodbye for a man who was larger than life, a goodbye for a man for whom anything, well, almost anything, was possible, a goodbye for a man who kept hope alive. And isn't that what we're missing? How can we learn that people's decisions about their loved ones are often based strongly, powerfully, many times irrationally, on the slimmest of hopes? The overwhelming presence of hope isn't denial. It's part of our DNA as humans, and maybe it's time our healthcare system -- doctors, patients, insurance companies, us, started accounting for the power of that hope. Hope isn't a bug. It's a feature. Thank you. (Applause)

So I'm a city planner, an urban designer, former arts advocate, trained in architecture and art history, and I want to talk to you today not about design but about America and how America can be more economically resilient, how America can be healthier, and how America can be more environmentally sustainable. And I realize this is a global forum, but I think I need to talk about America because there is a history, in some places, not all, of American ideas being appropriated, being emulated, for better or for worse, around the world. And the worst idea we've ever had is suburban sprawl. It's being emulated in many places as we speak. By suburban sprawl, I refer to the reorganization of the landscape and the creation of the landscape around the requirement of automobile use, and that the automobile that was once an instrument of freedom has become a gas-belching, time-wasting and life-threatening prosthetic device that many of us need just to, most Americans, in fact, need, just to live their daily lives. And there's an alternative. You know, we say, half the world is living in cities. Well, in America, that living in cities, for many of them, they're living in cities still where they're dependent on that automobile. And what I work for, and to do, is to make our cities more walkable. But I can't give design arguments for that that will have as much impact as the arguments that I've learned from the economists, the epidemiologists and the environmentalists. So these are the three arguments that I'm going to give you quickly today. When I was growing up in the '00s, the typical American spent one tenth of their income, American family, on transportation. Since then, we've doubled the number of roads in America, and we now spend one fifth of our income on transportation. Working families, which are defined as earning between 00,000 and 00,000 dollars a year in America are spending more now on transportation than on housing, slightly more, because of this phenomenon called "drive till you qualify," finding homes further and further and further from the city centers and from their jobs, so that they're locked in this, two, three hours, four hours a day of commuting. And these are the neighborhoods, for example, in the Central Valley of California that weren't hurt when the housing bubble burst and when the price of gas went up; they were decimated. And in fact, these are many of the half-vacant communities that you see today. Imagine putting everything you have into your mortgage, it goes underwater, and you have to pay twice as much for all the driving that you're doing. So we know what it's done to our society and all the extra work we have to do to support our cars. What happens when a city decides it's going to set other priorities? And probably the best example we have here in America is Portland, Oregon. Portland made a bunch of decisions in the 0000s that began to distinguish it from almost every other American city. While most other cities were growing an undifferentiated spare tire of sprawl, they instituted an urban growth boundary. While most cities were reaming out their roads, removing parallel parking and trees in order to flow more traffic, they instituted a skinny streets program. And while most cities were investing in more roads and more highways, they actually invested in bicycling and in walking. And they spent 00 million dollars on bike facilities, which seems like a lot of money, but it was spent over about 00 years, so two million dollars a year -- not that much -- and half the price of the one cloverleaf that they decided to rebuild in that city. These changes and others like them changed the way that Portlanders live, and their vehicle-miles traveled per day, the amount that each person drives, actually peaked in 0000, has been dropping ever since, and they now drive 00 percent less than the rest of the country. The typical Portland citizen drives four miles less, and 00 minutes less per day than they did before. The economist Joe Cortright did the math and he found out that those four miles plus those 00 minutes adds up to fully three and a half percent of all income earned in the region. So if they're not spending that money on driving -- and by the way, 00 percent of the money we spend on driving leaves the local economy -- if they're not spending that money on driving, what are they spending it on? Well, Portland is reputed to have the most roof racks per capita, the most independent bookstores per capita, the most strip clubs per capita. These are all exaggerations, slight exaggerations of a fundamental truth, which is Portlanders spend a lot more on recreation of all kinds than the rest of America. Actually, Oregonians spend more on alcohol than most other states, which may be a good thing or a bad thing, but it makes you glad they're driving less. (Laughter) But actually, they're spending most of it in their homes, and home investment is about as local an investment as you can get. But there's a whole other Portland story, which isn't part of this calculus, which is that young, educated people have been moving to Portland in droves, so that between the last two censuses, they had a 00-percent increase in college-educated millennials, which is five times what you saw anywhere else in the country, or, I should say, of the national average. So on the one hand, a city saves money for its residents by being more walkable and more bikeable, but on the other hand, it also is the cool kind of city that people want to be in these days. So the best economic strategy you can have as a city is not the old way of trying to attract corporations and trying to have a biotech cluster or a medical cluster, or an aerospace cluster, but to become a place where people want to be. And millennials, certainly, these engines of entrepreneurship, 00 percent of whom decide first where they want to live, then they move there, then they look for a job, they will come to your city. The health argument is a scary one, and you've probably heard part of this argument before. Again, back in the '00s, a lot's changed since then, back in the '00s, one in 00 Americans was obese. Now one out of three Americans is obese, and a second third of the population is overweight. Twenty-five percent of young men and 00 percent of young women are too heavy to enlist in our own military forces. According to the Center for Disease Control, fully one third of all children born after 0000 will get diabetes. We have the first generation of children in America who are predicted to live shorter lives than their parents. I believe that this American healthcare crisis that we've all heard about is an urban design crisis, and that the design of our cities lies at the cure. Because we've talked a long time about diet, and we know that diet impacts weight, and weight of course impacts health. But we've only started talking about inactivity, and how inactivity born of our landscape, inactivity that comes from the fact that we live in a place where there is no longer any such thing as a useful walk, is driving our weight up. And we finally have the studies, one in Britain called "Gluttony versus sloth" that tracked weight against diet and tracked weight against inactivity, and found a much higher, stronger correlation between the latter two. Dr. James Levine at, in this case, the aptly-named Mayo Clinic put his test subjects in electronic underwear, held their diet steady, and then started pumping the calories in. Some people gained weight, some people didn't gain weight. Expecting some metabolic or DNA factor at work, they were shocked to learn that the only difference between the subjects that they could figure out was the amount they were moving, and that in fact those who gained weight were sitting, on average, two hours more per day than those who didn't. So we have these studies that tie weight to inactivity, but even more, we now have studies that tie weight to where you live. Do you live in a more walkable city or do you live in a less walkable city, or where in your city do you live? In San Diego, they used Walk Score -- Walk Score rates every address in America and soon the world in terms of how walkable it is -- they used Walk Score to designate more walkable neighborhoods and less walkable neighborhoods. Well guess what? If you lived in a more walkable neighborhood, you were 00 percent likely to be overweight. If you lived in a less walkable neighborhood, you were 00 percent likely to be overweight. So we have study after study now that's tying where you live to your health, particularly as in America, the biggest health crisis we have is this one that's stemming from environmental-induced inactivity. And I learned a new word last week. They call these neighborhoods "obesageneric." I may have that wrong, but you get the idea. Now that's one thing, of course. Briefly mentioning, we have an asthma epidemic in this country. You probably haven't thought that much about it. Fourteen Americans die each day from asthma, three times what it was in the '00s, and it's almost all coming from car exhaust. American pollution does not come from factories anymore, it comes from tailpipes, and the amount that people are driving in your city, your urban VMT, is a good prediction of the asthma problems in your city. And then finally, in terms of driving, there's the issue of the single-largest killer of healthy adults, and one of the largest killers of all people, is car crashes. And we take car crashes for granted. We figure it's a natural risk of being on the road. But in fact, here in America, 00 people out of every 000,000 die every year from car crashes. We're pretty safe here. Well, guess what? In England, it's seven per 000,000. It's Japan, it's four per 000,000. Do you know where it's three per 000,000? New York City. San Francisco, the same thing. Portland, the same thing. Oh, so cities make us safer because we're driving less? Tulsa: 00 per 000,000. Orlando: 00 per 000,000. It's not whether you're in the city or not, it's how is your city designed? Was it designed around cars or around people? Because if your city is designed around cars, it's really good at smashing them into each other. That's part of a much larger health argument. Finally, the environmental argument is fascinating, because the environmentalists turned on a dime about 00 years ago. The environmental movement in America has historically been an anti-city movement from Jefferson on. "Cities are pestilential to the health, to the liberties, to the morals of man. If we continue to pile upon ourselves in cities, as they do in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as they are in Europe and take to eating one another as they do there." He apparently had a sense of humor. And then the American environmental movement has been a classically Arcadian movement. To become more environmental, we move into the country, we commune with nature, we build suburbs. But, of course, we've seen what that does. The carbon mapping of America, where is the CO0 being emitted, for many years only hammered this argument in more strongly. If you look at any carbon map, because we map it per square mile, any carbon map of the U.S., it looks like a night sky satellite photo of the U.S., hottest in the cities, cooler in the suburbs, dark, peaceful in the countryside. Until some economists said, you know, is that the right way to measure CO0? There are only so many people in this country at any given time, and we can choose to live where perhaps we would have a lighter impact. And they said, let's measure CO0 per household, and when they did that, the maps just flipped, coolest in the center city, warmer in the suburbs, and red hot in these exurban "drive till you qualify" neighborhoods. So a fundamental shift, and now you have environmentalists and economists like Ed Glaeser saying we are a destructive species. If you love nature, the best thing you can do is stay the heck away from it, move to a city, and the denser the better, and the denser cities like Manhattan are the cities that perform the best. So the average Manhattanite is consuming gasoline at the rate the rest of the nation hasn't seen since the '00s, consuming half of the electricity of Dallas. But of course, we can do better. Canadian cities, they consume half the gasoline of American cities. European cities consume half as much again. So obviously, we can do better, and we want to do better, and we're all trying to be green. My final argument in this topic is that I think we're trying to be green the wrong way, and I'm one of many people who believes that this focus on gadgets, on accessorizing -- What can I add to my house, what can I add to what I've already got to make my lifestyle more sustainable? -- has kind of dominated the discussion. So I'm not immune to this. My wife and I built a new house on an abandoned lot in Washington, D.C., and we did our best to clear the shelves of the sustainability store. We've got the solar photovoltaic system, solar hot water heater, dual-flush toilets, bamboo floors. A log burning in my German high-tech stove apparently, supposedly, contributes less carbon to the atmosphere than were it left alone to decompose in the forest. Yet all of these innovations -- That's what they said in the brochure. (Laughter) All of these innovations together contribute a fraction of what we contribute by living in a walkable neighborhood three blocks from a metro in the heart of a city. We've changed all our light bulbs to energy-savers, and you should do the same thing, but changing all your light bulbs to energy-savers saves as much energy in a year as moving to a walkable city does in a week. And we don't want to have this argument. Politicians and marketers are afraid of marketing green as a "lifestyle choice." You don't want to tell Americans, God forbid, that they have to change their lifestyle. But what if lifestyle was really about quality of life and about perhaps something that we would all enjoy more, something that would be better than what we have right now? Well, the gold standard of quality of life rankings, it's called the Mercer Survey. You may have heard of it. They rank hundreds of nations worldwide according to 00 criteria that they believe add up to quality of life: health, economics, education, housing, you name it. There's six more. Short talk. (Laughter) And it's very interesting to see that the highest-ranking American city, Honolulu, number 00, is followed by kind of the usual suspects of Seattle and Boston and all walkable cities. The driving cities in the Sun Belt, the Dallases and the Phoenixes and, sorry, Atlanta, these cities are not appearing on the list. But who's doing even better? The Canadian cities like Vancouver, where again, they're burning half the fuel. And then it's usually won by cities where they speak German, like Dusseldorf or Vienna, where they're burning, again, half as much fuel. And you see this alignment, this strange alignment. Is being more sustainble what gives you a higher quality of life? I would argue the same thing that makes you more sustainble is what gives you a higher quality of life, and that's living in a walkable neighborhood. So sustainability, which includes our wealth and our health may not be a direct function of our sustainability. But particularly here in America, we are polluting so much because we're throwing away our time and our money and our lives on the highway, then these two problems would seem to share the same solution, which is to make our cities more walkable. Doing so isn't easy, but it can be done, it has been done, and it's being done now in more than a few cities, around the globe and in our country. I take some solace from Winston Churchill, who put it this way: "The Americans can be counted on to do the right thing once they have exhausted the alternatives." (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause)

So in my free time outside of Twitter I experiment a little bit with telling stories online, experimenting with what we can do with new digital tools. And in my job at Twitter, I actually spent a little bit of time working with authors and storytellers as well, helping to expand out the bounds of what people are experimenting with. And I want to talk through some examples today of things that people have done that I think are really fascinating using flexible identity and anonymity on the web and blurring the lines between fact and fiction. But I want to start and go back to the 0000s. Long before a little thing called Twitter, radio brought us broadcasts and connected millions of people to single points of broadcast. And from those single points emanated stories. Some of them were familiar stories. Some of them were new stories. And for a while they were familiar formats, but then radio began to evolve its own unique formats specific to that medium. Think about episodes that happened live on radio. Combining the live play and the serialization of written fiction, you get this new format. And the reason why I bring up radio is that I think radio is a great example of how a new medium defines new formats which then define new stories. And of course, today, we have an entirely new medium to play with, which is this online world. This is the map of verified users on Twitter and the connections between them. There are thousands upon thousands of them. Every single one of these points is its own broadcaster. We've gone to this world of many to many, where access to the tools is the only barrier to broadcasting. And I think that we should start to see wildly new formats emerge as people learn how to tell stories in this new medium. I actually believe that we are in a wide open frontier for creative experimentation, if you will, that we've explored and begun to settle this wild land of the Internet and are now just getting ready to start to build structures on it, and those structures are the new formats of storytelling that the Internet will allow us to create. I believe this starts with an evolution of existing methods. The short story, for example, people are saying that the short story is experiencing a renaissance of sorts thanks to e-readers, digital marketplaces. One writer, Hugh Howey, experimented with short stories on Amazon by releasing one very short story called "Wool." And he actually says that he didn't intend for "Wool" to become a series, but that the audience loved the first story so much they demanded more, and so he gave them more. He gave them "Wool 0," which was a little bit longer than the first one, "Wool 0," which was even longer, culminating in "Wool 0," which was a 00,000-word novel. I think Howey was able to do all of this because he had the quick feedback system of e-books. He was able to write and publish in relatively short order. There was no mediator between him and the audience. It was just him directly connected with his audience and building on the feedback and enthusiasm that they were giving him. So this whole project was an experiment. It started with the one short story, and I think the experimentation actually became a part of Howey's format. And that's something that this medium enabled, was experimentation being a part of the format itself. This is a short story by the author Jennifer Egan called "Black Box." It was originally written specifically with Twitter in mind. Egan convinced The New Yorker to start a New Yorker fiction account from which they could tweet all of these lines that she created. Now Twitter, of course, has a 000-character limit. Egan mocked that up just writing manually in this storyboard sketchbook, used the physical space constraints of those storyboard squares to write each individual tweet, and those tweets ended up becoming over 000 of them that were serialized by The New Yorker. Every night, at 0 p.m., you could tune in to a short story from The New Yorker's fiction account. I think that's pretty exciting: tune-in literary fiction. The experience of Egan's story, of course, like anything on Twitter, there were multiple ways to experience it. You could scroll back through it, but interestingly, if you were watching it live, there was this suspense that built because the actual tweets, you had no control over when you would read them. They were coming at a pretty regular clip, but as the story was building, normally, as a reader, you control how fast you move through a text, but in this case, The New Yorker did, and they were sending you bit by bit by bit, and you had this suspense of waiting for the next line. Another great example of fiction and the short story on Twitter, Elliott Holt is an author who wrote a story called "Evidence." It began with this tweet: "On November 00 at 00:00 p.m., a woman identified as Miranda Brown, 00, of Brooklyn, fell to her death from the roof of a Manhattan hotel." It begins in Elliott's voice, but then Elliott's voice recedes, and we hear the voices of Elsa, Margot and Simon, characters that Elliott created on Twitter specifically to tell this story, a story from multiple perspectives leading up to this moment at 00:00 p.m. when this woman falls to her death. These three characters brought an authentic vision from multiple perspectives. One reviewer called Elliott's story "Twitter fiction done right," because she did. She captured that voice and she had multiple characters and it happened in real time. Interestingly, though, it wasn't just Twitter as a distribution mechanism. It was also Twitter as a production mechanism. Elliott told me later she wrote the whole thing with her thumbs. She laid on the couch and just went back and forth between different characters tweeting out each line, line by line. I think that this kind of spontaneous creation of what was coming out of the characters' voices really lent an authenticity to the characters themselves, but also to this format that she had created of multiple perspectives in a single story on Twitter. As you begin to play with flexible identity online, it gets even more interesting as you start to interact with the real world. Things like Invisible Obama or the famous "binders full of women" that came up during the 0000 election cycle, or even the fan fiction universe of "West Wing" Twitter in which you have all of these accounts for every single one of the characters in "The West Wing," including the bird that taps at Josh Lyman's window in one single episode. (Laughter) All of these are rapid iterations on a theme. They are creative people experimenting with the bounds of what is possible in this medium. You look at something like "West Wing" Twitter, in which you have these fictional characters that engage with the real world. They comment on politics, they cry out against the evils of Congress. Keep in mind, they're all Democrats. And they engage with the real world. They respond to it. So once you take flexible identity, anonymity, engagement with the real world, and you move beyond simple homage or parody and you put these tools to work in telling a story, that's when things get really interesting. So during the Chicago mayoral election there was a parody account. It was Mayor Emanuel. It gave you everything you wanted from Rahm Emanuel, particularly in the expletive department. This foul-mouthed account followed the daily activities of the race, providing commentary as it went. It followed all of the natural tropes of a good, solid Twitter parody account, but then started to get weird. And as it progressed, it moved from this commentary to a multi-week, real-time science fiction epic in which your protagonist, Rahm Emanuel, engages in multi-dimensional travel on election day, which is -- it didn't actually happen. I double checked the newspapers. And then, very interestingly, it came to an end. This is something that doesn't usually happen with a Twitter parody account. It ended, a true narrative conclusion. And so the author, Dan Sinker, who was a journalist, who was completely anonymous this whole time, I think Dan -- it made a lot of sense for him to turn this into a book, because it was a narrative format in the end, and I think that turning it into a book is representative of this idea that he had created something new that needed to be translated into previous formats. One of my favorite examples of something that's happening on Twitter right now, actually, is the very absurdist Crimer Show. Crimer Show tells the story of a supercriminal and a hapless detective that face off in this exceptionally strange lingo, with all of the tropes of a television show. Crimer Show's creator has said that it is a parody of a popular type of show in the U.K., but, man, is it weird. And there are all these times where Crimer, the supercriminal, does all of these TV things. He's always taking off his sunglasses or turning to the camera, but these things just happen in text. I think borrowing all of these tropes from television and additionally presenting each Crimer Show as an episode, spelled E-P-P-A-S-O-D, "eppasod," presenting them as episodes really, it creates something new. There is a new "eppasod" of Crimer Show on Twitter pretty much every day, and they're archived that way. And I think this is an interesting experiment in format. Something totally new has been created here out of parodying something on television. I think in nonfiction real-time storytelling, there are a lot of really excellent examples as well. RealTimeWWII is an account that documents what was happening on this day 00 years ago in exceptional detail, as if you were reading the news reports from that day. And the author Teju Cole has done a lot of experimentation with putting a literary twist on events of the news. In this particular case, he's talking about drone strikes. I think that in both of these examples, you're beginning to see ways in which people are telling stories with nonfiction content that can be built into new types of fictional storytelling. So with real-time storytelling, blurring the lines between fact and fiction, the real world and the digital world, flexible identity, anonymity, these are all tools that we have accessible to us, and I think that they're just the building blocks. They are the bits that we use to create the structures, the frames, that then become our settlements on this wide open frontier for creative experimentation. Thank you. (Applause)

I'm a physician trained in infectious diseases, and following my training, I moved to Somalia from San Francisco. And my goodbye greeting from the chief of infectious diseases at San Francisco General was, "Gary, this is the biggest mistake you'll ever make." But I landed in a refugee situation that had a million refugees in 00 camps, and there were six of us doctors. There were many epidemics there. My responsibilities were largely related to tuberculosis, and then we got struck by an epidemic of cholera. So it was the spread of tuberculosis and the spread of cholera that I was responsible for inhibiting. And in order to do this work, we, of course, because of the limitation in health workers, had to recruit refugees to be a specialized new category of health worker. Following three years of work in Somalia, I got picked up by the World Health Organization, and got assigned to the epidemics of AIDS. My primary responsibility was Uganda, but also I worked in Rwanda and Burundi and Zaire, now Congo, Tanzania, Malawi, and several other countries. And my last assignment there was to run a unit called intervention development, which was responsible for designing interventions. After 00 years of working overseas, I was exhausted. I really had very little left. I had been traveling to one country after another. I was emotionally feeling very isolated. I wanted to come home. I'd seen a lot of death, in particular epidemic death, and epidemic death has a different feel to it. It's full of panic and fear, and I'd heard the women wailing and crying in the desert. And I wanted to come home and take a break and maybe start over. I was not aware of any epidemic problems in America. In fact, I wasn't aware of any problems in America. In fact -- seriously. And in fact I would visit friends of mine, and I noticed that they had water that came right into their homes. How many of you have such a situation? (Laughter) And some of them, many of them actually, had water that came into more than one room. And I noticed that they would move this little thermoregulatory device to change the temperature in their home by one degree or two degrees. And now I do that. And I really didn't know what I would do, but friends of mine began telling me about children shooting other children with guns. And I asked the question, what are you doing about it? What are you in America doing about it? And there were two essential explanations or ideas that were prevalent. And one was punishment. And this I had heard about before. We who had worked in behavior knew that punishment was something that was discussed but also that it was highly overvalued. It was not a main driver of behavior, nor was it a main driver of behavior change. And besides that, it reminded me of ancient epidemics that were previously completely misunderstood because the science hadn't been there before, epidemics of plague or typhus or leprosy, where the prevalent ideas were that there were bad people or bad humors or bad air, and widows were dragged around the moat, and dungeons were part of the solution. The other explanation or, in a way, the solution suggested, is please fix all of these things: the schools, the community, the homes, the families, everything. And I'd heard this before as well. I'd called this the "everything" theory, or EOE: Everything On Earth. But we'd also realized in treating other processes and problems that sometimes you don't need to treat everything. And so the sense that I had was there was a giant gap here. The problem of violence was stuck, and this has historically been the case in many other issues. Diarrheal diseases had been stuck. Malaria had been stuck. Frequently, a strategy has to be rethought. It's not as if I had any idea what it would look like, but there was a sense that we would have to do something with new categories of workers and something having to do with behavior change and something having to do with public education. But I began to ask questions and search out the usual things that I had been exploring before, like, what do the maps look like? What do the graphs look like? What does the data look like? And the maps of violence in most U.S. cities looked like this. There was clustering. This reminded me of clustering that we'd seen also in infectious epidemics, for example cholera. And then we looked at the maps, and the maps showed this typical wave upon wave upon wave, because all epidemics are combinations of many epidemics. And it also looked like infectious epidemics. And then we asked the question, well what really predicts a case of violence? And it turns out that the greatest predictor of a case of violence is a preceding case of violence. Which also sounds like, if there is a case of flu, someone gave someone a case of flu, or a cold, or the greatest risk factor of tuberculosis is having been exposed to tuberculosis. And so we see that violence is, in a way, behaving like a contagious disease. We're aware of this anyway even in our common experiences or our newspaper stories of the spread of violence from fights or in gang wars or in civil wars or even in genocides. And so there's good news about this, though, because there's a way to reverse epidemics, and there's really only three things that are done to reverse epidemics, and the first of it is interrupting transmission. In order to interrupt transmission, you need to detect and find first cases. In other words, for T.B. you have to find somebody who has active T.B. who is infecting other people. Make sense? And there's special workers for doing that. For this particular problem, we designed a new category of worker who, like a SARS worker or someone looking for bird flu, might find first cases. In this case, it's someone who's very angry because someone looked at his girlfriend or owes him money, and you can find workers and train them into these specialized categories. And the second thing to do, of course, is to prevent further spread, that means to find who else has been exposed, but may not be spreading so much right now like someone with a smaller case of T.B., or someone who is just hanging out in the neighborhoods, but in the same group, and then they need to be, in a way, managed as well, particular to the specific disease process. And then the third part, the shifting the norms, and that means a whole bunch of community activities, remodeling, public education, and then you've got what you might call group immunity. And that combination of factors is how the AIDS epidemic in Uganda was very successfully reversed. And so what we decided to do in the year 0000 is kind of put this together in a way by hiring in new categories of workers, the first being violence interruptors. And then we would put all of this into place in one neighborhood in what was the worst police district in the United States at the time. So violence interruptors hired from the same group, credibility, trust, access, just like the health workers in Somalia, but designed for a different category, and trained in persuasion, cooling people down, buying time, reframing. And then another category of worker, the outreach workers, to keep people in a way on therapy for six to 00 months. Just like T.B., but the object is behavior change. And then a bunch of community activities for changing norms. Now our first experiment of this resulted in a 00-percent drop in shootings and killings in the West Garfield neighborhood of Chicago. (Applause) And this was a beautiful thing for the neighborhood itself, first 00 or 00 days, then 00 days, and then there was unfortunately another shooting in another 00 days, and the moms were hanging out in the afternoon. They were using parks they weren't using before. The sun was out. Everybody was happy. But of course, the funders said, "Wait a second, do it again." And so we had to then, fortunately, get the funds to repeat this experience, and this is one of the next four neighborhoods that had a 00-percent drop in shootings and killings. And since that time, this has been replicated 00 times. There have been independent evaluations supported by the Justice Department and by the CDC and performed by Johns Hopkins that have shown 00-to-00-percent and 00-to-00-percent reductions in shootings and killings using this new method. In fact, there have been three independent evaluations of this now. Now we've gotten a lot of attention as a result of this, including being featured on The New York Times' Sunday magazine cover story. The Economist in 0000 said this is "the approach that will come to prominence." And even a movie was made around our work. [The Interrupters] However, not so fast, because a lot of people did not agree with this way of going about it. We got a lot of criticism, a lot of opposition, and a lot of opponents. In other words, what do you mean, health problem? What do you mean, epidemic? What do you mean, no bad guys? And there's whole industries designed for managing bad people. What do you mean, hiring people who have backgrounds? My business friends said, "Gary, you're being criticized tremendously. You must be doing something right." (Laughter) My musician friends added the word "dude." So anyway, additionally, there was still this problem, and we were getting highly criticized as well for not dealing with all of these other problems. Yet we were able to manage malaria and reduce HIV and reduce diarrheal diseases in places with awful economies without healing the economy. So what's actually happened is, although there is still some opposition, the movement is clearly growing. Many of the major cities in the U.S., including New York City and Baltimore and Kansas City, their health departments are running this now. Chicago and New Orleans, the health departments are having a very large role in this. This is being embraced more by law enforcement than it had been years ago. Trauma centers and hospitals are doing their part in stepping up. And the U.S. Conference of Mayors has endorsed not only the approach but the specific model. Where there's really been uptake even faster is in the international environment, where there's a 00-percent drop in the first neighborhood in Puerto Rico, where interruptions are just beginning in Honduras, where the strategy has been applied in Kenya for the recent elections, and where there have been 000 interruptions in Iraq. So violence is responding as a disease even as it behaves as a disease. So the theory, in a way, is kind of being validated by the treatment. And recently, the Institute of Medicine came out with a workshop report which went through some of the data, including the neuroscience, on how this problem is really transmitted. So I think this is good news, because it allows us an opportunity to come out of the Middle Ages, which is where I feel this field has been. It gives us an opportunity to consider the possibility of replacing some of these prisons with playgrounds or parks, and to consider the possibility of converting our neighborhoods into neighborhoods, and to allow there to be a new strategy, a new set of methods, a new set of workers: science, in a way, replacing morality. And moving away from emotions is the most important part of the solution to science as a more important part of the solution. So I didn't mean to come up with this at all. It was a matter of, I wanted actually a break, and we looked at maps, we looked at graphs, we asked some questions and tried some tools that actually have been used many times before for other things. For myself, I tried to get away from infectious diseases, and I didn't. Thank you. (Applause)

"Iran is Israel's best friend, and we do not intend to change our position in relation to Tehran." Believe it or not, this is a quote from an Israeli prime minister, but it's not Ben-Gurion or Golda Meir from the era of the Shah. It's actually from Yitzhak Rabin. The year is 0000. Ayatollah Khomeini is still alive, and much like Ahmadinejad today, he's using the worst rhetoric against Israel. Yet, Rabin referred to Iran as a geostrategic friend. Today, when we hear the threats of war and the high rhetoric, we're oftentimes led to believe that this is yet another one of those unsolvable Middle Eastern conflicts with roots as old as the region itself. Nothing could be further from the truth, and I hope today to show you why that is. The relations between the Iranian and the Jewish people throughout history has actually been quite positive, starting in 000 B.C., when King Cyrus the Great of Persia liberated the Jewish people from their Babylonian captivity. A third of the Jewish population stayed in Babylonia. They're today's Iraqi Jews. A third migrated to Persia. They're today's Iranian Jews, still 00,000 of them living in Iran, making them the largest Jewish community in the Middle East outside of Israel itself. And a third returned to historic Palestine, did the second rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, financed, incidentally, by Persian tax money. But even in modern times, relations have been close at times. Rabin's statement was a reflection of decades of security and intelligence collaboration between the two, which in turn was born out of perception of common threats. Both states feared the Soviet Union and strong Arab states such as Egypt and Iraq. And, in addition, the Israeli doctrine of the periphery, the idea that Israel's security was best achieved by creating alliances with the non-Arab states in the periphery of the region in order to balance the Arab states in its vicinity. Now, from the Shah's perspective, though, he wanted to keep this as secret as possible, so when Yitzhak Rabin, for instance, traveled to Iran in the '00s, he usually wore a wig so that no one would recognize him. The Iranians built a special tarmac at the airport in Tehran, far away from the central terminal, so that no one would notice the large number of Israeli planes shuttling between Tel Aviv and Tehran. Now, did all of this end with the Islamic revolution in 0000? In spite of the very clear anti-Israeli ideology of the new regime, the geopolitical logic for their collaboration lived on, because they still had common threats. And when Iraq invaded Iran in 0000, Israel feared an Iraqi victory and actively helped Iran by selling it arms and providing it with spare parts for Iran's American weaponry at a moment when Iran was very vulnerable because of an American arms embargo that Israel was more than happy to violate. In fact, back in the 0000s, it was Israel that lobbied Washington to talk to Iran, to sell arms to Iran, and not pay attention to Iran's anti-Israeli ideology. And this, of course, climaxed in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 0000s. But with the end of the Cold War came also the end of the Israeli-Iranian cold peace. Suddenly, the two common threats that had pushed them closer together throughout decades, more or less evaporated. The Soviet Union collapsed, Iraq was defeated, and a new environment was created in the region in which both of them felt more secure, but they were also now left unchecked. Without Iraq balancing Iran, Iran could now become a threat, some in Israel argued. In fact, the current dynamic that you see between Iran and Israel has its roots more so in the geopolitical reconfiguration of the region after the Cold War than in the events of 0000, because at this point, Iran and Israel emerge as two of the most powerful states in the region, and rather than viewing each other as potential security partners, they increasingly came to view each other as rivals and competitors. So Israel, who in the 0000s lobbied for and improved U.S.-Iran relations now feared a U.S.-Iran rapprochement, thinking that it would come at Israel's security interests' expense, and instead sought to put Iran in increased isolation. Ironically, this was happening at a time when Iran was more interested in peacemaking with Washington than to see to Israel's destruction. Iran had put itself in isolation because of its radicalism, and after having helped the United States indirectly in the war against Iraq in 0000, the Iranians were hoping that they would be rewarded by being included in the post-war security architecture of the region. But Washington chose to ignore Iran's outreach, as it would a decade later in Afghanistan, and instead moved to intensify Iran's isolation, and it is at this point, around 0000, '00, that Iran begins to translate its anti-Israeli ideology into operational policy. The Iranians believed that whatever they did, even if they moderated their policies, the U.S. would continue to seek Iran's isolation, and the only way Iran could compel Washington to change its position was by imposing a cost on the U.S. if it didn't. The easiest target was the peace process, and now the Iranian ideological bark was to be accompanied by a nonconventional bite, and Iran began supporting extensively Palestinian Islamist groups that it previously had shunned. In some ways, this sounds paradoxical, but according to Martin Indyk of the Clinton administration, the Iranians had not gotten it entirely wrong, because the more peace there would be between Israel and Palestine, the U.S. believed, the more Iran would get isolated. The more Iran got isolated, the more peace there would be. So according to Indyk, and these are his words, the Iranians had an interest to do us in on the peace process in order to defeat our policy of containment. To defeat our policy of containment, not about ideology. But throughout even the worst times of their entanglement, all sides have reached out to each other. Netanyahu, when he got elected in 0000, reached out to the Iranians to see if there were any ways that the doctrine of the periphery could be resurrected. Tehran was not interested. A few years later, the Iranians sent a comprehensive negotiation proposal to the Bush administration, a proposal that revealed that there was some potential of getting Iran and Israel back on terms again. The Bush administration did not even respond. All sides have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. But this is not an ancient conflict. This is not even an ideological conflict. The ebbs and flows of hostility have not shifted with ideological zeal, but rather with changes in the geopolitical landscape. When Iran and Israel's security imperatives dictated collaboration, they did so in spite of lethal ideological opposition to each other. When Iran's ideological impulses collided with its strategic interests, the strategic interests always prevailed. This is good news, because it means that neither war nor enmity is a foregone conclusion. But some want war. Some believe or say that it's 0000, Iran is Germany, and Ahmadinejad is Hitler. If we accept this to be true, that indeed it is 0000, Iran is Germany, Ahmadinejad is Hitler, then the question we have to ask ourself is, who wishes to play the role of Neville Chamberlain? Who will risk peace? This is an analogy that is deliberately aimed at eliminating diplomacy, and when you eliminate diplomacy, you make war inevitable. In an ideological conflict, there can be no truce, no draw, no compromise, only victory or defeat. But rather than making war inevitable by viewing this as ideological, we would be wise to seek ways to make peace possible. Iran and Israel's conflict is a new phenomenon, only a few decades old in a history of 0,000 years, and precisely because its roots are geopolitical, it means that solutions can be found, compromises can be struck, however difficult it yet may be. After all, it was Yitzhak Rabin himself who said, "You don't make peace with your friends. You make it with your enemies." Thank you. (Applause)

The work of a transportation commissioner isn't just about stop signs and traffic signals. It involves the design of cities and the design of city streets. Streets are some of the most valuable resources that a city has, and yet it's an asset that's largely hidden in plain sight. And the lesson from New York over the past six years is that you can update this asset. You can remake your streets quickly, inexpensively, it can provide immediate benefits, and it can be quite popular. You just need to look at them a little differently. This is important because we live in an urban age. For the first time in history, most people live in cities, and the U.N. estimates that over the next 00 years, the population is going to double on the planet. So the design of cities is a key issue for our future. Mayor Bloomberg recognized this when he launched PlaNYC in 0000. The plan recognized that cities are in a global marketplace, and that if we're going to continue to grow and thrive and to attract the million more people that are expected to move here, we need to focus on the quality of life and the efficiency of our infrastructure. For many cities, our streets have been in a kind of suspended animation for generations. This is a picture of Times Square in the '00s, and despite all of the technological innovation, cultural changes, political changes, this is Times Square in 0000. Not much has changed in those 00 years. So we worked hard to refocus our agenda, to maximize efficient mobility, providing more room for buses, more room for bikes, more room for people to enjoy the city, and to make our streets as safe as they can be for everybody that uses them. We set out a clear action plan with goals and benchmarks. Having goals is important, because if you want to change and steer the ship of a big city in a new direction, you need to know where you're going and why. The design of a street can tell you everything about what's expected on it. In this case, it's expected that you shelter in place. The design of this street is really to maximize the movement of cars moving as quickly as possible from point A to point B, and it misses all the other ways that a street is used. When we started out, we did some early surveys about how our streets were used, and we found that New York City was largely a city without seats. Pictures like this, people perched on a fire hydrant, not the mark of a world-class city. (Laughter) It's not great for parents with kids. It's not great for seniors. It's not great for retailers. It's probably not good for the fire hydrants. Certainly not good for the police department. So we worked hard to change that balance, and probably the best example of our new approach is in Times Square. Three hundred and fifty thousand people a day walk through Times Square, and people had tried for years to make changes. They changed signals, they changed lanes, everything they could do to make Times Square work better. It was dangerous, hard to cross the street. It was chaotic. And so, none of those approaches worked, so we took a different approach, a bigger approach, looked at our street differently. And so we did a six-month pilot. We closed Broadway from 00nd Street to 00th Street and created two and a half acres of new pedestrian space. And the temporary materials are an important part of the program, because we were able to show how it worked. And I work for a data-driven mayor, as you probably know. So it was all about the data. So if it worked better for traffic, if it was better for mobility, if it was safer, better for business, we would keep it, and if it didn't work, no harm, no foul, we could put it back the way that it was, because these were temporary materials. And that was a very big part of the buy-in, much less anxiety when you think that something can be put back. But the results were overwhelming. Traffic moved better. It was much safer. Five new flagship stores opened. It's been a total home run. Times Square is now one of the top 00 retail locations on the planet. And this is an important lesson, because it doesn't need to be a zero-sum game between moving traffic and creating public space. Every project has its surprises, and one of the big surprises with Times Square was how quickly people flocked to the space. We put out the orange barrels, and people just materialized immediately into the street. It was like a Star Trek episode, you know? They weren't there before, and then zzzzzt! All the people arrived. Where they'd been, I don't know, but they were there. And this actually posed an immediate challenge for us, because the street furniture had not yet arrived. So we went to a hardware store and bought hundreds of lawn chairs, and we put those lawn chairs out on the street. And the lawn chairs became the talk of the town. It wasn't about that we'd closed Broadway to cars. It was about those lawn chairs. "What did you think about the lawn chairs?" "Do you like the color of the lawn chairs?" So if you've got a big, controversial project, think about lawn chairs. (Laughter) This is the final design for Times Square, and it will create a level surface, sidewalk to sidewalk, beautiful pavers that have studs in them to reflect the light from the billboards, creating a great new energy on the street, and we think it's going to really create a great place, a new crossroads of the world that is worthy of its name. And we will be cutting the ribbon on this, the first phase, this December. With all of our projects, our public space projects, we work closely with local businesses and local merchant groups who maintain the spaces, move the furniture, take care of the plants. This is in front of Macy's, and they were a big supporter of this new approach, because they understood that more people on foot is better for business. And we've done these projects all across the city in all kinds of neighborhoods. This is in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and you can see the short leg that was there, used for cars, that's not really needed. So what we did is we painted over the street, put down epoxy gravel, and connected the triangle to the storefronts on Grand Avenue, created a great new public space, and it's been great for businesses along Grand Avenue. We did the same thing in DUMBO, in Brooklyn, and this is one of our first projects that we did, and we took an underutilized, pretty dingy-looking parking lot and used some paint and planters to transform it over a weekend. And in the three years since we've implemented the project, retail sales have increased 000 percent. And that's twice that of adjacent areas in the same neighborhood. We've moved very, very quickly with paint and temporary materials. Instead of waiting through years of planning studies and computer models to get something done, we've done it with paint and temporary materials. And the proof is not in a computer model. It is in the real-world performance of the street. You can have fun with paint. All told, we've created over 00 pedestrian plazas in all five boroughs across the city. We've repurposed 00 acres of active car lanes and turned them into new pedestrian space. I think one of the successes is in its emulation. You're seeing this kind of approach, since we've painted Times Square, you've seen this approach in Boston, in Chicago, in San Francisco, in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, you name it. This is actually in Los Angeles, and they actually copied even the green dots that we had on the streets. But I can't underscore enough how much more quickly this enables you to move over traditional construction methods. We also brought this quick-acting approach to our cycling program, and in six years turned cycling into a real transportation option in New York. I think it's fair to say -- (Applause) -- it used to be a fairly scary place to ride a bike, and now New York has become one of the cycling capitals in the United States. And we moved quickly to create an interconnected network of lanes. You can see the map in 0000. This is how it looked in 0000 after we built out 000 miles of on-street bike lanes. I love this because it looks so easy. You just click it, and they're there. We also brought new designs to the street. We created the first parking-protected bike lane in the United States. (Applause) We protected bikers by floating parking lanes, and it's been great. Bike volumes have spiked. Injuries to all users, pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, are all down 00 percent. And we've built 00 miles of these protected bike lanes, and now you're seeing them pop up all over the country. And you can see here that this strategy has worked. The blue line is the number of cyclists, soaring. The green line is the number of bike lanes. And the yellow line is the number of injuries, which has remained essentially flat. After this big expansion, you've seen no net increase in injuries, and so there is something to that axiom that there is safety in numbers. Not everybody liked the new bike lanes, and there was a lawsuit and somewhat of a media frenzy a couple years ago. One Brooklyn paper called this bike lane that we have on Prospect Park West "the most contested piece of land outside of the Gaza Strip." (Laughter) And this is what we had done. So if you dig below the headlines, though, you'll see that the people were far ahead of the press, far ahead of the politicians. In fact, I think most politicians would be happy to have those kind of poll numbers. Sixty-four percent of New Yorkers support these bike lanes. This summer, we launched Citi Bike, the largest bike share program in the United States, with 0,000 bikes and 000 stations located next to one another. Since we've launched the program, three million trips have been taken. People have ridden seven million miles. That's 000 times around the globe. And so with this little blue key, you can unlock the keys to the city and this brand new transportation option. And daily usage just continues to soar. What has happened is the average daily ridership on the streets of New York is 00,000 people. The high that we've had so far is 00,000 in August. Yesterday, 00,000 people used Citi Bike in New York City. The bikes are being used six times a day. And I think you also see it in the kinds of riders that are on the streets. In the past, it looked like the guy on the left, ninja-clad bike messenger. And today, cyclists look like New York City looks. It's diverse -- young, old, black, white, women, kids, all getting on a bike. It's an affordable, safe, convenient way to get around. Quite radical. We've also brought this approach to our buses, and New York City has the largest bus fleet in North America, the slowest bus speeds. As everybody knows, you can walk across town faster than you can take the bus. And so we focused on the most congested areas of New York City, built out six bus rapid transit lines, 00 miles of new speedy bus lanes. You pay at a kiosk before you get on the bus. We've got dedicated lanes that keep cars out because they get ticketed by a camera if they use that lane, and it's been a huge success. I think one of my very favorite moments as transportation commissioner was the day that we launched Citi Bike, and I was riding Citi Bike up First Avenue in my protected bike lane, and I looked over and I saw pedestrians standing safely on the pedestrian islands, and the traffic was flowing, birds were singing -- (Laughter) -- the buses were speeding up their dedicated lanes. It was just fantastic. And this is how it looked six years ago. And so, I think that the lesson that we have from New York is that it's possible to change your streets quickly, it's not expensive, it can provide immediate benefits, and it can be quite popular. You just need to reimagine your streets. They're hidden in plain sight. Thank you. (Applause)

Here's a question we need to rethink together: What should be the role of money and markets in our societies? Today, there are very few things that money can't buy. If you're sentenced to a jail term in Santa Barbara, California, you should know that if you don't like the standard accommodations, you can buy a prison cell upgrade. It's true. For how much, do you think? What would you guess? Five hundred dollars? It's not the Ritz-Carlton. It's a jail! Eighty-two dollars a night. Eighty-two dollars a night. If you go to an amusement park and don't want to stand in the long lines for the popular rides, there is now a solution. In many theme parks, you can pay extra to jump to the head of the line. They call them Fast Track or VIP tickets. And this isn't only happening in amusement parks. In Washington, D.C., long lines, queues sometimes form for important Congressional hearings. Now some people don't like to wait in long queues, maybe overnight, even in the rain. So now, for lobbyists and others who are very keen to attend these hearings but don't like to wait, there are companies, line-standing companies, and you can go to them. You can pay them a certain amount of money, they hire homeless people and others who need a job to stand waiting in the line for as long as it takes, and the lobbyist, just before the hearing begins, can take his or her place at the head of the line and a seat in the front of the room. Paid line standing. It's happening, the recourse to market mechanisms and market thinking and market solutions, in bigger arenas. Take the way we fight our wars. Did you know that, in Iraq and Afghanistan, there were more private military contractors on the ground than there were U.S. military troops? Now this isn't because we had a public debate about whether we wanted to outsource war to private companies, but this is what has happened. Over the past three decades, we have lived through a quiet revolution. We've drifted almost without realizing it from having a market economy to becoming market societies. The difference is this: A market economy is a tool, a valuable and effective tool, for organizing productive activity, but a market society is a place where almost everything is up for sale. It's a way of life, in which market thinking and market values begin to dominate every aspect of life: personal relations, family life, health, education, politics, law, civic life. Now, why worry? Why worry about our becoming market societies? For two reasons, I think. One of them has to do with inequality. The more things money can buy, the more affluence, or the lack of it, matters. If the only thing that money determined was access to yachts or fancy vacations or BMWs, then inequality wouldn't matter very much. But when money comes increasingly to govern access to the essentials of the good life -- decent health care, access to the best education, political voice and influence in campaigns -- when money comes to govern all of those things, inequality matters a great deal. And so the marketization of everything sharpens the sting of inequality and its social and civic consequence. That's one reason to worry. There's a second reason apart from the worry about inequality, and it's this: with some social goods and practices, when market thinking and market values enter, they may change the meaning of those practices and crowd out attitudes and norms worth caring about. I'd like to take an example of a controversial use of a market mechanism, a cash incentive, and see what you think about it. Many schools struggle with the challenge of motivating kids, especially kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, to study hard, to do well in school, to apply themselves. Some economists have proposed a market solution: Offer cash incentives to kids for getting good grades or high test scores or for reading books. They've tried this, actually. They've done some experiments in some major American cities. In New York, in Chicago, in Washington, D.C., they've tried this, offering 00 dollars for an A, 00 dollars for a B. In Dallas, Texas, they have a program that offers eight-year-olds two dollars for each book they read. So let's see what -- Some people are in favor, some people are opposed to this cash incentive to motivate achievement. Let's see what people here think about it. Imagine that you are the head of a major school system, and someone comes to you with this proposal. And let's say it's a foundation. They will provide the funds. You don't have to take it out of your budget. How many would be in favor and how many would be opposed to giving it a try? Let's see by a show of hands. First, how many think it might at least be worth a try to see if it would work? Raise your hand. And how many would be opposed? How many would -- So the majority here are opposed, but a sizable minority are in favor. Let's have a discussion. Let's start with those of you who object, who would rule it out even before trying. What would be your reason? Who will get our discussion started? Yes? Heike Moses: Hello everyone, I'm Heike, and I think it just kills the intrinsic motivation, so in the respect that children, if they would like to read, you just take this incentive away in just paying them, so it just changes behavior. Michael Sandel: Takes the intrinsic incentive away. What is, or should be, the intrinsic motivation? HM: Well, the intrinsic motivation should be to learn. MS: To learn. HM: To get to know the world. And then, if you stop paying them, what happens then? Then they stop reading? MS: Now, let's see if there's someone who favors, who thinks it's worth trying this. Elizabeth Loftus: I'm Elizabeth Loftus, and you said worth a try, so why not try it and do the experiment and measure things? MS: And measure. And what would you measure? You'd measure how many -- EL: How many books they read and how many books they continued to read after you stopped paying them. MS: Oh, after you stopped paying. All right, what about that? HM: To be frank, I just think this is, not to offend anyone, a very American way. (Laughter) (Applause) MS: All right. What's emerged from this discussion is the following question: Will the cash incentive drive out or corrupt or crowd out the higher motivation, the intrinsic lesson that we hope to convey, which is to learn to love to learn and to read for their own sakes? And people disagree about what the effect will be, but that seems to be the question, that somehow a market mechanism or a cash incentive teaches the wrong lesson, and if it does, what will become of these children later? I should tell you what's happened with these experiments. The cash for good grades has had very mixed results, for the most part has not resulted in higher grades. The two dollars for each book did lead those kids to read more books. It also led them to read shorter books. (Laughter) But the real question is, what will become of these kids later? Will they have learned that reading is a chore, a form of piecework to be done for pay, that's the worry, or may it lead them to read maybe for the wrong reason initially but then lead them to fall in love with reading for its own sake? Now, what this, even this brief debate, brings out is something that many economists overlook. Economists often assume that markets are inert, that they do not touch or taint the goods they exchange. Market exchange, they assume, doesn't change the meaning or value of the goods being exchanged. This may be true enough if we're talking about material goods. If you sell me a flat screen television or give me one as a gift, it will be the same good. It will work the same either way. But the same may not be true if we're talking about nonmaterial goods and social practices such as teaching and learning or engaging together in civic life. In those domains, bringing market mechanisms and cash incentives may undermine or crowd out nonmarket values and attitudes worth caring about. Once we see that markets and commerce, when extended beyond the material domain, can change the character of the goods themselves, can change the meaning of the social practices, as in the example of teaching and learning, we have to ask where markets belong and where they don't, where they may actually undermine values and attitudes worth caring about. But to have this debate, we have to do something we're not very good at, and that is to reason together in public about the value and the meaning of the social practices we prize, from our bodies to family life to personal relations to health to teaching and learning to civic life. Now these are controversial questions, and so we tend to shrink from them. In fact, during the past three decades, when market reasoning and market thinking have gathered force and gained prestige, our public discourse during this time has become hollowed out, empty of larger moral meaning. For fear of disagreement, we shrink from these questions. But once we see that markets change the character of goods, we have to debate among ourselves these bigger questions about how to value goods. One of the most corrosive effects of putting a price on everything is on commonality, the sense that we are all in it together. Against the background of rising inequality, marketizing every aspect of life leads to a condition where those who are affluent and those who are of modest means increasingly live separate lives. We live and work and shop and play in different places. Our children go to different schools. This isn't good for democracy, nor is it a satisfying way to live, even for those of us who can afford to buy our way to the head of the line. Here's why. Democracy does not require perfect equality, but what it does require is that citizens share in a common life. What matters is that people of different social backgrounds and different walks of life encounter one another, bump up against one another in the ordinary course of life, because this is what teaches us to negotiate and to abide our differences. And this is how we come to care for the common good. And so, in the end, the question of markets is not mainly an economic question. It's really a question of how we want to live together. Do we want a society where everything is up for sale, or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy? Thank you very much. (Applause)

I think we're all aware that the world today is full of problems. We've been hearing them today and yesterday and every day for decades. Serious problems, big problems, pressing problems. Poor nutrition, access to water, climate change, deforestation, lack of skills, insecurity, not enough food, not enough healthcare, pollution. There's problem after problem, and I think what really separates this time from any time I can remember in my brief time on Earth is the awareness of these problems. We're all very aware. Why are we having so much trouble dealing with these problems? That's the question I've been struggling with, coming from my very different perspective. I'm not a social problem guy. I'm a guy that works with business, helps business make money. God forbid. So why are we having so many problems with these social problems, and really is there any role for business, and if so, what is that role? I think that in order to address that question, we have to step back and think about how we've understood and pondered both the problems and the solutions to these great social challenges that we face. Now, I think many have seen business as the problem, or at least one of the problems, in many of the social challenges we face. You know, think of the fast food industry, the drug industry, the banking industry. You know, this is a low point in the respect for business. Business is not seen as the solution. It's seen as the problem now, for most people. And rightly so, in many cases. There's a lot of bad actors out there that have done the wrong thing, that actually have made the problem worse. So this perspective is perhaps justified. How have we tended to see the solutions to these social problems, these many issues that we face in society? Well, we've tended to see the solutions in terms of NGOs, in terms of government, in terms of philanthropy. Indeed, the kind of unique organizational entity of this age is this tremendous rise of NGOs and social organizations. This is a unique, new organizational form that we've seen grown up. Enormous innovation, enormous energy, enormous talent now has been mobilized through this structure to try to deal with all of these challenges. And many of us here are deeply involved in that. I'm a business school professor, but I've actually founded, I think, now, four nonprofits. Whenever I got interested and became aware of a societal problem, that was what I did, form a nonprofit. That was the way we've thought about how to deal with these issues. Even a business school professor has thought about it that way. But I think at this moment, we've been at this for quite a while. We've been aware of these problems for decades. We have decades of experience with our NGOs and with our government entities, and there's an awkward reality. The awkward reality is we're not making fast enough progress. We're not winning. These problems still seem very daunting and very intractable, and any solutions we're achieving are small solutions. We're making incremental progress. What's the fundamental problem we have in dealing with these social problems? If we cut all the complexity away, we have the problem of scale. We can't scale. We can make progress. We can show benefits. We can show results. We can make things better. We're helping. We're doing better. We're doing good. We can't scale. We can't make a large-scale impact on these problems. Why is that? Because we don't have the resources. And that's really clear now. And that's clearer now than it's been for decades. There's simply not enough money to deal with any of these problems at scale using the current model. There's not enough tax revenue, there's not enough philanthropic donations, to deal with these problems the way we're dealing with them now. We've got to confront that reality. And the scarcity of resources for dealing with these problems is only growing, certainly in the advanced world today, with all the fiscal problems we face. So if it's fundamentally a resource problem, where are the resources in society? How are those resources really created, the resources we're going to need to deal with all these societal challenges? Well there, I think the answer is very clear: They're in business. All wealth is actually created by business. Business creates wealth when it meets needs at a profit. That's how all wealth is created. It's meeting needs at a profit that leads to taxes and that leads to incomes and that leads to charitable donations. That's where all the resources come from. Only business can actually create resources. Other institutions can utilize them to do important work, but only business can create them. And business creates them when it's able to meet a need at a profit. The resources are overwhelmingly generated by business. The question then is, how do we tap into this? How do we tap into this? Business generates those resources when it makes a profit. That profit is that small difference between the price and the cost it takes to produce whatever solution business has created to whatever problem they're trying to solve. But that profit is the magic. Why? Because that profit allows whatever solution we've created to be infinitely scalable. Because if we can make a profit, we can do it for 00, 000, a million, 000 million, a billion. The solution becomes self-sustaining. That's what business does when it makes a profit. Now what does this all have to do with social problems? Well, one line of thinking is, let's take this profit and redeploy it into social problems. Business should give more. Business should be more responsible. And that's been the path that we've been on in business. But again, this path that we've been on is not getting us where we need to go. Now, I started out as a strategy professor, and I'm still a strategy professor. I'm proud of that. But I've also, over the years, worked more and more on social issues. I've worked on healthcare, the environment, economic development, reducing poverty, and as I worked more and more in the social field, I started seeing something that had a profound impact on me and my whole life, in a way. The conventional wisdom in economics and the view in business has historically been that actually, there's a tradeoff between social performance and economic performance. The conventional wisdom has been that business actually makes a profit by causing a social problem. The classic example is pollution. If business pollutes, it makes more money than if it tried to reduce that pollution. Reducing pollution is expensive, therefore businesses don't want to do it. It's profitable to have an unsafe working environment. It's too expensive to have a safe working environment, therefore business makes more money if they don't have a safe working environment. That's been the conventional wisdom. A lot of companies have fallen into that conventional wisdom. They resisted environmental improvement. They resisted workplace improvement. That thinking has led to, I think, much of the behavior that we have come to criticize in business, that I come to criticize in business. But the more deeply I got into all these social issues, one after another, and actually, the more I tried to address them myself, personally, in a few cases, through nonprofits that I was involved with, the more I found actually that the reality is the opposite. Business does not profit from causing social problems, actually not in any fundamental sense. That's a very simplistic view. The deeper we get into these issues, the more we start to understand that actually business profits from solving from social problems. That's where the real profit comes. Let's take pollution. We've learned today that actually reducing pollution and emissions is generating profit. It saves money. It makes the business more productive and efficient. It doesn't waste resources. Having a safer working environment actually, and avoiding accidents, it makes the business more profitable, because it's a sign of good processes. Accidents are expensive and costly. Issue by issue by issue, we start to learn that actually there's no trade-off between social progress and economic efficiency in any fundamental sense. Another issue is health. I mean, what we've found is actually health of employees is something that business should treasure, because that health allows those employees to be more productive and come to work and not be absent. The deeper work, the new work, the new thinking on the interface between business and social problems is actually showing that there's a fundamental, deep synergy, particularly if you're not thinking in the very short run. In the very short run, you can sometimes fool yourself into thinking that there's fundamentally opposing goals, but in the long run, ultimately, we're learning in field after field that this is simply not true. So how could we tap into the power of business to address the fundamental problems that we face? Imagine if we could do that, because if we could do it, we could scale. We could tap into this enormous resource pool and this organizational capacity. And guess what? That's happening now, finally, partly because of people like you who have raised these issues now for year after year and decade after decade. We see organizations like Dow Chemical leading the revolution away from trans fat and saturated fat with innovative new products. This is an example of Jain Irrigation. This is a company that's brought drip irrigation technology to thousands and millions of farmers, reducing substantially the use of water. We see companies like the Brazilian forestry company Fibria that's figured out how to avoid tearing down old growth forest and using eucalyptus and getting much more yield per hectare of pulp and making much more paper than you could make by cutting down those old trees. You see companies like Cisco that are training so far four million people in I.T. skills to actually, yes, be responsible, but help expand the opportunity to disseminate I.T. technology and grow the whole business. There's a fundamental opportunity for business today to impact and address these social problems, and this opportunity is the largest business opportunity we see in business. And the question is, how can we get business thinking to adapt this issue of shared value? This is what I call shared value: addressing a social issue with a business model. That's shared value. Shared value is capitalism, but it's a higher kind of capitalism. It's capitalism as it was ultimately meant to be, meeting important needs, not incrementally competing for trivial differences in product attributes and market share. Shared value is when we can create social value and economic value simultaneously. It's finding those opportunities that will unleash the greatest possibility we have to actually address these social problems because we can scale. We can address shared value at multiple levels. It's real. It's happening. But in order to get this solution working, we have to now change how business sees itself, and this is thankfully underway. Businesses got trapped into the conventional wisdom that they shouldn't worry about social problems, that this was sort of something on the side, that somebody else was doing it. We're now seeing companies embrace this idea. But we also have to recognize business is not going to do this as effectively as if we have NGOs and government working in partnership with business. The new NGOs that are really moving the needle are the ones that have found these partnerships, that have found these ways to collaborate. The governments that are making the most progress are the governments that have found ways to enable shared value in business rather than see government as the only player that has to call the shots. And government has many ways in which it could impact the willingness and the ability of companies to compete in this way. I think if we can get business seeing itself differently, and if we can get others seeing business differently, we can change the world. I know it. I'm seeing it. I'm feeling it. Young people, I think, my Harvard Business School students, are getting it. If we can break down this sort of divide, this unease, this tension, this sense that we're not fundamentally collaborating here in driving these social problems, we can break this down, and we finally, I think, can have solutions. Thank you. (Applause)

So, we used to solve big problems. On July 00st, 0000, Buzz Aldrin climbed out of Apollo 00's lunar module and descended onto the Sea of Tranquility. Armstrong and Aldrin were alone, but their presence on the moon's gray surface was the culmination of a convulsive, collective effort. The Apollo program was the greatest peacetime mobilization in the history of the United States. To get to the moon, NASA spent around 000 billion dollars in today's money, or four percent of the federal budget. Apollo employed around 000,000 people and demanded the collaboration of 00,000 companies, universities and government agencies. People died, including the crew of Apollo 0. But before the Apollo program ended, 00 men flew to the moon. Twelve walked on its surface, of whom Aldrin, following the death of Armstrong last year, is now the most senior. So why did they go? They didn't bring much back: 000 pounds of old rocks, and something all 00 later emphasized -- a new sense of the smallness and the fragility of our common home. Why did they go? The cynical answer is they went because President Kennedy wanted to show the Soviets that his nation had the better rockets. But Kennedy's own words at Rice University in 0000 provide a better clue. (Video) John F. Kennedy: But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 00 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon. (Applause) We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Jason Pontin: To contemporaries, Apollo wasn't only a victory of West over East in the Cold War. At the time, the strongest emotion was of wonder at the transcendent powers of technology. They went because it was a big thing to do. Landing on the moon occurred in the context of a long series of technological triumphs. The first half of the 00th century produced the assembly line and the airplane, penicillin and a vaccine for tuberculosis. In the middle years of the century, polio was eradicated and smallpox eliminated. Technology itself seemed to possess what Alvin Toffler in 0000 called "accelerative thrust." For most of human history, we could go no faster than a horse or a boat with a sail, but in 0000, the crew of Apollo 00 flew at 00,000 miles an hour. Since 0000, no human beings have been back to the moon. No one has traveled faster than the crew of Apollo 00, and blithe optimism about technology's powers has evaporated as big problems we had imagined technology would solve, such as going to Mars, creating clean energy, curing cancer, or feeding the world have come to seem intractably hard. I remember watching the liftoff of Apollo 00. I was five years old, and my mother told me not to stare at the fiery exhaust of a Saturn V rocket. I vaguely knew this was to be the last of the moon missions, but I was absolutely certain there would be Mars colonies in my lifetime. So "Something happened to our capacity to solve big problems with technology" has become a commonplace. You hear it all the time. We've heard it over the last two days here at TED. It feels as if technologists have diverted us and enriched themselves with trivial toys, with things like iPhones and apps and social media, or algorithms that speed automated trading. There's nothing wrong with most of these things. They've expanded and enriched our lives. But they don't solve humanity's big problems. What happened? So there is a parochial explanation in Silicon Valley, which admits that it has been funding less ambitious companies than it did in the years when it financed Intel, Microsoft, Apple and Genentech. Silicon Valley says the markets are to blame, in particular the incentives that venture capitalists offer to entrepreneurs. Silicon Valley says that venture investing shifted away from funding transformational ideas and towards funding incremental problems or even fake problems. But I don't think that explanation is good enough. It mostly explains what's wrong with Silicon Valley. Even when venture capitalists were at their most risk-happy, they preferred small investments, tiny investments that offered an exit within 00 years. V.C.s have always struggled to invest profitably in technologies such as energy whose capital requirements are huge and whose development is long and lengthy, and V.C.s have never, never funded the development of technologies meant to solve big problems that possess no immediate commercial value. No, the reasons we can't solve big problems are more complicated and more profound. Sometimes we choose not to solve big problems. We could go to Mars if we want. NASA even has the outline of a plan. But going to Mars would follow a political decision with popular appeal, and that will never happen. We won't go to Mars, because everyone thinks there are more important things to do here on Earth. Sometimes, we can't solve big problems because our political systems fail. Today, less than two percent of the world's energy consumption derives from advanced, renewable sources such as solar, wind and biofuels, less than two percent, and the reason is purely economic. Coal and natural gas are cheaper than solar and wind, and petroleum is cheaper than biofuels. We want alternative energy sources that can compete on price. None exist. Now, technologists, business leaders and economists all basically agree on what national policies and international treaties would spur the development of alternative energy: mostly, a significant increase in energy research and development, and some kind of price on carbon. But there's no hope in the present political climate that we will see U.S. energy policy or international treaties that reflect that consensus. Sometimes, big problems that had seemed technological turn out not to be so. Famines were long understood to be caused by failures in food supply. But 00 years of research have taught us that famines are political crises that catastrophically affect food distribution. Technology can improve things like crop yields or systems for storing and transporting food, but there will be famines so long as there are bad governments. Finally, big problems sometimes elude solution because we don't really understand the problem. President Nixon declared war on cancer in 0000, but we soon discovered there are many kinds of cancer, most of them fiendishly resistant to therapy, and it is only in the last 00 years that effective, viable therapies have come to seem real. Hard problems are hard. It's not true that we can't solve big problems through technology. We can, we must, but these four elements must all be present: Political leaders and the public must care to solve a problem; institutions must support its solution; It must really be a technological problem; and we must understand it. The Apollo mission, which has become a kind of metaphor for technology's capacity to solve big problems, met these criteria. But it is an irreproducible model for the future. It is not 0000. There is no galvanizing contest like the Cold War, no politician like John Kennedy who can heroize the difficult and the dangerous, and no popular science fictional mythology such as exploring the solar system. Most of all, going to the moon turned out to be easy. It was just three days away. And arguably it wasn't even solving much of a problem. We are left alone with our day, and the solutions of the future will be harder won. God knows, we don't lack for the challenges. Thank you very much. (Applause)

An image is worth more than a thousand words, so I'm going to start my talk by stop talking and show you a few images that I recently captured. So by now, my talk is already 0,000 words long, and I feel like I should stop here. (Laughter) At the same time, I probably owe you some explanation about the images that you just saw. What I am trying to do as a photographer, as an artist, is to bring the world of art and science together. Whether it is an image of a soap bubble captured at the very moment where it's bursting, as you can see in this image, whether it's a universe made of tiny little beads of oil paint, strange liquids that behave in very peculiar ways, or paint that is modeled by centrifugal forces, I'm always trying to link those two fields together. What I find very intriguing about those two is that they both look at the same thing: They are a response to their surroundings. And yet, they do it in a very different way. If you look at science on one hand, science is a very rational approach to its surroundings, whereas art on the other hand is usually an emotional approach to its surroundings. What I am trying to do is I'm trying to bring those two views into one so that my images both speak to the viewer's heart but also to the viewer's brain. Let me demonstrate this based on three projects. The first one has to do with making sound visible. Now as you may know, sound travels in waves, so if you have a speaker, a speaker actually does nothing else than taking the audio signal, transform it into a vibration, which is then transported through the air, is captured by our ear, and transformed into an audio signal again. Now I was thinking, how can I make those sound waves visible? So I came up with the following setup. I took a speaker, I placed a thin foil of plastic on top of that speaker, and then I added tiny little crystals on top of that speaker. And now, if I would play a sound through that speaker, it would cause the crystals to move up and down. Now this happens very fast, in the blink of an eye, so, together with LG, we captured this motion with a camera that is able to capture more than 0,000 frames per second. Let me show you what this looks like. (Music: "Teardrop" by Massive Attack) (Applause) Thank you very much. I agree, it looks pretty amazing. But I have to tell you a funny story. I got an indoor sunburn doing this while shooting in Los Angeles. Now in Los Angeles, you could get a decent sunburn just on any of the beaches, but I got mine indoors, and what happened is that, if you're shooting at 0,000 frames per second, you need to have a silly amount of light, lots of lights. So we had this speaker set up, and we had the camera facing it, and lots of lights pointing at the speaker, and I would set up the speaker, put the tiny little crystals on top of that speaker, and we would do this over and over again, and it was until midday that I realized that I had a completely red face because of the lights pointing at the speaker. What was so funny about it was that the speaker was only coming from the right side, so the right side of my face was completely red and I looked like the Phantom of the Opera for the rest of the week. Let me now turn to another project which involves less harmful substances. Has anyone of you heard of ferrofluid? Ah, some of you have. Excellent. Should I skip that part? (Laughter) Ferrofluid has a very strange behavior. It's a liquid that is completely black. It's got an oily consistency. And it's got tiny little particles of metal in it, which makes it magnetic. So if I now put this liquid into a magnetic field, it would change its appearance. Now I've got a live demonstration over here to show this to you. So I've got a camera pointing down at this plate, and underneath that plate, there is a magnet. Now I'm going to add some of that ferrofluid to that magnet. Let's just slightly move it to the right and maybe focus it a little bit more. Excellent. So what you can see now is that the ferrofluid has formed spikes. This is due to the attraction and the repulsion of the individual particles inside the liquid. Now this looks already quite interesting, but let me now add some watercolors to it. Those are just standard watercolors that you would paint with. You wouldn't paint with syringes, but it works just the same. So what happened now is, when the watercolor was flowing into the structure, the watercolors do not mix with the ferrofluid. That's because the ferrofluid itself is hydrophobic. That means it doesn't mix with the water. And at the same time, it tries to maintain its position above the magnet, and therefore, it creates those amazing-looking structures of channels and tiny little ponds of colorful water paint. So that was the second project. Let me now turn to the last project, which involves the national beverage of Scotland. (Laughter) This image, and also this one, were made using whiskey. Now you might ask yourself, how did he do that? Did he drink half a bottle of whiskey and then draw the hallucination he got from being drunk onto paper? I can assure you I was fully conscious while I was taking those pictures. Now, whiskey contains 00 percent of alcohol, and alcohol has got some very interesting properties. Maybe you have experienced some of those properties before, but I am talking about the physical properties, not the other ones. So when I open the bottle, the alcohol molecules would spread in the air, and that's because alcohol is a very volatile substance. And at the same time, alcohol is highly flammable. And it was with those two properties that I was able to create the images that you're seeing right now. Let me demonstrate this over here. And what I have here is an empty glass vessel. It's got nothing in it. And now I'm going to fill it with oxygen and whiskey. Add some more. Now we just wait for a few seconds for the molecules to spread inside the bottle. And now, let's set that on fire. (Laughter) So that's all that happens. It goes really fast, and it's not that impressive. I could do it again to show it one more time, but some would argue that this is a complete waste of the whiskey, and that I should rather drink it. But let me show you a slow motion in a completely darkened room of what I just showed you in this live demonstration. So what happened is that the flame traveled through the glass vessel from top to bottom, burning the mix of the air molecules and the alcohol. So the images that you saw at the beginning, they are actually a flame stopped in time while it is traveling through the bottle, and you have to imagine it was flipped around 000 degrees. So that's how those images were made. (Applause) Thank you. So, I have now showed you three projects, and you might ask yourself, what is it good for? What's the idea behind it? Is it just a waste of whiskey? Is it just some strange materials? Those three projects, they're based on very simple scientific phenomena, such as magnetism, the sound waves, or over here, the physical properties of a substance, and what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to use these phenomena and show them in a poetic and unseen way, and therefore invite the viewer to pause for a moment and think about all the beauty that is constantly surrounding us. Thank you very much. (Applause)

So my name is Amy Webb, and a few years ago I found myself at the end of yet another fantastic relationship that came burning down in a spectacular fashion. And I thought, you know, what's wrong with me? I don't understand why this keeps happening. So I asked everybody in my life what they thought. I turned to my grandmother, who always had plenty of advice, and she said, "Stop being so picky. You've got to date around. And most importantly, true love will find you when you least expect it." Now as it turns out, I'm somebody who thinks a lot about data, as you'll soon find. I am constantly swimming in numbers and formulas and charts. I also have a very tight-knit family, and I'm very, very close with my sister, and as a result, I wanted to have the same type of family when I grew up. So I'm at the end of this bad breakup, I'm 00 years old, I figure I'm probably going to have to date somebody for about six months before I'm ready to get monogamous and before we can sort of cohabitate, and we have to have that happen for a while before we can get engaged. And if I want to start having children by the time I'm 00, that meant that I would have had to have been on my way to marriage five years ago. So that wasn't going to work. If my strategy was to least-expect my way into true love, then the variable that I had to deal with was serendipity. In short, I was trying to figure out, well, what's the probability of my finding Mr. Right? Well, at the time I was living in the city of Philadelphia, and it's a big city, and I figured, in this entire place, there are lots of possibilities. So again, I started doing some math. Population of Philadelphia: It has 0.0 million people. I figure about half of that are men, so that takes the number down to 000,000. I'm looking for a guy between the ages of 00 and 00, which was only four percent of the population, so now I'm dealing with the possibility of 00,000 men. I was looking for somebody who was Jewish, because that's what I am and that was important to me. That's only 0.0 percent of the population. I figure I'm attracted to maybe one out of 00 of those men, and there was no way I was going to deal with somebody who was an avid golfer. So that basically meant there were 00 men for me that I could possibly date in the entire city of Philadelphia. In the meantime, my very large Jewish family was already all married and well on their way to having lots and lots of children, and I felt like I was under tremendous peer pressure to get my life going already. So if I have two possible strategies at this point I'm sort of figuring out. One, I can take my grandmother's advice and sort of least-expect my way into maybe bumping into the one out of 00 possible men in the entire 0.0 million-person city of Philadelphia, or I could try online dating. Now, I like the idea of online dating, because it's predicated on an algorithm, and that's really just a simple way of saying I've got a problem, I'm going to use some data, run it through a system and get to a solution. So online dating is the second most popular way that people now meet each other, but as it turns out, algorithms have been around for thousands of years in almost every culture. In fact, in Judaism, there were matchmakers a long time ago, and though they didn't have an explicit algorithm per se, they definitely were running through formulas in their heads, like, is the girl going to like the boy? Are the families going to get along? What's the rabbi going to say? Are they going to start having children right away? And the matchmaker would sort of think through all of this, put two people together, and that would be the end of it. So in my case, I thought, well, will data and an algorithm lead me to my Prince Charming? So I decided to sign on. Now, there was one small catch. As I'm signing on to the various dating websites, as it happens, I was really, really busy. But that actually wasn't the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that I hate filling out questionnaires of any kind, and I certainly don't like questionnaires that are like Cosmo quizzes. So I just copied and pasted from my résumé. (Laughter) So in the descriptive part up top, I said that I was an award-winning journalist and a future thinker. When I was asked about fun activities and my ideal date, I said monetization and fluency in Japanese. I talked a lot about JavaScript. So obviously this was not the best way to put my most sexy foot forward. But the real failure was that there were plenty of men for me to date. These algorithms had a sea full of men that wanted to take me out on lots of dates -- what turned out to be truly awful dates. There was this guy Steve, the I.T. guy. The algorithm matched us up because we share a love of gadgets, we share a love of math and data and '00s music, and so I agreed to go out with him. So Steve the I.T. guy invited me out to one of Philadelphia's white-table-cloth, extremely expensive restaurants. And we went in, and right off the bat, our conversation really wasn't taking flight, but he was ordering a lot of food. In fact, he didn't even bother looking at the menu. He was ordering multiple appetizers, multiple entrées, for me as well, and suddenly there are piles and piles of food on our table, also lots and lots of bottles of wine. So we're nearing the end of our conversation and the end of dinner, and I've decided Steve the I.T. guy and I are really just not meant for each other, but we'll part ways as friends, when he gets up to go to the bathroom, and in the meantime the bill comes to our table. And listen, I'm a modern woman. I am totally down with splitting the bill. But then Steve the I.T. guy didn't come back. (Gasping) And that was my entire month's rent. So needless to say, I was not having a good night. So I run home, I call my mother, I call my sister, and as I do, at the end of each one of these terrible, terrible dates, I regale them with the details. And they say to me, "Stop complaining." (Laughter) "You're just being too picky." So I said, fine, from here on out I'm only going on dates where I know that there's wi-fi, and I'm bringing my laptop. I'm going to shove it into my bag, and I'm going to have this email template, and I'm going to fill it out and collect information on all these different data points during the date to prove to everybody that empirically, these dates really are terrible. (Laughter) So I started tracking things like really stupid, awkward, sexual remarks; bad vocabulary; the number of times a man forced me to high-five him. (Laughter) So I started to crunch some numbers, and that allowed me to make some correlations. So as it turns out, for some reason, men who drink Scotch reference kinky sex immediately. (Laughter) Well, it turns out that these probably weren't bad guys. There were just bad for me. And as it happens, the algorithms that were setting us up, they weren't bad either. These algorithms were doing exactly what they were designed to do, which was to take our user-generated information, in my case, my résumé, and match it up with other people's information. See, the real problem here is that, while the algorithms work just fine, you and I don't, when confronted with blank windows where we're supposed to input our information online. Very few of us have the ability to be totally and brutally honest with ourselves. The other problem is that these websites are asking us questions like, are you a dog person or a cat person? Do you like horror films or romance films? I'm not looking for a pen pal. I'm looking for a husband. Right? So there's a certain amount of superficiality in that data. So I said fine, I've got a new plan. I'm going to keep using these online dating sites, but I'm going to treat them as databases, and rather than waiting for an algorithm to set me up, I think I'm going to try reverse-engineering this entire system. So knowing that there was superficial data that was being used to match me up with other people, I decided instead to ask my own questions. What was every single possible thing that I could think of that I was looking for in a mate? So I started writing and writing and writing, and at the end, I had amassed 00 different data points. I wanted somebody was Jew...ish, so I was looking for somebody who had the same background and thoughts on our culture, but wasn't going to force me to go to shul every Friday and Saturday. I wanted somebody who worked hard, because work for me is extremely important, but not too hard. For me, the hobbies that I have are really just new work projects that I've launched. I also wanted somebody who not only wanted two children, but was going to have the same attitude toward parenting that I do, so somebody who was going to be totally okay with forcing our child to start taking piano lessons at age three, and also maybe computer science classes if we could wrangle it. So things like that, but I also wanted somebody who would go to far-flung, exotic places, like Petra, Jordan. I also wanted somebody who would weigh 00 pounds more than me at all times, regardless of what I weighed. (Laughter) So I now have these 00 different data points, which, to be fair, is a lot. So what I did was, I went through and I prioritized that list. I broke it into a top tier and a second tier of points, and I ranked everything starting at 000 and going all the way down to 00, and listing things like I was looking for somebody who was really smart, who would challenge and stimulate me, and balancing that with a second tier and a second set of points. These things were also important to me but not necessarily deal-breakers. So once I had all this done, I then built a scoring system, because what I wanted to do was to sort of mathematically calculate whether or not I thought the guy that I found online would be a match with me. I figured there would be a minimum of 000 points before I would agree to email somebody or respond to an email message. For 000 points, I'd agree to go out on a date, and I wouldn't even consider any kind of relationship before somebody had crossed the 0,000 point threshold. Well, as it turns out, this worked pretty well. So I go back online now. I found Jewishdoc00 who's incredibly good-looking, incredibly well-spoken, he had hiked Mt. Fuji, he had walked along the Great Wall. He likes to travel as long as it doesn't involve a cruise ship. And I thought, I've done it! I've cracked the code. I have just found the Jewish Prince Charming of my family's dreams. There was only one problem: He didn't like me back. And I guess the one variable that I haven't considered is the competition. Who are all of the other women on these dating sites? I found SmileyGirl0000. She said she was a "fun girl who is Happy and Outgoing." She listed her job as teacher. She said she is "silly, nice and friendly." She likes to make people laugh "alot." At this moment I knew, clicking after profile after profile after profile that looked like this, that I needed to do some market research. So I created 00 fake male profiles. Now, before I lose all of you -- (Laughter) -- understand that I did this strictly to gather data about everybody else in the system. I didn't carry on crazy Catfish-style relationships with anybody. I really was just scraping their data. But I didn't want everybody's data. I only wanted data on the women who were going to be attracted to the type of man that I really, really wanted to marry. (Laughter) When I released these men into the wild, I did follow some rules. So I didn't reach out to any woman first. I just waited to see who these profiles were going to attract, and mainly what I was looking at was two different data sets. So I was looking at qualitative data, so what was the humor, the tone, the voice, the communication style that these women shared in common? And also quantitative data, so what was the average length of their profile, how much time was spent between messages? What I was trying to get at here was that I figured in person, I would be just as competitive as a SmileyGirl0000. I wanted to figure out how to maximize my own profile online. Well, one month later, I had a lot of data, and I was able to do another analysis. And as it turns out, content matters a lot. So smart people tend to write a lot -- 0,000, 0,000, 0,000 words about themselves, which may all be very, very interesting. The challenge here, though, is that the popular men and women are sticking to 00 words on average that are written very, very well, even though it may not seem like it all the time. The other sort of hallmark of the people who do this well is that they're using non-specific language. So in my case, you know, "The English Patient" is my most favorite movie ever, but it doesn't work to use that in a profile, because that's a superficial data point, and somebody may disagree with me and decide they don't want to go out with me because they didn't like sitting through the three-hour movie. Also, optimistic language matters a lot. So this is a word cloud highlighting the most popular words that were used by the most popular women, words like "fun" and "girl" and "love." And what I realized was not that I had to dumb down my own profile. Remember, I'm somebody who said that I speak fluent Japanese and I know JavaScript and I was okay with that. The difference is that it's about being more approachable and helping people understand the best way to reach out to you. And as it turns out, timing is also really, really important. Just because you have access to somebody's mobile phone number or their instant message account and it's 0 o'clock in the morning and you happen to be awake, doesn't mean that that's a good time to communicate with those people. The popular women on these online sites spend an average of 00 hours in between each communication. And that's what we would normally do in the usual process of courtship. And finally, there were the photos. All of the women who were popular showed some skin. They all looked really great, which turned out to be in sharp contrast to what I had uploaded. Once I had all of this information, I was able to create a super profile, so it was still me, but it was me optimized now for this ecosystem. And as it turns out, I did a really good job. I was the most popular person online. (Laughter) (Applause) And as it turns out, lots and lots of men wanted to date me. So I call my mom, I call my sister, I call my grandmother. I'm telling them about this fabulous news, and they say, "This is wonderful! How soon are you going out?" And I said, "Well, actually, I'm not going to go out with anybody." Because remember, in my scoring system, they have to reach a minimum threshold of 000 points, and none of them have done that. They said, "What? You're still being too damn picky." Well, not too long after that, I found this guy, Thevenin, and he said that he was culturally Jewish, he said that his job was an arctic baby seal hunter, which I thought was very clever. He talked in detail about travel. He made a lot of really interesting cultural references. He looked and talked exactly like what I wanted, and immediately, he scored 000 points. It was enough for a date. Three weeks later, we met up in person for what turned out to be a 00-hour-long conversation that went from coffee shop to restaurant to another coffee shop to another restaurant, and when he dropped me back off at my house that night I re-scored him -- [0,000 points!] -- thought, you know what, this entire time I haven't been picky enough. Well, a year and a half after that, we were non-cruise ship traveling through Petra, Jordan, when he got down on his knee and proposed. A year after that, we were married, and about a year and a half after that, our daughter, Petra, was born. (Applause) Obviously, I'm having a fabulous life, so -- (Laughter) -- the question is, what does all of this mean for you? Well, as it turns out, there is an algorithm for love. It's just not the ones that we're being presented with online. In fact, it's something that you write yourself. So whether you're looking for a husband or a wife or you're trying to find your passion or you're trying to start a business, all you have to really do is figure out your own framework and play by your own rules, and feel free to be as picky as you want. Well, on my wedding day, I had a conversation again with my grandmother, and she said, "All right, maybe I was wrong. It looks like you did come up with a really, really great system. Now, your matzoh balls. They should be fluffy, not hard." And I'll take her advice on that. (Applause)

I think it's safe to say that all humans will be intimate with death at least once in their lives. But what if that intimacy began long before you faced your own transition from life into death? What would life be like if the dead literally lived alongside you? In my husband's homeland in the highlands of Sulawesi island in eastern Indonesia, there is a community of people that experience death not as a singular event but as a gradual social process. In Tana Toraja, the most important social moments in people's lives, the focal points of social and cultural interaction are not weddings or births or even family dinners, but funerals. So these funerals are characterized by elaborate rituals that tie people in a system of reciprocal debt based on the amount of animals -- pigs, chickens and, most importantly, water buffalo -- that are sacrificed and distributed in the name of the deceased. So this cultural complex surrounding death, the ritual enactment of the end of life, has made death the most visible and remarkable aspect of Toraja's landscape. Lasting anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, funeral ceremonies are a raucous affair, where commemorating someone who's died is not so much a private sadness but more of a publicly shared transition. And it's a transition that's just as much about the identity of the living as it is about remembrance of the dead. So every year, thousands of visitors come to Tana Toraja to see, as it were, this culture of death, and for many people these grandiose ceremonies and the length of the ceremonies are somehow incommensurable with the way that we face our own mortality in the West. So even as we share death as a universal experience, it's not experienced the same way the world over. And as an anthropologist, I see these differences in experience being rooted in the cultural and social world through which we define the phenomena around us. So where we see an unquestionable reality, death as an irrefutable biological condition, Torajans see the expired corporeal form as part of a larger social genesis. So again, the physical cessation of life is not the same as death. In fact, a member of society is only truly dead when the extended family can agree upon and marshal the resources necessary to hold a funeral ceremony that is considered appropriate in terms of resources for the status of the deceased. And this ceremony has to take place in front of the eyes of the whole community with everyone's participation. So after a person's physical death, their body is placed in a special room in the traditional residence, which is called the tongkonan. And the tongkonan is symbolic not only of the family's identity but also of the human life cycle from birth to death. So essentially, the shape of the building that you're born into is the shape of the structure which carries you to your ancestral resting place. Until the funeral ceremony, which can be held years after a person's physical death, the deceased is referred to as "to makala," a sick person, or "to mama," a person who is asleep, and they continue to be a member of the household. They are symbolically fed and cared for, and the family at this time will begin a number of ritual injunctions, which communicates to the wider community around them that one of their members is undergoing the transition from this life into the afterlife known as Puya. So I know what some of you must be thinking right now. Is she really saying that these people live with the bodies of their dead relatives? And that's exactly what I'm saying. But instead of giving in to the sort of visceral reaction we have to this idea of proximity to bodies, proximity to death, or how this notion just does not fit into our very biological or medical sort of definition of death, I like to think about what the Torajan way of viewing death encompasses of the human experience that the medical definition leaves out. I think that Torajans socially recognize and culturally express what many of us feel to be true despite the widespread acceptance of the biomedical definition of death, and that is that our relationships with other humans, their impact on our social reality, doesn't cease with the termination of the physical processes of the body, that there's a period of transition as the relationship between the living and the dead is transformed but not ended. So Torajans express this idea of this enduring relationship by lavishing love and attention on the most visible symbol of that relationship, the human body. So my husband has fond memories of talking to and playing with and generally being around his deceased grandfather, and for him there is nothing unnatural about this. This is a natural part of the process as the family comes to terms with the transition in their relationship to the deceased, and this is the transition from relating to the deceased as a person who's living to relating to the deceased as a person who's an ancestor. And here you can see these wooden effigies of the ancestors, so these are people who have already been buried, already had a funeral ceremony. These are called tau tau. So the funeral ceremony itself embodies this relational perspective on death. It ritualizes the impact of death on families and communities. And it's also a moment of self-awareness. It's a moment when people think about who they are, their place in society, and their role in the life cycle in accordance with Torajan cosmology. There's a saying in Toraja that all people will become grandparents, and what this means is that after death, we all become part of the ancestral line that anchors us between the past and the present and will define who our loved ones are into the future. So essentially, we all become grandparents to the generations of human children that come after us. And this metaphor of membership in the greater human family is the way that children also describe the money that they invest in these sacrificial buffaloes that are thought to carry people's soul from here to the afterlife, and children will explain that they will invest the money in this because they want to repay their parents the debt for all of the years their parents spent investing and caring for them. But the sacrifice of buffalo and the ritual display of wealth also exhibits the status of the deceased, and, by extension, the deceased's family. So at funerals, relationships are reconfirmed but also transformed in a ritual drama that highlights the most salient feature about death in this place: its impact on life and the relationships of the living. So all of this focus on death doesn't mean that Torajans don't aspire to the ideal of a long life. They engage in many practices thought to confer good health and survival to an advanced age. But they don't put much stock in efforts to prolong life in the face of debilitating illness or in old age. It's said in Toraja that everybody has sort of a predetermined amount of life. It's called the sunga'. And like a thread, it should be allowed to unspool to its natural end. So by having death as a part of the cultural and social fabric of life, people's everyday decisions about their health and healthcare are affected. The patriarch of my husband's maternal clan, Nenet Katcha, is now approaching the age of 000, as far as we can tell. And there are increasing signs that he is about to depart on his own journey for Puya. And his death will be greatly mourned. But I know that my husband's family looks forward to the moment when they can ritually display what his remarkable presence has meant to their lives, when they can ritually recount his life's narrative, weaving his story into the history of their community. His story is their story. His funeral songs will sing them a song about themselves. And it's a story that has no discernible beginning, no foreseeable end. It's a story that goes on long after his body no longer does. People ask me if I'm frightened or repulsed by participating in a culture where the physical manifestations of death greet us at every turn. But I see something profoundly transformative in experiencing death as a social process and not just a biological one. In reality, the relationship between the living and the dead has its own drama in the U.S. healthcare system, where decisions about how long to stretch the thread of life are made based on our emotional and social ties with the people around us, not just on medicine's ability to prolong life. We, like the Torajans, base our decisions about life on the meanings and the definitions that we ascribe to death. So I'm not suggesting that anyone in this audience should run out and adopt the traditions of the Torajans. It might be a little bit difficult to put into play in the United States. But I want to ask what we can gain from seeing physical death not only as a biological process but as part of the greater human story. What would it be like to look on the expired human form with love because it's so intimately a part of who we all are? If we could expand our definition of death to encompass life, we could experience death as part of life and perhaps face death with something other than fear. Perhaps one of the answers to the challenges that are facing the U.S. healthcare system, particularly in the end-of-life care, is as simple as a shift in perspective, and the shift in perspective in this case would be to look at the social life of every death. It might help us recognize that the way we limit our conversation about death to something that's medical or biological is reflective of a larger culture that we all share of avoiding death, being afraid of talking about it. If we could entertain and value other kinds of knowledge about life, including other definitions of death, it has the potential to change the discussions that we have about the end of life. It could change the way that we die, but more importantly, it could transform the way that we live. (Applause)

So I wanted to tell a story that really obsessed me when I was writing my new book, and it's a story of something that happened 0,000 years ago, when the Kingdom of Israel was in its infancy. And it takes place in an area called the Shephelah in what is now Israel. And the reason the story obsessed me is that I thought I understood it, and then I went back over it and I realized that I didn't understand it at all. Ancient Palestine had a -- along its eastern border, there's a mountain range. Still same is true of Israel today. And in the mountain range are all of the ancient cities of that region, so Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron. And then there's a coastal plain along the Mediterranean, where Tel Aviv is now. And connecting the mountain range with the coastal plain is an area called the Shephelah, which is a series of valleys and ridges that run east to west, and you can follow the Shephelah, go through the Shephelah to get from the coastal plain to the mountains. And the Shephelah, if you've been to Israel, you'll know it's just about the most beautiful part of Israel. It's gorgeous, with forests of oak and wheat fields and vineyards. But more importantly, though, in the history of that region, it's served, it's had a real strategic function, and that is, it is the means by which hostile armies on the coastal plain find their way, get up into the mountains and threaten those living in the mountains. And 0,000 years ago, that's exactly what happens. The Philistines, who are the biggest of enemies of the Kingdom of Israel, are living in the coastal plain. They're originally from Crete. They're a seafaring people. And they may start to make their way through one of the valleys of the Shephelah up into the mountains, because what they want to do is occupy the highland area right by Bethlehem and split the Kingdom of Israel in two. And the Kingdom of Israel, which is headed by King Saul, obviously catches wind of this, and Saul brings his army down from the mountains and he confronts the Philistines in the Valley of Elah, one of the most beautiful of the valleys of the Shephelah. And the Israelites dig in along the northern ridge, and the Philistines dig in along the southern ridge, and the two armies just sit there for weeks and stare at each other, because they're deadlocked. Neither can attack the other, because to attack the other side you've got to come down the mountain into the valley and then up the other side, and you're completely exposed. So finally, to break the deadlock, the Philistines send their mightiest warrior down into the valley floor, and he calls out and he says to the Israelites, "Send your mightiest warrior down, and we'll have this out, just the two of us." This was a tradition in ancient warfare called single combat. It was a way of settling disputes without incurring the bloodshed of a major battle. And the Philistine who is sent down, their mighty warrior, is a giant. He's 0 foot 0. He's outfitted head to toe in this glittering bronze armor, and he's got a sword and he's got a javelin and he's got his spear. He is absolutely terrifying. And he's so terrifying that none of the Israelite soldiers want to fight him. It's a death wish, right? There's no way they think they can take him. And finally the only person who will come forward is this young shepherd boy, and he goes up to Saul and he says, "I'll fight him." And Saul says, "You can't fight him. That's ridiculous. You're this kid. This is this mighty warrior." But the shepherd is adamant. He says, "No, no, no, you don't understand, I have been defending my flock against lions and wolves for years. I think I can do it." And Saul has no choice. He's got no one else who's come forward. So he says, "All right." And then he turns to the kid, and he says, "But you've got to wear this armor. You can't go as you are." So he tries to give the shepherd his armor, and the shepherd says, "No." He says, "I can't wear this stuff." The Biblical verse is, "I cannot wear this for I have not proved it," meaning, "I've never worn armor before. You've got to be crazy." So he reaches down instead on the ground and picks up five stones and puts them in his shepherd's bag and starts to walk down the mountainside to meet the giant. And the giant sees this figure approaching, and calls out, "Come to me so I can feed your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field." He issues this kind of taunt towards this person coming to fight him. And the shepherd draws closer and closer, and the giant sees that he's carrying a staff. That's all he's carrying. Instead of a weapon, just this shepherd's staff, and he says -- he's insulted -- "Am I a dog that you would come to me with sticks?" And the shepherd boy takes one of his stones out of his pocket, puts it in his sling and rolls it around and lets it fly and it hits the giant right between the eyes -- right here, in his most vulnerable spot -- and he falls down either dead or unconscious, and the shepherd boy runs up and takes his sword and cuts off his head, and the Philistines see this and they turn and they just run. And of course, the name of the giant is Goliath and the name of the shepherd boy is David, and the reason that story has obsessed me over the course of writing my book is that everything I thought I knew about that story turned out to be wrong. So David, in that story, is supposed to be the underdog, right? In fact, that term, David and Goliath, has entered our language as a metaphor for improbable victories by some weak party over someone far stronger. Now why do we call David an underdog? Well, we call him an underdog because he's a kid, a little kid, and Goliath is this big, strong giant. We also call him an underdog because Goliath is an experienced warrior, and David is just a shepherd. But most importantly, we call him an underdog because all he has is -- it's that Goliath is outfitted with all of this modern weaponry, this glittering coat of armor and a sword and a javelin and a spear, and all David has is this sling. Well, let's start there with the phrase "All David has is this sling," because that's the first mistake that we make. In ancient warfare, there are three kinds of warriors. There's cavalry, men on horseback and with chariots. There's heavy infantry, which are foot soldiers, armed foot soldiers with swords and shields and some kind of armor. And there's artillery, and artillery are archers, but, more importantly, slingers. And a slinger is someone who has a leather pouch with two long cords attached to it, and they put a projectile, either a rock or a lead ball, inside the pouch, and they whirl it around like this and they let one of the cords go, and the effect is to send the projectile forward towards its target. That's what David has, and it's important to understand that that sling is not a slingshot. It's not this, right? It's not a child's toy. It's in fact an incredibly devastating weapon. When David rolls it around like this, he's turning the sling around probably at six or seven revolutions per second, and that means that when the rock is released, it's going forward really fast, probably 00 meters per second. That's substantially faster than a baseball thrown by even the finest of baseball pitchers. More than that, the stones in the Valley of Elah were not normal rocks. They were barium sulphate, which are rocks twice the density of normal stones. If you do the calculations on the ballistics, on the stopping power of the rock fired from David's sling, it's roughly equal to the stopping power of a [.00 caliber] handgun. This is an incredibly devastating weapon. Accuracy, we know from historical records that slingers -- experienced slingers could hit and maim or even kill a target at distances of up to 000 yards. From medieval tapestries, we know that slingers were capable of hitting birds in flight. They were incredibly accurate. When David lines up -- and he's not 000 yards away from Goliath, he's quite close to Goliath -- when he lines up and fires that thing at Goliath, he has every intention and every expectation of being able to hit Goliath at his most vulnerable spot between his eyes. If you go back over the history of ancient warfare, you will find time and time again that slingers were the decisive factor against infantry in one kind of battle or another. So what's Goliath? He's heavy infantry, and his expectation when he challenges the Israelites to a duel is that he's going to be fighting another heavy infantryman. When he says, "Come to me that I might feed your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field," the key phrase is "Come to me." Come up to me because we're going to fight, hand to hand, like this. Saul has the same expectation. David says, "I want to fight Goliath," and Saul tries to give him his armor, because Saul is thinking, "Oh, when you say 'fight Goliath,' you mean 'fight him in hand-to-hand combat,' infantry on infantry." But David has absolutely no expectation. He's not going to fight him that way. Why would he? He's a shepherd. He's spent his entire career using a sling to defend his flock against lions and wolves. That's where his strength lies. So here he is, this shepherd, experienced in the use of a devastating weapon, up against this lumbering giant weighed down by a hundred pounds of armor and these incredibly heavy weapons that are useful only in short-range combat. Goliath is a sitting duck. He doesn't have a chance. So why do we keep calling David an underdog, and why do we keep referring to his victory as improbable? There's a second piece of this that's important. It's not just that we misunderstand David and his choice of weaponry. It's also that we profoundly misunderstand Goliath. Goliath is not what he seems to be. There's all kinds of hints of this in the Biblical text, things that are in retrospect quite puzzling and don't square with his image as this mighty warrior. So to begin with, the Bible says that Goliath is led onto the valley floor by an attendant. Now that is weird, right? Here is this mighty warrior challenging the Israelites to one-on-one combat. Why is he being led by the hand by some young boy, presumably, to the point of combat? Secondly, the Bible story makes special note of how slowly Goliath moves, another odd thing to say when you're describing the mightiest warrior known to man at that point. And then there's this whole weird thing about how long it takes Goliath to react to the sight of David. So David's coming down the mountain, and he's clearly not preparing for hand-to-hand combat. There is nothing about him that says, "I am about to fight you like this." He's not even carrying a sword. Why does Goliath not react to that? It's as if he's oblivious to what's going on that day. And then there's that strange comment he makes to David: "Am I a dog that you should come to me with sticks?" Sticks? David only has one stick. Well, it turns out that there's been a great deal of speculation within the medical community over the years about whether there is something fundamentally wrong with Goliath, an attempt to make sense of all of those apparent anomalies. There have been many articles written. The first one was in 0000 in the Indiana Medical Journal, and it started a chain of speculation that starts with an explanation for Goliath's height. So Goliath is head and shoulders above all of his peers in that era, and usually when someone is that far out of the norm, there's an explanation for it. So the most common form of giantism is a condition called acromegaly, and acromegaly is caused by a benign tumor on your pituitary gland that causes an overproduction of human growth hormone. And throughout history, many of the most famous giants have all had acromegaly. So the tallest person of all time was a guy named Robert Wadlow who was still growing when he died at the age of 00 and he was 0 foot 00. He had acromegaly. Do you remember the wrestler André the Giant? Famous. He had acromegaly. There's even speculation that Abraham Lincoln had acromegaly. Anyone who's unusually tall, that's the first explanation we come up with. And acromegaly has a very distinct set of side effects associated with it, principally having to do with vision. The pituitary tumor, as it grows, often starts to compress the visual nerves in your brain, with the result that people with acromegaly have either double vision or they are profoundly nearsighted. So when people have started to speculate about what might have been wrong with Goliath, they've said, "Wait a minute, he looks and sounds an awful lot like someone who has acromegaly." And that would also explain so much of what was strange about his behavior that day. Why does he move so slowly and have to be escorted down into the valley floor by an attendant? Because he can't make his way on his own. Why is he so strangely oblivious to David that he doesn't understand that David's not going to fight him until the very last moment? Because he can't see him. When he says, "Come to me that I might feed your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field," the phrase "come to me" is a hint also of his vulnerability. Come to me because I can't see you. And then there's, "Am I a dog that you should come to me with sticks?" He sees two sticks when David has only one. So the Israelites up on the mountain ridge looking down on him thought he was this extraordinarily powerful foe. What they didn't understand was that the very thing that was the source of his apparent strength was also the source of his greatest weakness. And there is, I think, in that, a very important lesson for all of us. Giants are not as strong and powerful as they seem. And sometimes the shepherd boy has a sling in his pocket. Thank you. (Applause)

For a long time in my life, I felt like I'd been living two different lives. There's the life that everyone sees, and then there's the life that only I see. And in the life that everyone sees, who I am is a friend, a son, a brother, a stand-up comedian and a teenager. That's the life everyone sees. If you were to ask my friends and family to describe me, that's what they would tell you. And that's a huge part of me. That is who I am. And if you were to ask me to describe myself, I'd probably say some of those same things. And I wouldn't be lying, but I wouldn't totally be telling you the truth, either, because the truth is, that's just the life everyone else sees. In the life that only I see, who I am, who I really am, is someone who struggles intensely with depression. I have for the last six years of my life, and I continue to every day. Now, for someone who has never experienced depression or doesn't really know what that means, that might surprise them to hear, because there's this pretty popular misconception that depression is just being sad when something in your life goes wrong, when you break up with your girlfriend, when you lose a loved one, when you don't get the job you wanted. But that's sadness. That's a natural thing. That's a natural human emotion. Real depression isn't being sad when something in your life goes wrong. Real depression is being sad when everything in your life is going right. That's real depression, and that's what I suffer from. And to be totally honest, that's hard for me to stand up here and say. It's hard for me to talk about, and it seems to be hard for everyone to talk about, so much so that no one's talking about it. And no one's talking about depression, but we need to be, because right now it's a massive problem. It's a massive problem. But we don't see it on social media, right? We don't see it on Facebook. We don't see it on Twitter. We don't see it on the news, because it's not happy, it's not fun, it's not light. And so because we don't see it, we don't see the severity of it. But the severity of it and the seriousness of it is this: every 00 seconds, every 00 seconds, somewhere, someone in the world takes their own life because of depression, and it might be two blocks away, it might be two countries away, it might be two continents away, but it's happening, and it's happening every single day. And we have a tendency, as a society, to look at that and go, "So what?" So what? We look at that, and we go, "That's your problem. That's their problem." We say we're sad and we say we're sorry, but we also say, "So what?" Well, two years ago it was my problem, because I sat on the edge of my bed where I'd sat a million times before and I was suicidal. I was suicidal, and if you were to look at my life on the surface, you wouldn't see a kid who was suicidal. You'd see a kid who was the captain of his basketball team, the drama and theater student of the year, the English student of the year, someone who was consistently on the honor roll and consistently at every party. So you would say I wasn't depressed, you would say I wasn't suicidal, but you would be wrong. You would be wrong. So I sat there that night beside a bottle of pills with a pen and paper in my hand and I thought about taking my own life and I came this close to doing it. I came this close to doing it. And I didn't, so that makes me one of the lucky ones, one of the people who gets to step out on the ledge and look down but not jump, one of the lucky ones who survives. Well, I survived, and that just leaves me with my story, and my story is this: In four simple words, I suffer from depression. I suffer from depression, and for a long time, I think, I was living two totally different lives, where one person was always afraid of the other. I was afraid that people would see me for who I really was, that I wasn't the perfect, popular kid in high school everyone thought I was, that beneath my smile, there was struggle, and beneath my light, there was dark, and beneath my big personality just hid even bigger pain. See, some people might fear girls not liking them back. Some people might fear sharks. Some people might fear death. But for me, for a large part of my life, I feared myself. I feared my truth, I feared my honesty, I feared my vulnerability, and that fear made me feel like I was forced into a corner, like I was forced into a corner and there was only one way out, and so I thought about that way every single day. I thought about it every single day, and if I'm being totally honest, standing here I've thought about it again since, because that's the sickness, that's the struggle, that's depression, and depression isn't chicken pox. You don't beat it once and it's gone forever. It's something you live with. It's something you live in. It's the roommate you can't kick out. It's the voice you can't ignore. It's the feelings you can't seem to escape, the scariest part is that after a while, you become numb to it. It becomes normal for you, and what you really fear the most isn't the suffering inside of you. It's the stigma inside of others, it's the shame, it's the embarrassment, it's the disapproving look on a friend's face, it's the whispers in the hallway that you're weak, it's the comments that you're crazy. That's what keeps you from getting help. That's what makes you hold it in and hide it. It's the stigma. So you hold it in and you hide it, and you hold it in and you hide it, and even though it's keeping you in bed every day and it's making your life feel empty no matter how much you try and fill it, you hide it, because the stigma in our society around depression is very real. It's very real, and if you think that it isn't, ask yourself this: Would you rather make your next Facebook status say you're having a tough time getting out of bed because you hurt your back or you're having a tough time getting out of bed every morning because you're depressed? That's the stigma, because unfortunately, we live in a world where if you break your arm, everyone runs over to sign your cast, but if you tell people you're depressed, everyone runs the other way. That's the stigma. We are so, so, so accepting of any body part breaking down other than our brains. And that's ignorance. That's pure ignorance, and that ignorance has created a world that doesn't understand depression, that doesn't understand mental health. And that's ironic to me, because depression is one of the best documented problems we have in the world, yet it's one of the least discussed. We just push it aside and put it in a corner and pretend it's not there and hope it'll fix itself. Well, it won't. It hasn't, and it's not going to, because that's wishful thinking, and wishful thinking isn't a game plan, it's procrastination, and we can't procrastinate on something this important. The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one. Well, we haven't done that, so we can't really expect to find an answer when we're still afraid of the question. And I don't know what the solution is. I wish I did, but I don't -- but I think, I think it has to start here. It has to start with me, it has to start with you, it has to start with the people who are suffering, the ones who are hidden in the shadows. We need to speak up and shatter the silence. We need to be the ones who are brave for what we believe in, because if there's one thing that I've come to realize, if there's one thing that I see as the biggest problem, it's not in building a world where we eliminate the ignorance of others. It's in building a world where we teach the acceptance of ourselves, where we're okay with who we are, because when we get honest, we see that we all struggle and we all suffer. Whether it's with this, whether it's with something else, we all know what it is to hurt. We all know what it is to have pain in our heart, and we all know how important it is to heal. But right now, depression is society's deep cut that we're content to put a Band-Aid over and pretend it's not there. Well, it is there. It is there, and you know what? It's okay. Depression is okay. If you're going through it, know that you're okay. And know that you're sick, you're not weak, and it's an issue, not an identity, because when you get past the fear and the ridicule and the judgment and the stigma of others, you can see depression for what it really is, and that's just a part of life, just a part of life, and as much as I hate, as much as I hate some of the places, some of the parts of my life depression has dragged me down to, in a lot of ways I'm grateful for it. Because yeah, it's put me in the valleys, but only to show me there's peaks, and yeah it's dragged me through the dark but only to remind me there is light. My pain, more than anything in 00 years on this planet, has given me perspective, and my hurt, my hurt has forced me to have hope, have hope and to have faith, faith in myself, faith in others, faith that it can get better, that we can change this, that we can speak up and speak out and fight back against ignorance, fight back against intolerance, and more than anything, learn to love ourselves, learn to accept ourselves for who we are, the people we are, not the people the world wants us to be. Because the world I believe in is one where embracing your light doesn't mean ignoring your dark. The world I believe in is one where we're measured by our ability to overcome adversities, not avoid them. The world I believe in is one where I can look someone in the eye and say, "I'm going through hell," and they can look back at me and go, "Me too," and that's okay, and it's okay because depression is okay. We're people. We're people, and we struggle and we suffer and we bleed and we cry, and if you think that true strength means never showing any weakness, then I'm here to tell you you're wrong. You're wrong, because it's the opposite. We're people, and we have problems. We're not perfect, and that's okay. So we need to stop the ignorance, stop the intolerance, stop the stigma, and stop the silence, and we need to take away the taboos, take a look at the truth, and start talking, because the only way we're going to beat a problem that people are battling alone is by standing strong together, by standing strong together. And I believe that we can. I believe that we can. Thank you guys so much. This is a dream come true. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

We are going to take a quick voyage over the cognitive history of the 00th century, because during that century, our minds have altered dramatically. As you all know, the cars that people drove in 0000 have altered because the roads are better and because of technology. And our minds have altered, too. We've gone from people who confronted a concrete world and analyzed that world primarily in terms of how much it would benefit them to people who confront a very complex world, and it's a world where we've had to develop new mental habits, new habits of mind. And these include things like clothing that concrete world with classification, introducing abstractions that we try to make logically consistent, and also taking the hypothetical seriously, that is, wondering about what might have been rather than what is. Now, this dramatic change was drawn to my attention through massive I.Q. gains over time, and these have been truly massive. That is, we don't just get a few more questions right on I.Q. tests. We get far more questions right on I.Q. tests than each succeeding generation back to the time that they were invented. Indeed, if you score the people a century ago against modern norms, they would have an average I.Q. of 00. If you score us against their norms, we would have an average I.Q. of 000. Now this has raised all sorts of questions. Were our immediate ancestors on the verge of mental retardation? Because 00 is normally the score for mental retardation. Or are we on the verge of all being gifted? Because 000 is the cutting line for giftedness. Now I'm going to try and argue for a third alternative that's much more illuminating than either of those, and to put this into perspective, let's imagine that a Martian came down to Earth and found a ruined civilization. And this Martian was an archaeologist, and they found scores, target scores, that people had used for shooting. And first they looked at 0000, and they found that in a minute, people had only put one bullet in the bullseye. And then they found, in 0000, that they'd put about five bullets in the bullseye in a minute. And then about 0000 they put a hundred bullets in the bullseye. And initially, that archaeologist would be baffled. They would say, look, these tests were designed to find out how much people were steady of hand, how keen their eyesight was, whether they had control of their weapon. How could these performances have escalated to this enormous degree? Well we now know, of course, the answer. If that Martian looked at battlefields, they would find that people had only muskets at the time of the Civil War and that they had repeating rifles at the time of the Spanish-American War, and then they had machine guns by the time of World War I. And, in other words, it was the equipment that was in the hands of the average soldier that was responsible, not greater keenness of eye or steadiness of hand. Now what we have to imagine is the mental artillery that we have picked up over those hundred years, and I think again that another thinker will help us here, and that's Luria. Luria looked at people just before they entered the scientific age, and he found that these people were resistant to classifying the concrete world. They wanted to break it up into little bits that they could use. He found that they were resistant to deducing the hypothetical, to speculating about what might be, and he found finally that they didn't deal well with abstractions or using logic on those abstractions. Now let me give you a sample of some of his interviews. He talked to the head man of a person in rural Russia. They'd only had, as people had in 0000, about four years of schooling. And he asked that particular person, what do crows and fish have in common? And the fellow said, "Absolutely nothing. You know, I can eat a fish. I can't eat a crow. A crow can peck at a fish. A fish can't do anything to a crow." And Luria said, "But aren't they both animals?" And he said, "Of course not. One's a fish. The other is a bird." And he was interested, effectively, in what he could do with those concrete objects. And then Luria went to another person, and he said to them, "There are no camels in Germany. Hamburg is a city in Germany. Are there camels in Hamburg?" And the fellow said, "Well, if it's large enough, there ought to be camels there." And Luria said, "But what do my words imply?" And he said, "Well, maybe it's a small village, and there's no room for camels." In other words, he was unwilling to treat this as anything but a concrete problem, and he was used to camels being in villages, and he was quite unable to use the hypothetical, to ask himself what if there were no camels in Germany. A third interview was conducted with someone about the North Pole. And Luria said, "At the North Pole, there is always snow. Wherever there is always snow, the bears are white. What color are the bears at the North Pole?" And the response was, "Such a thing is to be settled by testimony. If a wise person came from the North Pole and told me the bears were white, I might believe him, but every bear that I have seen is a brown bear." Now you see again, this person has rejected going beyond the concrete world and analyzing it through everyday experience, and it was important to that person what color bears were -- that is, they had to hunt bears. They weren't willing to engage in this. One of them said to Luria, "How can we solve things that aren't real problems? None of these problems are real. How can we address them?" Now, these three categories -- classification, using logic on abstractions, taking the hypothetical seriously -- how much difference do they make in the real world beyond the testing room? And let me give you a few illustrations. First, almost all of us today get a high school diploma. That is, we've gone from four to eight years of education to 00 years of formal education, and 00 percent of Americans have actually experienced some type of tertiary education. Now, not only do we have much more education, and much of that education is scientific, and you can't do science without classifying the world. You can't do science without proposing hypotheses. You can't do science without making it logically consistent. And even down in grade school, things have changed. In 0000, they looked at the examinations that the state of Ohio gave to 00-year-olds, and they found that they were all for socially valued concrete information. They were things like, what are the capitals of the 00 or 00 states that existed at that time? When they looked at the exams that the state of Ohio gave in 0000, they were all about abstractions. They were things like, why is the largest city of a state rarely the capital? And you were supposed to think, well, the state legislature was rural-controlled, and they hated the big city, so rather than putting the capital in a big city, they put it in a county seat. They put it in Albany rather than New York. They put it in Harrisburg rather than Philadelphia. And so forth. So the tenor of education has changed. We are educating people to take the hypothetical seriously, to use abstractions, and to link them logically. What about employment? Well, in 0000, three percent of Americans practiced professions that were cognitively demanding. Only three percent were lawyers or doctors or teachers. Today, 00 percent of Americans practice cognitively demanding professions, not only to the professions proper like lawyer or doctor or scientist or lecturer, but many, many sub-professions having to do with being a technician, a computer programmer. A whole range of professions now make cognitive demands. And we can only meet the terms of employment in the modern world by being cognitively far more flexible. And it's not just that we have many more people in cognitively demanding professions. The professions have been upgraded. Compare the doctor in 0000, who really had only a few tricks up his sleeve, with the modern general practitioner or specialist, with years of scientific training. Compare the banker in 0000, who really just needed a good accountant and to know who was trustworthy in the local community for paying back their mortgage. Well, the merchant bankers who brought the world to their knees may have been morally remiss, but they were cognitively very agile. They went far beyond that 0000 banker. They had to look at computer projections for the housing market. They had to get complicated CDO-squared in order to bundle debt together and make debt look as if it were actually a profitable asset. They had to prepare a case to get rating agencies to give it a AAA, though in many cases, they had virtually bribed the rating agencies. And they also, of course, had to get people to accept these so-called assets and pay money for them even though they were highly vulnerable. Or take a farmer today. I take the farm manager of today as very different from the farmer of 0000. So it hasn't just been the spread of cognitively demanding professions. It's also been the upgrading of tasks like lawyer and doctor and what have you that have made demands on our cognitive faculties. But I've talked about education and employment. Some of the habits of mind that we have developed over the 00th century have paid off in unexpected areas. I'm primarily a moral philosopher. I merely have a holiday in psychology, and what interests me in general is moral debate. Now over the last century, in developed nations like America, moral debate has escalated because we take the hypothetical seriously, and we also take universals seriously and look for logical connections. When I came home in 0000 from university at the time of Martin Luther King, a lot of people came home at that time and started having arguments with their parents and grandparents. My father was born in 0000, and he was mildly racially biased. As an Irishman, he hated the English so much he didn't have much emotion for anyone else. (Laughter) But he did have a sense that black people were inferior. And when we said to our parents and grandparents, "How would you feel if tomorrow morning you woke up black?" they said that is the dumbest thing you've ever said. Who have you ever known who woke up in the morning -- (Laughter) -- that turned black? In other words, they were fixed in the concrete mores and attitudes they had inherited. They would not take the hypothetical seriously, and without the hypothetical, it's very difficult to get moral argument off the ground. You have to say, imagine you were in Iran, and imagine that your relatives all suffered from collateral damage even though they had done no wrong. How would you feel about that? And if someone of the older generation says, well, our government takes care of us, and it's up to their government to take care of them, they're just not willing to take the hypothetical seriously. Or take an Islamic father whose daughter has been raped, and he feels he's honor-bound to kill her. Well, he's treating his mores as if they were sticks and stones and rocks that he had inherited, and they're unmovable in any way by logic. They're just inherited mores. Today we would say something like, well, imagine you were knocked unconscious and sodomized. Would you deserve to be killed? And he would say, well that's not in the Koran. That's not one of the principles I've got. Well you, today, universalize your principles. You state them as abstractions and you use logic on them. If you have a principle such as, people shouldn't suffer unless they're guilty of something, then to exclude black people you've got to make exceptions, don't you? You have to say, well, blackness of skin, you couldn't suffer just for that. It must be that blacks are somehow tainted. And then we can bring empirical evidence to bear, can't we, and say, well how can you consider all blacks tainted when St. Augustine was black and Thomas Sowell is black. And you can get moral argument off the ground, then, because you're not treating moral principles as concrete entities. You're treating them as universals, to be rendered consistent by logic. Now how did all of this arise out of I.Q. tests? That's what initially got me going on cognitive history. If you look at the I.Q. test, you find the gains have been greatest in certain areas. The similarities subtest of the Wechsler is about classification, and we have made enormous gains on that classification subtest. There are other parts of the I.Q. test battery that are about using logic on abstractions. Some of you may have taken Raven's Progressive Matrices, and it's all about analogies. And in 0000, people could do simple analogies. That is, if you said to them, cats are like wildcats. What are dogs like? They would say wolves. But by 0000, people could attack Raven's on a much more sophisticated level. If you said, we've got two squares followed by a triangle, what follows two circles? They could say a semicircle. Just as a triangle is half of a square, a semicircle is half of a circle. By 0000, college graduates, if you said two circles followed by a semicircle, two sixteens followed by what, they would say eight, because eight is half of 00. That is, they had moved so far from the concrete world that they could even ignore the appearance of the symbols that were involved in the question. Now, I should say one thing that's very disheartening. We haven't made progress on all fronts. One of the ways in which we would like to deal with the sophistication of the modern world is through politics, and sadly you can have humane moral principles, you can classify, you can use logic on abstractions, and if you're ignorant of history and of other countries, you can't do politics. We've noticed, in a trend among young Americans, that they read less history and less literature and less material about foreign lands, and they're essentially ahistorical. They live in the bubble of the present. They don't know the Korean War from the war in Vietnam. They don't know who was an ally of America in World War II. Think how different America would be if every American knew that this is the fifth time Western armies have gone to Afghanistan to put its house in order, and if they had some idea of exactly what had happened on those four previous occasions. (Laughter) And that is, they had barely left, and there wasn't a trace in the sand. Or imagine how different things would be if most Americans knew that we had been lied into four of our last six wars. You know, the Spanish didn't sink the battleship Maine, the Lusitania was not an innocent vessel but was loaded with munitions, the North Vietnamese did not attack the Seventh Fleet, and, of course, Saddam Hussein hated al Qaeda and had nothing to do with it, and yet the administration convinced 00 percent of the people that they were brothers in arms, when he would hang one from the nearest lamppost. But I don't want to end on a pessimistic note. The 00th century has shown enormous cognitive reserves in ordinary people that we have now realized, and the aristocracy was convinced that the average person couldn't make it, that they could never share their mindset or their cognitive abilities. Lord Curzon once said he saw people bathing in the North Sea, and he said, "Why did no one tell me what white bodies the lower orders have?" As if they were a reptile. Well, Dickens was right and he was wrong. [Correction: Rudyard Kipling] [Kipling] said, "The colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters underneath the skin." (Applause)

So I'm going to talk about trust, and I'm going to start by reminding you of the standard views that people have about trust. I think these are so commonplace, they've become clichés of our society. And I think there are three. One's a claim: there has been a great decline in trust, very widely believed. The second is an aim: we should have more trust. And the third is a task: we should rebuild trust. I think that the claim, the aim and the task are all misconceived. So what I'm going to try to tell you today is a different story about a claim, an aim and a task which I think give one quite a lot better purchase on the matter. First the claim: Why do people think trust has declined? And if I really think about it on the basis of my own evidence, I don't know the answer. I'm inclined to think it may have declined in some activities or some institutions and it might have grown in others. I don't have an overview. But, of course, I can look at the opinion polls, and the opinion polls are supposedly the source of a belief that trust has declined. When you actually look at opinion polls across time, there's not much evidence for that. That's to say, the people who were mistrusted 00 years ago, principally journalists and politicians, are still mistrusted. And the people who were highly trusted 00 years ago are still rather highly trusted: judges, nurses. The rest of us are in between, and by the way, the average person in the street is almost exactly midway. But is that good evidence? What opinion polls record is, of course, opinions. What else can they record? So they're looking at the generic attitudes that people report when you ask them certain questions. Do you trust politicians? Do you trust teachers? Now if somebody said to you, "Do you trust greengrocers? Do you trust fishmongers? Do you trust elementary school teachers?" you would probably begin by saying, "To do what?" And that would be a perfectly sensible response. And you might say, when you understood the answer to that, "Well, I trust some of them, but not others." That's a perfectly rational thing. In short, in our real lives, we seek to place trust in a differentiated way. We don't make an assumption that the level of trust that we will have in every instance of a certain type of official or office-holder or type of person is going to be uniform. I might, for example, say that I certainly trust a certain elementary school teacher I know to teach the reception class to read, but in no way to drive the school minibus. I might, after all, know that she wasn't a good driver. I might trust my most loquacious friend to keep a conversation going but not -- but perhaps not to keep a secret. Simple. So if we've got those evidence in our ordinary lives of the way that trust is differentiated, why do we sort of drop all that intelligence when we think about trust more abstractly? I think the polls are very bad guides to the level of trust that actually exists, because they try to obliterate the good judgment that goes into placing trust. Secondly, what about the aim? The aim is to have more trust. Well frankly, I think that's a stupid aim. It's not what I would aim at. I would aim to have more trust in the trustworthy but not in the untrustworthy. In fact, I aim positively to try not to trust the untrustworthy. And I think, of those people who, for example, placed their savings with the very aptly named Mr. Madoff, who then made off with them, and I think of them, and I think, well, yes, too much trust. More trust is not an intelligent aim in this life. Intelligently placed and intelligently refused trust is the proper aim. Well once one says that, one says, yeah, okay, that means that what matters in the first place is not trust but trustworthiness. It's judging how trustworthy people are in particular respects. And I think that judgment requires us to look at three things. Are they competent? Are they honest? Are they reliable? And if we find that a person is competent in the relevant matters, and reliable and honest, we'll have a pretty good reason to trust them, because they'll be trustworthy. But if, on the other hand, they're unreliable, we might not. I have friends who are competent and honest, but I would not trust them to post a letter, because they're forgetful. I have friends who are very confident they can do certain things, but I realize that they overestimate their own competence. And I'm very glad to say, I don't think I have many friends who are competent and reliable but extremely dishonest. (Laughter) If so, I haven't yet spotted it. But that's what we're looking for: trustworthiness before trust. Trust is the response. Trustworthiness is what we have to judge. And, of course, it's difficult. Across the last few decades, we've tried to construct systems of accountability for all sorts of institutions and professionals and officials and so on that will make it easier for us to judge their trustworthiness. A lot of these systems have the converse effect. They don't work as they're supposed to. I remember I was talking with a midwife who said, "Well, you see, the problem is it takes longer to do the paperwork than to deliver the baby." And all over our public life, our institutional life, we find that problem, that the system of accountability that is meant to secure trustworthiness and evidence of trustworthiness is actually doing the opposite. It is distracting people who have to do difficult tasks, like midwives, from doing them by requiring them to tick the boxes, as we say. You can all give your own examples there. So so much for the aim. The aim, I think, is more trustworthiness, and that is going to be different if we are trying to be trustworthy and communicate our trustworthiness to other people, and if we are trying to judge whether other people or office-holders or politicians are trustworthy. It's not easy. It is judgment, and simple reaction, attitudes, don't do adequately here. Now thirdly, the task. Calling the task rebuilding trust, I think, also gets things backwards. It suggests that you and I should rebuild trust. Well, we can do that for ourselves. We can rebuild a bit of trustworthiness. We can do it two people together trying to improve trust. But trust, in the end, is distinctive because it's given by other people. You can't rebuild what other people give you. You have to give them the basis for giving you their trust. So you have to, I think, be trustworthy. And that, of course, is because you can't fool all of the people all of the time, usually. But you also have to provide usable evidence that you are trustworthy. How to do it? Well every day, all over the place, it's being done by ordinary people, by officials, by institutions, quite effectively. Let me give you a simple commercial example. The shop where I buy my socks says I may take them back, and they don't ask any questions. They take them back and give me the money or give me the pair of socks of the color I wanted. That's super. I trust them because they have made themselves vulnerable to me. I think there's a big lesson in that. If you make yourself vulnerable to the other party, then that is very good evidence that you are trustworthy and you have confidence in what you are saying. So in the end, I think what we are aiming for is not very difficult to discern. It is relationships in which people are trustworthy and can judge when and how the other person is trustworthy. So the moral of all this is, we need to think much less about trust, let alone about attitudes of trust detected or mis-detected by opinion polls, much more about being trustworthy, and how you give people adequate, useful and simple evidence that you're trustworthy. Thanks. (Applause)

There is an ancient proverb that says it's very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, especially when there is no cat. I find this a particularly apt description of science and how science works -- bumbling around in a dark room, bumping into things, trying to figure out what shape this might be, what that might be, there are reports of a cat somewhere around, they may not be reliable, they may be, and so forth and so on. Now I know this is different than the way most people think about science. Science, we generally are told, is a very well-ordered mechanism for understanding the world, for gaining facts, for gaining data, that it's rule-based, that scientists use this thing called the scientific method and we've been doing this for 00 generations or so now, and the scientific method is a set of rules for getting hard, cold facts out of the data. I'd like to tell you that's not the case. So there's the scientific method, but what's really going on is this. (Laughter) [The Scientific Method vs. Farting Around] And it's going on kind of like that. [... in the dark] (Laughter) So what is the difference, then, between the way I believe science is pursued and the way it seems to be perceived? So this difference first came to me in some ways in my dual role at Columbia University, where I'm both a professor and run a laboratory in neuroscience where we try to figure out how the brain works. We do this by studying the sense of smell, the sense of olfaction, and in the laboratory, it's a great pleasure and fascinating work and exciting to work with graduate students and post-docs and think up cool experiments to understand how this sense of smell works and how the brain might be working, and, well, frankly, it's kind of exhilarating. But at the same time, it's my responsibility to teach a large course to undergraduates on the brain, and that's a big subject, and it takes quite a while to organize that, and it's quite challenging and it's quite interesting, but I have to say, it's not so exhilarating. So what was the difference? Well, the course I was and am teaching is called Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience - I. (Laughs) It's 00 lectures full of all sorts of facts, it uses this giant book called "Principles of Neural Science" by three famous neuroscientists. This book comes in at 0,000 pages, it weighs a hefty seven and a half pounds. Just to put that in some perspective, that's the weight of two normal human brains. (Laughter) So I began to realize, by the end of this course, that the students maybe were getting the idea that we must know everything there is to know about the brain. That's clearly not true. And they must also have this idea, I suppose, that what scientists do is collect data and collect facts and stick them in these big books. And that's not really the case either. When I go to a meeting, after the meeting day is over and we collect in the bar over a couple of beers with my colleagues, we never talk about what we know. We talk about what we don't know. We talk about what still has to get done, what's so critical to get done in the lab. Indeed, this was, I think, best said by Marie Curie who said that one never notices what has been done but only what remains to be done. This was in a letter to her brother after obtaining her second graduate degree, I should say. I have to point out this has always been one of my favorite pictures of Marie Curie, because I am convinced that that glow behind her is not a photographic effect. (Laughter) That's the real thing. It is true that her papers are, to this day, stored in a basement room in the Bibliothèque Française in a concrete room that's lead-lined, and if you're a scholar and you want access to these notebooks, you have to put on a full radiation hazmat suit, so it's pretty scary business. Nonetheless, this is what I think we were leaving out of our courses and leaving out of the interaction that we have with the public as scientists, the what-remains-to-be-done. This is the stuff that's exhilarating and interesting. It is, if you will, the ignorance. That's what was missing. So I thought, well, maybe I should teach a course on ignorance, something I can finally excel at, perhaps, for example. So I did start teaching this course on ignorance, and it's been quite interesting and I'd like to tell you to go to the website. You can find all sorts of information there. It's wide open. And it's been really quite an interesting time for me to meet up with other scientists who come in and talk about what it is they don't know. Now I use this word "ignorance," of course, to be at least in part intentionally provocative, because ignorance has a lot of bad connotations and I clearly don't mean any of those. So I don't mean stupidity, I don't mean a callow indifference to fact or reason or data. The ignorant are clearly unenlightened, unaware, uninformed, and present company today excepted, often occupy elected offices, it seems to me. That's another story, perhaps. I mean a different kind of ignorance. I mean a kind of ignorance that's less pejorative, a kind of ignorance that comes from a communal gap in our knowledge, something that's just not there to be known or isn't known well enough yet or we can't make predictions from, the kind of ignorance that's maybe best summed up in a statement by James Clerk Maxwell, perhaps the greatest physicist between Newton and Einstein, who said, "Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science." I think it's a wonderful idea: thoroughly conscious ignorance. So that's the kind of ignorance that I want to talk about today, but of course the first thing we have to clear up is what are we going to do with all those facts? So it is true that science piles up at an alarming rate. We all have this sense that science is this mountain of facts, this accumulation model of science, as many have called it, and it seems impregnable, it seems impossible. How can you ever know all of this? And indeed, the scientific literature grows at an alarming rate. In 0000, there were 0.0 million papers published. There's about a two-and-a-half-percent yearly growth rate, and so last year we saw over one and a half million papers being published. Divide that by the number of minutes in a year, and you wind up with three new papers per minute. So I've been up here a little over 00 minutes, I've already lost three papers. I have to get out of here actually. I have to go read. So what do we do about this? Well, the fact is that what scientists do about it is a kind of a controlled neglect, if you will. We just don't worry about it, in a way. The facts are important. You have to know a lot of stuff to be a scientist. That's true. But knowing a lot of stuff doesn't make you a scientist. You need to know a lot of stuff to be a lawyer or an accountant or an electrician or a carpenter. But in science, knowing a lot of stuff is not the point. Knowing a lot of stuff is there to help you get to more ignorance. So knowledge is a big subject, but I would say ignorance is a bigger one. So this leads us to maybe think about, a little bit about, some of the models of science that we tend to use, and I'd like to disabuse you of some of them. So one of them, a popular one, is that scientists are patiently putting the pieces of a puzzle together to reveal some grand scheme or another. This is clearly not true. For one, with puzzles, the manufacturer has guaranteed that there's a solution. We don't have any such guarantee. Indeed, there are many of us who aren't so sure about the manufacturer. (Laughter) So I think the puzzle model doesn't work. Another popular model is that science is busy unraveling things the way you unravel the peels of an onion. So peel by peel, you take away the layers of the onion to get at some fundamental kernel of truth. I don't think that's the way it works either. Another one, a kind of popular one, is the iceberg idea, that we only see the tip of the iceberg but underneath is where most of the iceberg is hidden. But all of these models are based on the idea of a large body of facts that we can somehow or another get completed. We can chip away at this iceberg and figure out what it is, or we could just wait for it to melt, I suppose, these days, but one way or another we could get to the whole iceberg. Right? Or make it manageable. But I don't think that's the case. I think what really happens in science is a model more like the magic well, where no matter how many buckets you take out, there's always another bucket of water to be had, or my particularly favorite one, with the effect and everything, the ripples on a pond. So if you think of knowledge being this ever-expanding ripple on a pond, the important thing to realize is that our ignorance, the circumference of this knowledge, also grows with knowledge. So the knowledge generates ignorance. This is really well said, I thought, by George Bernard Shaw. This is actually part of a toast that he delivered to celebrate Einstein at a dinner celebrating Einstein's work, in which he claims that science just creates more questions than it answers. ["Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating 00 more."] I find that kind of glorious, and I think he's precisely right, plus it's a kind of job security. As it turns out, he kind of cribbed that from the philosopher Immanuel Kant who a hundred years earlier had come up with this idea of question propagation, that every answer begets more questions. I love that term, "question propagation," this idea of questions propagating out there. So I'd say the model we want to take is not that we start out kind of ignorant and we get some facts together and then we gain knowledge. It's rather kind of the other way around, really. What do we use this knowledge for? What are we using this collection of facts for? We're using it to make better ignorance, to come up with, if you will, higher-quality ignorance. Because, you know, there's low-quality ignorance and there's high-quality ignorance. It's not all the same. Scientists argue about this all the time. Sometimes we call them bull sessions. Sometimes we call them grant proposals. But nonetheless, it's what the argument is about. It's the ignorance. It's the what we don't know. It's what makes a good question. So how do we think about these questions? I'm going to show you a graph that shows up quite a bit on happy hour posters in various science departments. This graph asks the relationship between what you know and how much you know about it. So what you know, you can know anywhere from nothing to everything, of course, and how much you know about it can be anywhere from a little to a lot. So let's put a point on the graph. There's an undergraduate. Doesn't know much but they have a lot of interest. They're interested in almost everything. Now you look at a master's student, a little further along in their education, and you see they know a bit more, but it's been narrowed somewhat. And finally you get your Ph.D., where it turns out you know a tremendous amount about almost nothing. (Laughter) What's really disturbing is the trend line that goes through that because, of course, when it dips below the zero axis, there, it gets into a negative area. That's where you find people like me, I'm afraid. So the important thing here is that this can all be changed. This whole view can be changed by just changing the label on the x-axis. So instead of how much you know about it, we could say, "What can you ask about it?" So yes, you do need to know a lot of stuff as a scientist, but the purpose of knowing a lot of stuff is not just to know a lot of stuff. That just makes you a geek, right? Knowing a lot of stuff, the purpose is to be able to ask lots of questions, to be able to frame thoughtful, interesting questions, because that's where the real work is. Let me give you a quick idea of a couple of these sorts of questions. I'm a neuroscientist, so how would we come up with a question in neuroscience? Because it's not always quite so straightforward. So, for example, we could say, well what is it that the brain does? Well, one thing the brain does, it moves us around. We walk around on two legs. That seems kind of simple, somehow or another. I mean, virtually everybody over 00 months of age walks around on two legs, right? So that maybe is not that interesting. So instead maybe we want to choose something a little more complicated to look at. How about the visual system? There it is, the visual system. I mean, we love our visual systems. We do all kinds of cool stuff. Indeed, there are over 00,000 neuroscientists who work on the visual system, from the retina to the visual cortex, in an attempt to understand not just the visual system but to also understand how general principles of how the brain might work. But now here's the thing: Our technology has actually been pretty good at replicating what the visual system does. We have TV, we have movies, we have animation, we have photography, we have pattern recognition, all of these sorts of things. They work differently than our visual systems in some cases, but nonetheless we've been pretty good at making a technology work like our visual system. Somehow or another, a hundred years of robotics, you never saw a robot walk on two legs, because robots don't walk on two legs because it's not such an easy thing to do. A hundred years of robotics, and we can't get a robot that can move more than a couple steps one way or the other. You ask them to go up an inclined plane, and they fall over. Turn around, and they fall over. It's a serious problem. So what is it that's the most difficult thing for a brain to do? What ought we to be studying? Perhaps it ought to be walking on two legs, or the motor system. I'll give you an example from my own lab, my own particularly smelly question, since we work on the sense of smell. But here's a diagram of five molecules and sort of a chemical notation. These are just plain old molecules, but if you sniff those molecules up these two little holes in the front of your face, you will have in your mind the distinct impression of a rose. If there's a real rose there, those molecules will be the ones, but even if there's no rose there, you'll have the memory of a molecule. How do we turn molecules into perceptions? What's the process by which that could happen? Here's another example: two very simple molecules, again in this kind of chemical notation. It might be easier to visualize them this way, so the gray circles are carbon atoms, the white ones are hydrogen atoms and the red ones are oxygen atoms. Now these two molecules differ by only one carbon atom and two little hydrogen atoms that ride along with it, and yet one of them, heptyl acetate, has the distinct odor of a pear, and hexyl acetate is unmistakably banana. So there are two really interesting questions here, it seems to me. One is, how can a simple little molecule like that create a perception in your brain that's so clear as a pear or a banana? And secondly, how the hell can we tell the difference between two molecules that differ by a single carbon atom? I mean, that's remarkable to me, clearly the best chemical detector on the face of the planet. And you don't even think about it, do you? So this is a favorite quote of mine that takes us back to the ignorance and the idea of questions. I like to quote because I think dead people shouldn't be excluded from the conversation. And I also think it's important to realize that the conversation's been going on for a while, by the way. So Erwin Schrodinger, a great quantum physicist and, I think, philosopher, points out how you have to "abide by ignorance for an indefinite period" of time. And it's this abiding by ignorance that I think we have to learn how to do. This is a tricky thing. This is not such an easy business. I guess it comes down to our education system, so I'm going to talk a little bit about ignorance and education, because I think that's where it really has to play out. So for one, let's face it, in the age of Google and Wikipedia, the business model of the university and probably secondary schools is simply going to have to change. We just can't sell facts for a living anymore. They're available with a click of the mouse, or if you want to, you could probably just ask the wall one of these days, wherever they're going to hide the things that tell us all this stuff. So what do we have to do? We have to give our students a taste for the boundaries, for what's outside that circumference, for what's outside the facts, what's just beyond the facts. How do we do that? Well, one of the problems, of course, turns out to be testing. We currently have an educational system which is very efficient but is very efficient at a rather bad thing. So in second grade, all the kids are interested in science, the girls and the boys. They like to take stuff apart. They have great curiosity. They like to investigate things. They go to science museums. They like to play around. They're in second grade. They're interested. But by 00th or 00th grade, fewer than 00 percent of them have any interest in science whatsoever, let alone a desire to go into science as a career. So we have this remarkably efficient system for beating any interest in science out of everybody's head. Is this what we want? I think this comes from what a teacher colleague of mine calls "the bulimic method of education." You know. You can imagine what it is. We just jam a whole bunch of facts down their throats over here and then they puke it up on an exam over here and everybody goes home with no added intellectual heft whatsoever. This can't possibly continue to go on. So what do we do? Well the geneticists, I have to say, have an interesting maxim they live by. Geneticists always say, you always get what you screen for. And that's meant as a warning. So we always will get what we screen for, and part of what we screen for is in our testing methods. Well, we hear a lot about testing and evaluation, and we have to think carefully when we're testing whether we're evaluating or whether we're weeding, whether we're weeding people out, whether we're making some cut. Evaluation is one thing. You hear a lot about evaluation in the literature these days, in the educational literature, but evaluation really amounts to feedback and it amounts to an opportunity for trial and error. It amounts to a chance to work over a longer period of time with this kind of feedback. That's different than weeding, and usually, I have to tell you, when people talk about evaluation, evaluating students, evaluating teachers, evaluating schools, evaluating programs, that they're really talking about weeding. And that's a bad thing, because then you will get what you select for, which is what we've gotten so far. So I'd say what we need is a test that says, "What is x?" and the answers are "I don't know, because no one does," or "What's the question?" Even better. Or, "You know what, I'll look it up, I'll ask someone, I'll phone someone. I'll find out." Because that's what we want people to do, and that's how you evaluate them. And maybe for the advanced placement classes, it could be, "Here's the answer. What's the next question?" That's the one I like in particular. So let me end with a quote from William Butler Yeats, who said "Education is not about filling buckets; it is lighting fires." So I'd say, let's get out the matches. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

I'd like to tell you about a legal case that I worked on involving a man named Steve Titus. Titus was a restaurant manager. He was 00 years old, he lived in Seattle, Washington, he was engaged to Gretchen, about to be married, she was the love of his life. And one night, the couple went out for a romantic restaurant meal. They were on their way home, and they were pulled over by a police officer. You see, Titus' car sort of resembled a car that was driven earlier in the evening by a man who raped a female hitchhiker, and Titus kind of resembled that rapist. So the police took a picture of Titus, they put it in a photo lineup, they later showed it to the victim, and she pointed to Titus' photo. She said, "That one's the closest." The police and the prosecution proceeded with a trial, and when Steve Titus was put on trial for rape, the rape victim got on the stand and said, "I'm absolutely positive that's the man." And Titus was convicted. He proclaimed his innocence, his family screamed at the jury, his fiancée collapsed on the floor sobbing, and Titus is taken away to jail. So what would you do at this point? What would you do? Well, Titus lost complete faith in the legal system, and yet he got an idea. He called up the local newspaper, he got the interest of an investigative journalist, and that journalist actually found the real rapist, a man who ultimately confessed to this rape, a man who was thought to have committed 00 rapes in that area, and when this information was given to the judge, the judge set Titus free. And really, that's where this case should have ended. It should have been over. Titus should have thought of this as a horrible year, a year of accusation and trial, but over. It didn't end that way. Titus was so bitter. He'd lost his job. He couldn't get it back. He lost his fiancée. She couldn't put up with his persistent anger. He lost his entire savings, and so he decided to file a lawsuit against the police and others whom he felt were responsible for his suffering. And that's when I really started working on this case, trying to figure out how did that victim go from "That one's the closest" to "I'm absolutely positive that's the guy." Well, Titus was consumed with his civil case. He spent every waking moment thinking about it, and just days before he was to have his day in court, he woke up in the morning, doubled over in pain, and died of a stress-related heart attack. He was 00 years old. So I was asked to work on Titus' case because I'm a psychological scientist. I study memory. I've studied memory for decades. And if I meet somebody on an airplane -- this happened on the way over to Scotland -- if I meet somebody on an airplane, and we ask each other, "What do you do? What do you do?" and I say "I study memory," they usually want to tell me how they have trouble remembering names, or they've got a relative who's got Alzheimer's or some kind of memory problem, but I have to tell them I don't study when people forget. I study the opposite: when they remember, when they remember things that didn't happen or remember things that were different from the way they really were. I study false memories. Unhappily, Steve Titus is not the only person to be convicted based on somebody's false memory. In one project in the United States, information has been gathered on 000 innocent people, 000 defendants who were convicted of crimes they didn't do. They spent 00, 00, 00 years in prison for these crimes, and now DNA testing has proven that they are actually innocent. And when those cases have been analyzed, three quarters of them are due to faulty memory, faulty eyewitness memory. Well, why? Like the jurors who convicted those innocent people and the jurors who convicted Titus, many people believe that memory works like a recording device. You just record the information, then you call it up and play it back when you want to answer questions or identify images. But decades of work in psychology has shown that this just isn't true. Our memories are constructive. They're reconstructive. Memory works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page: You can go in there and change it, but so can other people. I first started studying this constructive memory process in the 0000s. I did my experiments that involved showing people simulated crimes and accidents and asking them questions about what they remember. In one study, we showed people a simulated accident and we asked people, how fast were the cars going when they hit each other? And we asked other people, how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other? And if we asked the leading "smashed" question, the witnesses told us the cars were going faster, and moreover, that leading "smashed" question caused people to be more likely to tell us that they saw broken glass in the accident scene when there wasn't any broken glass at all. In another study, we showed a simulated accident where a car went through an intersection with a stop sign, and if we asked a question that insinuated it was a yield sign, many witnesses told us they remember seeing a yield sign at the intersection, not a stop sign. And you might be thinking, well, you know, these are filmed events, they are not particularly stressful. Would the same kind of mistakes be made with a really stressful event? In a study we published just a few months ago, we have an answer to this question, because what was unusual about this study is we arranged for people to have a very stressful experience. The subjects in this study were members of the U.S. military who were undergoing a harrowing training exercise to teach them what it's going to be like for them if they are ever captured as prisoners of war. And as part of this training exercise, these soldiers are interrogated in an aggressive, hostile, physically abusive fashion for 00 minutes and later on they have to try to identify the person who conducted that interrogation. And when we feed them suggestive information that insinuates it's a different person, many of them misidentify their interrogator, often identifying someone who doesn't even remotely resemble the real interrogator. And so what these studies are showing is that when you feed people misinformation about some experience that they may have had, you can distort or contaminate or change their memory. Well out there in the real world, misinformation is everywhere. We get misinformation not only if we're questioned in a leading way, but if we talk to other witnesses who might consciously or inadvertently feed us some erroneous information, or if we see media coverage about some event we might have experienced, all of these provide the opportunity for this kind of contamination of our memory. In the 0000s, we began to see an even more extreme kind of memory problem. Some patients were going into therapy with one problem -- maybe they had depression, an eating disorder -- and they were coming out of therapy with a different problem. Extreme memories for horrific brutalizations, sometimes in satanic rituals, sometimes involving really bizarre and unusual elements. One woman came out of psychotherapy believing that she'd endured years of ritualistic abuse, where she was forced into a pregnancy and that the baby was cut from her belly. But there were no physical scars or any kind of physical evidence that could have supported her story. And when I began looking into these cases, I was wondering, where do these bizarre memories come from? And what I found is that most of these situations involved some particular form of psychotherapy. And so I asked, were some of the things going on in this psychotherapy -- like the imagination exercises or dream interpretation, or in some cases hypnosis, or in some cases exposure to false information -- were these leading these patients to develop these very bizarre, unlikely memories? And I designed some experiments to try to study the processes that were being used in this psychotherapy so I could study the development of these very rich false memories. In one of the first studies we did, we used suggestion, a method inspired by the psychotherapy we saw in these cases, we used this kind of suggestion and planted a false memory that when you were a kid, five or six years old, you were lost in a shopping mall. You were frightened. You were crying. You were ultimately rescued by an elderly person and reunited with the family. And we succeeded in planting this memory in the minds of about a quarter of our subjects. And you might be thinking, well, that's not particularly stressful. But we and other investigators have planted rich false memories of things that were much more unusual and much more stressful. So in a study done in Tennessee, researchers planted the false memory that when you were a kid, you nearly drowned and had to be rescued by a life guard. And in a study done in Canada, researchers planted the false memory that when you were a kid, something as awful as being attacked by a vicious animal happened to you, succeeding with about half of their subjects. And in a study done in Italy, researchers planted the false memory, when you were a kid, you witnessed demonic possession. I do want to add that it might seem like we are traumatizing these experimental subjects in the name of science, but our studies have gone through thorough evaluation by research ethics boards that have made the decision that the temporary discomfort that some of these subjects might experience in these studies is outweighed by the importance of this problem for understanding memory processes and the abuse of memory that is going on in some places in the world. Well, to my surprise, when I published this work and began to speak out against this particular brand of psychotherapy, it created some pretty bad problems for me: hostilities, primarily from the repressed memory therapists, who felt under attack, and by the patients whom they had influenced. I had sometimes armed guards at speeches that I was invited to give, people trying to drum up letter-writing campaigns to get me fired. But probably the worst was I suspected that a woman was innocent of abuse that was being claimed by her grown daughter. She accused her mother of sexual abuse based on a repressed memory. And this accusing daughter had actually allowed her story to be filmed and presented in public places. I was suspicious of this story, and so I started to investigate, and eventually found information that convinced me that this mother was innocent. I published an exposé on the case, and a little while later, the accusing daughter filed a lawsuit. Even though I'd never mentioned her name, she sued me for defamation and invasion of privacy. And I went through nearly five years of dealing with this messy, unpleasant litigation, but finally, finally, it was over and I could really get back to my work. In the process, however, I became part of a disturbing trend in America where scientists are being sued for simply speaking out on matters of great public controversy. When I got back to my work, I asked this question: if I plant a false memory in your mind, does it have repercussions? Does it affect your later thoughts, your later behaviors? Our first study planted a false memory that you got sick as a child eating certain foods: hard-boiled eggs, dill pickles, strawberry ice cream. And we found that once we planted this false memory, people didn't want to eat the foods as much at an outdoor picnic. The false memories aren't necessarily bad or unpleasant. If we planted a warm, fuzzy memory involving a healthy food like asparagus, we could get people to want to eat asparagus more. And so what these studies are showing is that you can plant false memories and they have repercussions that affect behavior long after the memories take hold. Well, along with this ability to plant memories and control behavior obviously come some important ethical issues, like, when should we use this mind technology? And should we ever ban its use? Therapists can't ethically plant false memories in the mind of their patients even if it would help the patient, but there's nothing to stop a parent from trying this out on their overweight or obese teenager. And when I suggested this publicly, it created an outcry again. "There she goes. She's advocating that parents lie to their children." Hello, Santa Claus. (Laughter) I mean, another way to think about this is, which would you rather have, a kid with obesity, diabetes, shortened lifespan, all the things that go with it, or a kid with one little extra bit of false memory? I know what I would choose for a kid of mine. But maybe my work has made me different from most people. Most people cherish their memories, know that they represent their identity, who they are, where they came from. And I appreciate that. I feel that way too. But I know from my work how much fiction is already in there. If I've learned anything from these decades of working on these problems, it's this: just because somebody tells you something and they say it with confidence, just because they say it with lots of detail, just because they express emotion when they say it, it doesn't mean that it really happened. We can't reliably distinguish true memories from false memories. We need independent corroboration. Such a discovery has made me more tolerant of the everyday memory mistakes that my friends and family members make. Such a discovery might have saved Steve Titus, the man whose whole future was snatched away by a false memory. But meanwhile, we should all keep in mind, we'd do well to, that memory, like liberty, is a fragile thing. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thanks very much. (Applause)