A few years ago here at TED, Peter Skillman presented a design competition called The Marshmallow Challenge. 
The idea is pretty simple: four teams need the widest possible free-standing structure with 20 spaghetti, about one meter tape, about one meter thread and a marshmallow. 
The marshmallow must be on top 
of it. And although it really seems easy, it is actually really hard because it pushes people to work very quickly. 
And so I thought this is an interesting idea, and I turned it into a design workshop. 
It was a huge success. 
Since then, I've been doing about 70 workshops around the world, with students, developers and architects, even with CTOS, the Fortune 50 companies. And there's something about this task that allows deep impressions of nature working together. And I want to share some of it with you. 
Usually, most people start by orienting themselves towards the task. 
They talk about it. They think about what it's going to look like. They whip up power. 
Then they spend a little time planning and organization. They sketch and they sketch out spaghetti. 
They spend a lot of their time assembling ever-growing structures. 
And finally, just before they have no time, someone takes the marshmallow and they gently put it to the top, step back, step back. And TA: So they admire their work. 
But what happens then almost always is that the TA is becoming a UH: Oh, because the weight of the marshmallow is causing the whole thing to bend and collapse. 
There are a number of people who have a lot more UH: Oh, moments than others. And among the worst are fresh business graduates. 
They lie. They cheat. They are confused. And they produce really poor entities. 
And of course, there are also teams that have a lot more TA, because they are made, and among the best are fresh graduates from kindergarten. 
And this is quite amazing. 
As Peter told us, they are not only producing the highest towers, but also the most interesting structures of all. 
What you might ask is, how does this come about? Why? What about those? 
And Peter doesn't tell any of the children that they invest time in being the chief of spaghetti. 
They don't invest time in power struggles. 
But there's another reason, and that 
is that business leaders were trained to find one right plan, OK? 
And then they realized 
what happens when they grab the marshmallow to the top. They don't have time. And what happens? 
It's a crisis. 
Sounds familiar. What's 
different from what kindergarten children do is they start with the marshmallow and they build prototypes, successful prototypes always start with the marshmallow at the top, so they have multiple opportunities to repair malady prototypes. 
Designers recognize this kind of collaboration as the core of an iterative process. 
And with every attempt, the kids get instant feedback. What works and what doesn't work 
is the performance of working with prototypes. But let's see how different teams work. 
The average for most is about 50 centimeters. BWC students create half of them lawyers, but not much. Kids are better than adults. 
Who is the most successful? 
Architects and engineers. Luckily, 
1M is the highest thing I've seen. 
And why? Because they understand triangles and are self-reinforcing geometric patterns. The key to building stable structures, 
CEOs, are slightly above average. But here it gets interesting. 
If you put an executive administrator on the team, they get significantly better. 
It's incredible. They look around and they see this team will win. They 
can predict. Why does this work? 
Because they have special skills in the process of monitoring. 
They lead the process. They understand it. 
And that team that regulates and respects the work will significantly improve the performance of the team. 
Specialized skills and process skills and their combination will lead to success. 
If you have 10 teams that are typically operating, they get about six that have stable structures. 
I tried something exciting. 
I thought, "Let's get the poker stake straight away." 
So I offered a 100,000-prize prize for software for the winners. What 
did you think happened to these design students? 
What was the result? 
This wasn't what happened here. A team had a stable structure. 
If anyone had built a 3.5-inch construction, he would have carried the prize 
home. So isn't it interesting that high competitions have a strong effect? 
We repeated this exercise with the same students. 
What did you think happened? Well, 
now, you understood the advantage of prototyping. 
So from the same bad team, from one of the best, they 
produced the highest construction in the least time. 
So there are profound lessons for us about the nature of drive and success. 
You might ask, why would anyone actually invest time to create a marshmallow challenge? 
The reason is, I help create digital tools and processes to help teams create cars, video games and visual effects. 
And what the marshmallow challenge does is it helps you identify hidden assumptions, 
because frankly, every project has its own marshmallow. 
The challenge offers a shared experience, a common language, or a basic attitude to build the right prototype. 
And this is the value of this experience, this simple exercise, 
and those of you who care about it, can visit marshmallowchallenge.com. 
It's a blog where you see how you build the marshmallows. 
There's a step-by-step instruction there. You 
find crazy examples from around the world, like people optimize and refine the system. 
There are also world records, and 
the basal lesson, I think, is the construction. In fact, a connecting sport 
is what we all need to focus our senses on the task, and we need to use our thinking optimally, like our emotions and our actions in the challenge that lies ahead of us. 
And sometimes a little prototype of this experience is anything it needs to take us from a UH: Oh, to a TA, because 
bringing a moment is a moment, and that can make a big difference. 
Thank you. So we 
pretend we have a machine 
here, a big machine, a cool TED-like machine, and that's a time machine, 
and everybody in this room needs to go in and 
you can go into the past. You can go into the future. You can't stay in the here and now. 
And I wonder what you would choose, because I've asked my friends often this question recently, and they all wanted to go into the past. 
I don't know. They wanted to go back to time before there were cars, or Twitter, or America is looking for the superstar. 
I don't know. 
I'm convinced that somehow you're attracted to nostalgia, to wishful thinking, 
and I understand that. 
I'm not part of this group, I have to say, 
I don't want to go into the past, and not because I'm an adventurer. 
It's because the possibilities on this planet don't go back. They go forward. 
So I want to go into this machine, and I want to go into the future. 
This is the greatest time ever on this planet, whatever scale you apply. Health, wealth, mobility, opportunities, falling disease rates. There was 
never a time like this. 
My grandparents died all when they were 60. 
My grandparents pushed this number to 70. 
My parents are the 80th on the heels. 
So there should be a better nine at the beginning of my death. 
But it's not even about people like us, because this is a bigger thing than this. 
A child born in New Delhi today can expect to live as long as the richest man in the world 100 years ago. 
Think about this. This is an incredible fact. 
And why is this? 
Smallpox. Smallpox killed billions of people on this planet. 
They reshaped the demography of the Earth in a way that no war ever did. 
They're gone. They've disappeared. 
We've conquered them. Puff. 
In the rich world, there are diseases that millions of us threatened just a generation ago. Little more diphtheria. Rubella. 
polio. Does 
anyone know what that is? Vaccines. 
Modern medicine. The successes of the scientific method. 
And in my view, the scientific method is trying to try things out. See if it works. It changes if it doesn't. So one of the most important achievements of humanity 
is this: this is the good news. 
Unfortunately, this is all the good news, because there are a few other problems, and they've been mentioned a lot. 
And one of them is that despite all our achievements, a billion people in the world go hungry to bed every day. 
This number is rising, and it's rising very quickly. And this is shameful. 
And not just that. We've used our imagination to thoroughly devastate the water, 
the land of urbaric water, the rainforest, the oil, the gas. They're disappearing, and they're soon. If we don't innovate out of the window, we're also disappearing. 
So the question is, can we do that? I think 
I think it's clear that we can produce food that will feed billions of people without raping the land they live in. 
I think we can provide this world with energy that doesn't destroy it 
at the same time. I really think that's not wishful thinking, 
but this is keeping me awake at night. One of the things that keeps me awake at night: we've never needed as much as we've never done now, and 
we've never been able to put him in a reasonable position, just as we can today. 
We're on the threshold of amazing, amazing events in many areas. And yet I really think that we need to go back hundreds of 300 years before the Enlightenment to find a time when we've fought progress, when we've fought these things harder, on more fronts than we've now. 
People are enshrining themselves in their faith, so narrow that they can't be liberated, not 
even the truth. They're liberated, and listen. 
Everyone has a right to their opinion, even a right to their opinion on progress. 
But you know what they have no right to? 
They have no right to their own facts. Climatics. They don't. 
And I took a while to figure this out. 
About a decade ago, I wrote an article about vaccinations for The New Yorker, a little article. 
And I was amazed to encounter resistance, to resist what is ultimately the most effective measure in the health system in the history of humanity. 
I didn't know what to do, so I just did what I always do. I wrote an article, and I went on 
to write an article about genetically modified food. 
The same thing just bigger. 
People were crazy. 
So I wrote an article about it, and I couldn't understand why people thought that was Frankenfood. Why they believed that molecules were moving around in a particular way, rather than randomly, an assault on the natural area. But 
you know, I do what I do. I wrote the article. I kept doing 
it. I'm a guy. 
We're going to eat. That's what 
worried me, and I couldn't figure out why. 
And it's because these fanatics who made me crazy weren't fanatics at all. 
These were thoughtful people, educated people, decent people. 
They were just like the people in this room, 
and that got me so confused. 
But then I thought, "You know what? Are we 
honest? We've reached a point where we don't have the same relationship with progress as we used to 
be. "We talk about it ambivalently. 
We talk ironically about it with small inverted people. 
Okay, so there's reason, and I think we know what's the reason. 
We've lost institutional, authority, and sometimes science itself, and there's no reason why it shouldn't be that way. 
You can just call a few names, and people will understand. 
Chernobyl, Bhopal, the Challenger, Vioxx, weapons of mass destruction, the 2000 
US presidential election. I mean, you know, you can choose your own list. 
There are questions and problems with the people we thought you'd always be right. So be skeptical. 
Ask questions. Ask for evidence. Ask for evidence. 
Take nothing but given. 
But now it comes. If you get evidence, you have to take that evidence, and we're not good, and I can say 
that for the reason that we're living in an epidemic of fear that I've never seen before, and hopefully never will see again. 
About 12 years ago, a story was published, a terrible story that linked the autism epidemic to measles, mumps and rubella vaccines. 
Very scary. 
Cumple studies were done to see if that was true. 
Cumble studies should be done. This is a serious matter. 
The data came in. 
The data came in from the United States, from England, from Sweden, from Canada, and they were all the same. No correlation, no connection, no correlation. 
It doesn't make any difference. It doesn't make any difference, because we believe in anecdotes. We believe in what we see, what we believe in, what makes us feel real. 
We don't believe in a bundle of documents from a government scared that gives us data, and I understand that. I think we all do, 
but you know what 
the result was? Disaster, catastrophic, 
because of this fact. The US is one of the only countries in the world where the measles vaccination rate is falling. This 
is scandalous, and we should be ashamed. 
It's terrible. 
What happened is we could do this? 
Well, I understand that. I do, because has 
anybody here seen measles die 
from a single person in the audience? Masasles die very often, 
not very often 
in this country, but 160,000 times in the world last year. 
These are many deaths from measles. 20 per hour. 
But because this is not happening here, we can crowd it out, and people like Jenny McCarthy can run around and preach messages of fear and illiteracy from platforms like Oprah and Larry King Live. 
And you can do that because you don't link cause and correlation. 
You don't understand that these things seem to be the same, but almost never the same. 
And this is something we need to learn, and very quickly. 
This guy was a hero, Jonas Salk. 
He freed us from one of the worst scourges of humanity: no 
fear, no suffering, polio, puff, gone. 
The guy in the middle, not so much 
as he's Paul Offit. 
He's developed a rotavirus vaccine in the developing world that can 
save the lives of 400, 500,000 children a year. 
Quite good, not 
good. Now, that's good, except that Paul's walking around talking about vaccines and saying, "How valuable they are?" And that people should just stop whining. 
And that's what he actually says. "So Paul is 
a terrorist. 
When Paul speaks at a hearing, he can't tell me what to say. 
He likes to tell him that they know where his children go to school. 
And why? Because Paul did a vaccine. 
I don't need to say that, but vaccines are essential. 
If you take them away, the diseases will return. Terrible diseases. That's what's 

going to happen 
to polio. 
Let's take that. Why not? 
"A fellow student of mine wrote to me a few weeks ago, and he said," She thinks I'm a little bit 
too shrill. "No one ever said that she 
wouldn't vaccinate her child against polio. No way, 
fine. 
Why? Because we don't have polio. And you know what? 
We didn't have polio in this country yesterday. 
Today, I don't know. Maybe this morning somebody in Lagos got on an airplane, and he's flying to Los Angeles. At the moment, 
he's over Ohio, and in a few hours, he's landing and renting a car, and he's coming to Long Beach, and he's going to go to one of these fantastic TED dinners tonight. 
And he doesn't know that he's infected with a paralyzing disease. And we don't know, because that's how the world works. 
Well, this is the planet we live on. Don't pretend that he's 
not. We love to lie. We love that. Did you 
all take your vitamins this morning? 
Echinacea, a little antioxidantium, that helps you get on top of it? 
I know you did that because half of Americans do it every day. 
You take the stuff, and you take alternative remedies. And it doesn't make any difference how often we find out that they're useless. 
The data constantly shows this. 
They darken their urine. Do it almost never. That's okay. You like 
to pay 28 billion dollars for dark urine. 
I fully agree with you. 
Dark urine. Dark. 
Why do we do that? Why do we do it? 
Well, I think I understand. We hate the pharmaceutical industry. 
We hate too strong a government. We don't have confidence in the system, 
and we shouldn't have that. Our health system is lousy. 
It's cruel to millions of people. 
It's absolutely amazing. It's cold and soulkilling even to us who can afford it. 
So we're going away from that. And where are we going? 
We're going to the arms of the placebo industry. 
That's 
really a serious matter, because the stuff is crap, and we spend billions of dollars on it. 
And I have all sorts of little props here. 
None of these went into fraud. Echinacea cheated. Acai, I don't even know what that is, but we spend billions of dollars on it. It's fraud. 
And you know what? When I say that, people shout at me and say, "What cares about you? Let people do what they want. "So they 
feel good. 
And you know what they're wrong 
because I don't care whether it's the Minister of Health who says," Hmm, I'm not going to take the evidence of my experts on mammography, or any cancer quackling that wants to treat its patients with coffee. "When 
you go down this path, where faith and magic replace evidence and science, you get to a place where you don't want to be. 
You get to Thabo Mbeki in South Africa. 
He killed 400,000 of his people because he insisted that red beet, garlic and lemon oil are much more effective than antiretroviral drugs that we know can slow down the course of AIDS. 
Hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths in a country that's worse than any other being plagued by this disease, 
please don't tell me that these things have no consequences. They 
have them. They always have them. 
Now, the most brainless epidemic we're in is this absurd battle between the advocates of genetically modified food and the bio-elite. This 
is an idiotic debate. It has to stop. 
It's a debate about words, about metaphors. 
This is ideology, not science. 
All we eat, every grain of rice, every branch of parsley, every sprout of roses, was changed by people. 
You know, there were no mandarins in paradise, there were no 
cantalope melons, there were no Christmas trees. We did all of this. 
We did it in the last 11,000 years, 
and some of it worked, and some of it didn't work. 
We got rid of what didn't work. 
Now we can do it more precisely, and of course there are risks, but we can do something like vitamin A in rice, and the stuff can help millions of people to prolong their lives. 
They don't want to do that. 
I have to say that I'm not going 
to do that. 
Why are we doing that? 
Now, I'm hearing too many chemicals, pesticides, hormones, monoculture. We don't want companies to patent lives. 
We don't 
want companies to own seeds. 
And you know what my answer to all of this is? 
Yes, you're right. Let's fix it. 
It's true. We have a huge food problem, but that's not science. 
It's not science. 
It's quite moral. Patented. 
You know, it's 
not a country. 
It's not even an idea. It's a process. 
It's a process. And sometimes it works. And sometimes it doesn't allow science to do its work. Because we're afraid, it's a real impasse. And it keeps millions of people off blooming. 
You know, over the next 50 years, we're going to have to grow 70 percent more food than we're currently doing 70 percent. 
This investment in Africa over the last 30 years, 
shamefully shameful, 
they need it. And we don't give it to them. 
And why genetically modified food? 
We don't want to encourage you to eat the rotten stuff, like manioc. Manioc is 
something that half a billion people eat. 
It's like a potato. 
It's just a bundle of calories. It's sucked. 
It doesn't have protein. And scientists are building all of this in there. 
And then people would eat it, and they wouldn't get starved. And 
you know what 
that would be? It wouldn't be panisse. 
And all I can say is, why are we fighting this? 
I mean, why are we fighting this? 
Because we don't want to push around the 
genes. It's not about pushing chemicals. 
It's not about our ridiculous passion for hormones, our insistence on bigger food, better food, unique food. 
It's not about Rice Krispies. It's about keeping people alive. And it's high time we understood what that means. 
Because, you know, what 
if we don't do this? If we carry on doing the same thing as we do, we're guilty of what we don't want to be guilty of. High-tech colonialism. 
There's no other description of what's happening here. 
It's selfish. It's ugly. It's not worthy of us. And we really need to stop that. 
So after this incredibly fun conversation, you might want to say, "Do you still want to go to this ridiculous time machine and to the 
future? In any case, I want 
to. " At the moment, it's in the present. But we have an incredible opportunity. 
We can put this time machine on everything we want. 
We can move it where we want to move it. And we will move it where we want to go. 
We need to have these conversations, and we need to think. But when we get to the time machine and go into the future, we'll be happy to have done that. 
I know we can do it. And as far as I'm concerned, this is something that the world needs now. 
Thank you. 
Thank you. When Steve Lopez, a columnist at the Los Angeles Times, walked through the streets of the center of Los Angeles one of the wonderful music. 
She came from a man, an African-American sympathiser, homeless, playing on a violin that only had two strings 
left. Many of you will know the story, because Steve's article about it later became a book that was filmed with Robert Downey junior, when Steve Lopez and Jamie Foxx were Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, the constant who studied at the Juilliard Conservatory, and whose promising career was tragically ended early in his paranoid schizophrenia. 
Nathaniel left Juilliard, suffered a nervous breakdown, and 30 years later he lived as homeless on the streets of Skid Row in the center of Los Angeles. 
I recommend you all read Steve's book, or watch the movie, so that you understand not only the wonderful connection that emerged between these two men, but also how the music helped to make that connection, and how it eventually became the instrument, if this pun is allowed, that helped Nathaniel get away from the street. 
I met Mr. Ayers two years ago in 2008 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. 
He had just heard a performance of Beethoven's first and fourth symphony, and came back behind the stage to imagine me. 
He spoke in a very Laughter and social note about Yo-Yo, Ma and Hillary Clinton, and about how the Dodgers would never make it to the baseball world series, all because of the treacherous passage of the first violin in the last sentence of Beethoven's fourth symphony. 
We came up to talk about music, and a few days later I got an email saying that Nathaniel was interested in teaching violins at me. 
I have to say that Nathaniel refused to treat medically, because he had already been treated with electric shocks and thoracic and handcuffs, a trauma that has haunted him all his life. 
As a result, he is now particularly vulnerable to these schizophrenic phases. These are sometimes so bad that they threaten to tear him up, and he disappears for days, walks around the streets of Skills, always exposed to this horror and torture of his own mind. 
And in exactly the same irritating phase, Nathaniel started when we started our first class at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. He was a very lost eye, 
talking about invisible demons and smoke, and about how someone wanted to poison him in sleep. 
I was afraid, not for my own sake, but for my own sake, that I could lose him, that he could sink into one of his states, and that I could destroy his relationship with the violin. When I started talking about scales and Arpeggios and other exciting forms of teaching violin education, 
I just started playing. 
I played the first sentence of Beethoven's violin concert. 
And while I was playing, I noticed that in Nathaniel's eyes, there was a complete change. 
It was like he was under the influence of an invisible medicine, a chemical reaction whose catalyst was my game. 
Nathaniel's manic anger turned into understanding, into a quiet curiosity and grace. 
And like a miracle, he took his violin and started to listen, and some excerpts from violin concerts, and then asked me to finish playing it. Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, 
we started talking about music, from Bach to Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner and all the other BSs, from Bartók to ESA, Pekka Salonen, and 
I realized that he had not only an encyclopedic knowledge of music, but also connected it to a close personal relationship with it. 
He talked about it with a passion and an understanding that I otherwise know only from my colleagues in the Philharmonic of Los 
Angeles. By playing music and talking about music, this paranoid, confused man who had just moved through the streets of Los Angeles had become a loving, educated, excellent, Juilliard-trained musician. 
Music is medicine. Music changes us. 
For Nathaniel, music means mental 
health, because music allows him to transform his thoughts and delusions into something real through his imagination and creativity, and so 
he escapes his agonizing state. 
I understood that this is exactly the essence of art. 
This is precisely why we make music so that we can shape something that is deep inside us all, our emotions through our artistic lens, through our creativity to reality, and 
the reality of that expression reaches us all and moves us all, inspiring us and uniting us. 
What Nathaniel did, the music brought him back to a community of friends. 
The redeeming power of music brought him back to a family of musicians who understood him, recognized him and respected him, 
and I will play with Nathaniel again and again, whether in the Walt Disney Concert Hall or in Skid Row, because he reminds me why I have become musicians. 
Thank you very much, 
Bruno Giussani. Thank you very 
much, thank you, 
Robert Gupta. I want to play something that I have shamelessly stolen from cellists. 
I hope you forgive me. 
I'm Jane McGonigal. I've been designing computer games. 
I've been online games online for the next decade, and it's just as easy to save the world in reality as to save it in online games. 
I have a plan for doing this. I want to convince more people, including all of them, to spend more time playing bigger and more amazing games. 
At the moment, we spend 3 billion hours a week playing online games. 
Some of you may think this is a lot of time for games, maybe a 
little bit too much time, given how many problems we urgently have to solve in the real world. 
But in fact, according to my research at the Institute for the Future, the exact opposite is true. 
Three billion hours a week are not nearly enough to solve the most pressing problems in the world. 
In fact, I'm convinced that if we want to survive the next century on this planet, we need to dramatically increase this time. I 
calculated that the time needed is 21 billion hours a week. 
This may seem a little absurd first, so I repeat it so that it can work. If we want to solve problems like hunger, poverty, climate change, global conflicts and obesity, I think we need to try to play games online for at least 21 billion hours a week by the end of the next decade. 
No, I really mean, seriously. 
Why? 
This picture describes quite precisely why I think games are so essential to the survival of the human species in the future. Seriously. 
This is a portrait of photographer Phil Toledano. 
He wanted to capture the emotions of playing. So he built a camera before the players. This is one of the 
classic expressions of playing. If you are 
not a player, you may miss some of the nuances in this picture. 
You probably see this sense of urgency, a little fear, but also extreme concentration, deep into solving a really difficult problem. 
If you also watch playing, you see some nuances here. The eyes drawn up up there and the mouth are a sign of optimism. The eyebrows show surprise. 
This is a player standing on the edge of a so-called epic victory. 
Oh, you know that. 
OK, prima. So we have some players here. 
An epic victory is a result that is so very positive that you didn't even know it was possible at all. 
It was almost beyond imagination. And if you get there, you're shocked that you're actually capable of 
something like this. This is an epic victory. 
This player is on the verge of an epic victory. 
And this is what we need to see on millions of faces of problem solvers around the world when we tackle the hurdles of the next century, the face of those who stand on the edge of an epic victory, 
against all odds. Well, unfortunately, we're looking at this face in real life when we face difficult problems. 
I call it "I'm bad at life." Face. And 
it's actually my face. Look, yes. OK, this is me. 
Like me, this is in life. I'm bad at face. 
This is a graffiti in my former home country, Berkeley, California, where I studied in my Ph.D. why we're better at games than we are in real life. 
This is a problem that many players have. 
We think that we're not as good at reality as we are at games. And 
I mean not only less successful, though that's part of it. 
We're getting more in the game worlds. 
I mean, well connected to motivation to do something meaningful. Inspired to work together. If 
we're in a game world, I think many of us are turning into our best version, ready and immediate, helpful at all times, trying to solve the problem as long as it takes, trying to try again after the failure, and 
in reality, when we fail, when we encounter obstacles, we often feel different. 
We feel overwhelmed. We feel defeated. We feel threatened. We may feel threatened. Frustrated. Or cynical. 
We never have these feelings. If we play games in games, there's just no one in play. 
And that's what I wanted to study as a Ph.D. student. 
Why is it impossible in games to think you couldn't just achieve everything? 
How can we translate these emotions from games into reality? 
So I looked at games like World of Warcraft, which provides the ideal environment for community 
problem solving. And I've noticed some things that make epic victories in online worlds 
possible. So first, when you go into one of these online games, especially at World of Warcraft, there's a lot of different characters who are willing to entrust you with a world-saving mission, and immediately, 
but not just any mission, but a mission that fits perfectly into your current level of play. 
Right? So you can do that. 
You never get a task that you can't solve, 
but always on the edge of your abilities. So you have to make an effort. 
But there's no unemployment in World of Warcraft. You're not sitting around and rolling little bits. There's always something very specific about doing something important, and 
there's lots of staff 
where you go. Hundreds of thousands of people working with you to complete your epic mission. 
We don't have that easy in real life. This feeling that with a pinch of staff, there are piles of staff 
ready. There's also this epic story, this inspiring story. Why we're there and what we have to do? Then we get all this positive feedback. 
You've certainly heard of level-to-level and 1-power, or 1-power. This 
constant feedback is not there in real life. 
When I leave this stage, I don't have 1-speak and 1-crazy idea, 20-crazy idea. 
I don't get that feedback in real life. 
So the problem with the online worlds like World of Warcraft is that it's so satisfying to be standing on the edge of an epic victory that we prefer to spend all our time in those game worlds. 
They're just better than reality. 
To date, all the World of Warcraft players have spent 5.93 million years solving the virtual problems of Azeroth. 
This is not necessarily a bad thing. 
It may sound bad, but 
to see it in context, 5.93 million years ago, our first primate ancestors started walking up. 
The first upright primate, so OK. 
So when we talk about how much time we spend with games at the moment, it just makes sense. When do you think about the time in terms of the scale of human development, which is extraordinary, but 
also appropriate, because it turns out that by using all this time playing, we actually change what we as humans are 
able to do. We develop into community-minded, warm creatures. 
This is the truth. I think you're 
looking at this interesting statistic that was published recently by a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. The average young person today in a country with a strong playing culture spends 10,000 hours playing online until the age of 21, 
so 10,000 hours is a very interesting number for two reasons. 
First, for children in the United States, 10,080 hours are the exact total time they spend in school, from grade five to high school completion. So if you never miss, 
we have a complete parallel education path where young people learn the same thing as they do to be a good player as anything else they learn in school. 
And maybe some of you have read the new book by Malcolm Gladwell overflying. So you know his theory of success, the theory of success, the 10,000 hours. 
It's based on the great research of cognitive science that if we spend 10,000 hours studying any topic until the age of 21, we will be able to master it. 
We will be so good at doing whatever the most important people in the world 
do. So what we have here is a whole generation of young people who are masters. Players 
are the big question. So what exactly are players mastery? Well, because 
if we could figure out this, we would have virtually unprecedented human potential available before. So 
many people in the world currently spend at least an hour a day playing online. 
These are our masters players. 500 million people who are exceptionally good at something. 
And in the next decade, we have another billion players who are exceptionally good at whatever they have 
not heard. 
The games industry is developing consoles that save energy and work on mobile networks, instead of broadband Internet, so that players around the world, especially in India, China, Brazil, can play online. 
You expect an additional billion players in the next decade. 
So we have 1.5 billion players in total. 
So I started thinking about what it is, what these games are going to do. 
Here are the four things I found. First, urgency, optimism. 
OK, imagine how extreme self-motivation, 
urgency, optimism is the desire to do something immediately, to overcome a hurdle, together with the belief that we have a reasonable hope of success. 
Players always believe that an epic victory is possible and that it is always worth trying. Players are not 
sitting around. 
Players are masters in spiders, poets, social networks. 
There are a lot of interesting studies that show that we people like more after we played with them, even if they beat us wrong. 
The reason for this is that it requires a lot of trust to play a game with someone. 
We trust that someone spends time with us, that the rules are adhered to, that we have the same goal and stay there until they play. 
So the interaction allows the growth of bonds, trust and mutual trust. As 
a result, we build stronger social relationships. Happiness productivity, fantastic. 

You know, there is a reason why the average word of Warcraft plays 22 hours a week, as part-time jobs, so to speak. 
The reason is that when we play, we are actually happier working hard than when we relax or do nothing. 
We know that we work optimally as human beings when we do hard, important work, and 
players are always ready to work hard when they get the right job. 
And ultimately, epic meaning. 
Players love to become part of honorful missions of planetary proportions. Here's 
a background information to put that in perspective. You probably know all Wikipedia, the world's largest wiki, the world's 
second largest wiki. With almost 80,000 entries, the World of Warcraft is Wiki. 
Five million people use it every month. 
They've gathered more information about World of Warcraft on the Internet than any other topic in any other wiki in the world. 
They create an epic story. 
They create an epic source of knowledge about the World of Warcraft. 
OK, so these are four superpowers that lead to a single result. Players are super powerful, hopeful individuals. 
They are people who believe that they can change the world as individuals. 
And the only problem is they believe they can change the virtual worlds, but not the real ones. 
This is the problem I'm trying to solve. 
Edward Castronova is a folk scientist. 
His work is brilliant. 
He's studying why people spend so much time, energy and money in online worlds. 
And he says, "We're witnessing no less than mass emigration in virtual worlds and online game environments." 
And this from an economist. So he's logical. 
And he doesn't say, "I'm developing games. I'm a little bit exuberant." He 
says, "In fact, players can do more in real life than they do in real life. 
They can make more feedback and rewards in games than in real life. 
"So he says," It's perfectly logical right now that players spend more time in the virtual world than they do in real ones. 
I agree, first of all, that's logical, but it's 
definitely not optimal. 
We need to start turning the real world into a game. 
"My inspiration comes from an event that's been going on 
for over a few years. You know, before these 
fantastic games controllers, there were ankles, and 
these were the first, sort of, human-developed play tools. And if you're familiar with the works of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, you may know this story, the story about how and why games were invented. 
According to Herodotus, games, more accurate, play cubes in the Kingdom of Lydia, were invented during a famine. 
There was supposedly such a great famine that the King of Lydia decided to go crazy. 
People suffered. People fought. 
It was an extreme situation. You need an extreme solution. 
So, according to Herodotus, they invented the game of the cube and agreed a national strategy. On one day, you would eat. The next day, you would play. 
And they would be so deeply embedded in the game of the cube, because games are so fascinating and surround us with satisfying, happy productivity that they would forget that there was nothing to eat. 
And then the next day, you would play. And the next day, you would eat. 
And Herodotus survived. For 18 years, this famine, eating and playing on one day, 
is exactly what I think we are setting up today. 
We are playing games to escape the suffering of the real world. We are playing games to escape everything that is not working in the real world, everything that is not satisfying in real life. And we are catching up with what we need from the games. 
But that does not have to be the end. 
This is the exciting 
thing. Herodotus was not getting better after years of famine. So the King had to put on two halves. 
They played a game of cubes, 
and the winners were allowed to go on an epic adventure. 
They left Libya and went out to find a new home. They were leaving as many people back as there was food to survive, and they were looking for the rest for an area where they could thrive. 
That sounds crazy, or 
yet the latest DNA evidence shows that the etrusians who later formed the Roman Empire have the same DNA as the old lydians. 
So scientists recently came to the view that Herodotus' crazy story is actually true, 
and geologists found evidence of global cooling that took almost 20 years to explain the famine. 
So this crazy story could be true. 
Maybe they actually saved their people by playing games by fleeing into games for 18 years, and then having this inspiration and learning so much about playing with each other that they saved the whole civilization. So 
we can also play 
"We Play" since 1994. 
Warcraft: This was the first real-time strategy game in the World of Warcraft series. 
It was 16 years ago. 
We play game cubes for 16 years. Warcraft: 
I claim we are ready for our own epic game. 
So they sent half of their civilization to look for a new world. So I'm going to show you how 
half of us spend an hour a day playing games until we've solved the problems 
of the real world. I know you're going to ask, how do we solve the problems of the 
real world in games? And I've dedicated my work to this in recent years at 
our office in Palo Alto. It's like, "How do we understand the future?" 
We don't want to try to tell the future beforehand. 
What we want to do is create the best 
possible result, and then empower people to put that idea into reality. 
We imagine epic victories and give people the opportunity to achieve them. 
I'm going to show you very briefly three games that I designed to try to give people epic victories in their own future. 
This is a world without 
oil. The game is 2007; 
it's an online game where they have to overcome an oil shortage. 
The oil shortage is invented, but we have enough online content to make it realistic for them and actually live their real life without oil. So when you join the game, tell us where you live, and then you get messages, movies in real time, showing you how much oil costs, what doesn't exist, how food supplies are affected, 
how transportation is affected, whether schools are closed, whether there are riots, and you have to figure out how you design your real life if it was true. And we ask you to blog about it, hire videos or photos. 
We tested this game with 1,700 players in 2007, and we've been monitoring it for the last three years since then. 
And I can tell you it was a changing experience. 
Nobody wants to change their lives because it's good for the environment, or because we should. 
But if you're in an epic adventure and you're told, "We're running out of oil." 
This is a fascinating adventure that you're going to go through. 
Find out how you would survive. Most of our players have kept the habits that we've learned in the game. 
So we've set ourselves a bigger, higher goal for the next world-saving game than just oil scarcity. 
We've developed the game Superstruct at the Institute for the Future. 
The starting point is to calculate a supercomputer that people have only 23 years left on the planet. 
This supercomputer is called the Global Extinction Awareness Awareness Awareness System. 
Of course, we've almost made a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. 
You know Jerry Bruckheimer movies where there's the Energy, Food, Health, Safety and Social Justice Future. 8,000 players played the 

game for eight weeks. 
They found 500 incredibly creative solutions that they can read. If you Google Superstruct and bring 
the last game, we'll figure out on March 3. It's a game in collaboration with the World Bank. 
If you finish the game, you get the Social Reshapers Award from the World Bank. 2010: We're working 
with universities across sub-Saharan Africa and we're inviting them to learn social reshape. 
We've got a comic about this. We've got levels for regional understanding, knowledge networking, sustainability, vision and ingenuity. 
I want to invite you all to share this game with young people around the world, especially in development areas that benefit from joining together to imagine their own social ventures to save the world. 
I'm coming to the end. 
I want to ask you something. 
What do you think happens next? 
We have all these fantastic players. We have games that show us what we can do, but we haven't saved the real world yet. 
Well, I hope you agree with me that players are human resources that we can use to work in real life, and that games have a great meaning for change. 
We have all these superpowers: blissful productivity, the ability to build close social networks, urgency, optimism and the desire for epic meaning. 
I really hope that we will play important games together to survive another century on this planet, and I hope 
you will design and play with me like this. 
If I look forward to the next decade, I'm sure on two things: that we can create any imaginable future, and that we can play all sorts of games. So I say, let the world-changing games begin. 
Thank you. 
For some time now, I've been interested in the placebo effect. It may seem strange that a magician is interested in it, unless you look at it as a deception that becomes something real. If someone believes only firmly enough in it, in 
other words, sugar pills have had a measurable effect in some studies, the placebo effect, just because the person thinks what's going on with it is a pharmaceutical, or a kind of pain management. For example, if the patient believes only firmly enough in it, there's a measurable effect in the body that you call the placebo effect. 
A deception becomes something real, because someone perceives it that way. 
So that we understand each other, I'd like to show you a fundamental, simple magic trick, 
and I'm going to show you how it works. This is a trick that's been in every magic book for children since the 1950s at least. 
I myself learned it from Cub Scout Magic, the Scout Scout Path in the 1970s. 
I'm going to do it for you and then explain it, 
and then I'm going to explain why I explain it. 
So, see what happens? 
The knife you can study. My hand, you can study. 
I'm just going to hold the knife in my fist. I'm going 
to push my sleeve back, 
and to make sure that nothing disappears or comes out of my sleeve, I'm just going to squeeze my wrist right here. 
In this way, you can see that at no point anything moves as long as I can turn on this, move on or come out of my sleeve, 
and the goal is very simple. 
I'm going to open my hand, and hopefully, if everything goes well, the knife is held by my naked physical 
magnetism. It's actually so stuck in its place that I can shake it without the knife falling down. Nothing walks 
in my sleeve or comes out, no tricks, and you can investigate everything. 
TA: 
Well, this is a trick I often teach small kids who are interested in magic, because you can learn a lot about deception when you look at it, even though it's a very simple trick to 
do. I suppose many of you in this room know this trick. 
It works as follows: 
I hold the knife in my hand. 
I say I'm going to wrap my wrist to make sure that nothing disappears or comes out in my sleeve. And that's a lie. 
The reason I hold my wrist is because it's the real secret of the illusion. 
The moment I turn my hand away from you to see it from behind, this finger here moves my finger just from where it was, into a position where it was stretched 
out. Great 
trick. There's someone who didn't have a childhood sitting there. 
So he's right here. 
And if I turn around, the finger changes its position. 
And now you could talk about why this is a deception, why you don't realize that there are only three fingers down here, because the mind and the way it processes information doesn't count them individually. One, two, three, but you see them as a group. 
But that's really not what this is about. And then I open my hand. Of 
course, it's held there, but not by the magnetism of my body, but by a trick, by my finger now there. 
And if I close my hand, the same thing happens. By turning back, this movement conceals the fact that the finger moves back. 
I take this hand away. And here's the knife. This 
trick you can do to your friends and neighbors. Thank you. 
Now, what does this have to do with the placebo effect? 
A year ago, or something, I read a study that really blew me up. 
I'm not a doctor or a researcher, and so for me, this was an amazing thing. 
It turns out that if you offer a placebo in the form of a white pill, in the form of an aspirin tablet, it's just a round white pill that has a certain measurable effect. 
But if you change the shape in which you give the placebo, for example, into a smaller pill, coloring it blue and mincing a letter on it, it's actually measurable, more effective. 
And even though none of these are any pharmaceuticals, they're just sugar pills. 
But a white pill is not as good as a blue pill. 
What that really made me freak 
out? But it turns out that this isn't all. 
If you take capsules, they're even more effective than pills. Each shape, a 
black capsule that's yellow at one end and red at the other end, is better than a white capsule. 
The dosage also matters. A pill, 
twice a day, is not as good as three pills. I can't remember the exact statistics now. I'm 
sorry, the crucial thing is that 
the dosage also matters, and 
the shape plays a role. 
And if you want to have the ultimate placebo effect, you have to reach the needle. 
Right? A syringe with an ineffective, a few millilitres of an ineffective substance that you inject into a patient. This 
creates a very strong image in your mind. This is much stronger than a white pill. 
This graph is really. I'm going to show you another time when we have a 
projector. So the fact is that the white pill doesn't work as well as the blue pill that doesn't work as well as a capsule that doesn't work as well as the needle. 
And none of this has any really pharmaceutical property. It's just our belief in it that produces a stronger effect in us. 
I wanted to know if I could use this idea for a magic trick. 
I take something that is obviously a deception and I'll let it look real. 
We know from that study that you have to grab the needle if you want to go to the point. 
This is an 18-centimeter hat needle. It's very, very sharp, and I'll start by sterilizing it a little bit. 
This is really my meat. It's not Damian's special-bred meat. 
This is my skin. This is not a special effect from Hollywood. 
I'm going to stick this needle in my skin and drive it through it until it leaves on the other side, 
if you get wrong, if you get easily powerless. I showed this to some friends last night in the hotel room, and some people I didn't know, and a woman has almost become powerless. 
So I suggest, if you get sick quickly, look away for the next 30 seconds, or you know what? I'm going to do the first tricky part here. You 
can see it right away. But you can look away if you want. So 
it's going to be so accurate here where my meat starts. On the bottom of my arm, I'm just going to make a little bit 
of a bit of a bit of a 
bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit 
of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a 
bit of 
a bit of a bit of a bit of a 
bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit 
of a 
bit of a bit of a bit of a 
bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of 
a bit of a bit of a bit of 
a bit of a bit of a 
bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit 
of a bit of a bit of a bit of a 
bit of a bit of a bit of a 
bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a 
bit of a bit of a bit of a 
bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit 
of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of that — that's a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit 
of a bit of a bit of a bit 
of a bit of 
a bit of a bit of that. And 
that's a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of 
a bit of a deception, and that's a bit of a real thing that I'm going to leave in the needle and go out of the stage. 
And we're going to meet a couple of times in the next few days. 
I hope you're looking forward to that. Thank you very much. 
So I've known a lot of fish in my life. 
I just loved two of 
them. This first one was more like a passionate affair. 
It was a beautiful fish, delicious, good texture, rich, a bestseller on the menu. 
What better for 
a fish? It was bred in aquaculture, according to the supposedly highest standards of sustainability. 
So you could probably feel like selling it. 
I had a relationship with this beauty for several months. 
One day, the CEO of the company called and asked if I could talk at an event about the sustainability of 
the farm. Of course, I said, 
"Here was a company that was trying to solve what this unimaginable problem has become for our cooks." How do we keep fish on our menus? 
Over the last 50 years, we have fished the seas, like we have cut forests bare. 
It's hard to overstate the destruction. 
Ninety percent of the big fish we love, the tunas, the halibuts, the salmon, the swordfish, they've collapsed. 
There's almost nothing left left. 
So aquaculture, aquaculture, fish farming, is going to be part of our future. 
Many arguments against fish farms pollute the environment. Most of them, anyway, and they're inefficient. Consider tuna, a big disadvantage. 
It has a feed recycling rate of 15 percent. One, 
that means 15 pounds of wild fish are needed to get a pound of farmed tuna. 
Not very sustainable. 
Not very good. 
So here was finally a company trying to get it right. 
I wanted to support them. 
On the day before the event, I called the head of the public relations work for the company. 
Let's call it Don Don. 
Don said, "I just want to get it right. You're famous for growing out in the sea so you don't pollute. 
That's how far out there the waste is being distributed from our fish, not concentrated." 
And then he added, "We're basically a world of our 
own." This 2.5 to 1 protein said, 
"The best in the industry." 
2.5 to one. Great. 
2.5 to one. What are you feeding? 
Sustainable proteins said, "He 
said," Great. "I put up, and 
that evening I was lying in bed thinking, "What the hell is a sustainable protein?" 
So I called up the next day just before Don. 
I said, "Don, what are sustainable proteins?" 
He said, "You don't know, you're going to ask for 
a proper answer until I finally telephoned the senior biologist." Let's also call 
him, "Don Don said," 
"I'm going to say, "What are sustainable proteins?" 
Well, he mentioned some algae and some fishmeal, and then he said, "She said," 
chicken, pellets. 
He said, "Yes, skin, bonemeal, dried, processed into feed." 
I said, "How much percentage of your feed is chicken?" 
assuming maybe two percent. 
Now, that's about 30 percent," he said. 
Don't you know, there 
was a long break in the pipeline, and he said, "There's just too many chickens in the world." 
I borrowed from this fish, 
"No, not because I'm a self-righteous eater and a 
good man. I'm 
even no. "I actually borrowed from this fish because I swear to God that tasted fish after this conversation, after chicken. 
This second fish, this is another kind of love story. 
It's the romantic way you learn the better you know your fish, the more you love the fish, the more 
I love it first in a restaurant in southern Spain. 
A friend of mine had long talked about this fish. It sort 
of domed it up. 
It came on the table with a bright, almost glimmering white color. 
The cook had cooked it. 
Stop. 
Amazingly, it was still delicious. 
Who can let a fish taste so good after it's boiled? 
I can't. But this guy can 
call it "We" Miguel. In fact, he's called Miguel. 
And he didn't cook the fish, and he's not a cook, at least in the way you and I understand it. 
He's a biologist at Veta La Palma. 
This is a fish rearing in the southwest corner of Spain. 

Until the 1980s, the farm was in the hands of Argentineans. 
They raised beef cattle on what were basically wetlands. 
They did this by draining the land. 
They built this complicated sequence of canals, and they pushed water out of the land and out into the river. 
Now, they couldn't make that work. It wasn't 
economic and environmental. It was a disaster. 
It killed about 90 percent of birds, which is a lot of birds in this place. 
And so in 1982, a Spanish company with environmental awareness bought the land. 
What did they do? 
They reversed the river of water. 
They literally shifted the levers. 
Instead of pushing the water out, they used the canals to bring the water back in. 
They flooded the canals. 
They raised 11,000 hectares of fish, bushy seabases, shrimps, eels. And Miguel and his company completely reversed the ecological destruction. 
The farm is incredible. 
They've never seen it. They're on 
the edge of a mile away, and everything they see is flooded canals. And 
I was there not long ago with Miguel. 
He's an incredible guy. Three parts: Charles Darwin and one part: a crocodile 
kissing. Okay, there we were, and we fought through the wetlands. I'm sweating. I'm holding a biology lecture 
here. Here he highlights a rare glidear. Now 
he mentions the mineral needs of phytoplankton. 
And here he sees a pattern of bundles that remind him of the Tanzanian giraffe. 
It turns out Miguel spent most of his career in the Micumi National Park in Africa. 
I asked him how he became a fish expert. 
He said, "Fish, I don't know about fish. 
And then he goes down 
and falls into more talk of rare birds and algae and strange water plants." 
And don't get me wrong. This was really fascinating. You know, the biotic community unplugged, it's 
great, but I was in love, 
and my head got weak about this boiling piece of delicious fish that I had on the eve of. 
So I broke it. I said, "Well, how does it taste that good?" 
He pointed out algae. 
I know young, the algae of phytoplankton, the relationships. That's 
what your fish eat. 
What it does is it 
goes on to tell me that it's such a rich system that the fish eat what they would eat in the wild, 
the plant biomass, the phytoplankton, the zooplankton. That's what the fish feed. 
The system is so healthy. It's completely self-renewing. 
There's no food. 
Each farm owned by a farm that doesn't feed it. 
Later on the day, I drove around on this site with Miguel, and I asked him, "I said for a place that seems so natural, unlike any farm I'd ever been on, how do you measure success?" 
And then it was like a movie director had asked for a change of 
stage, and we were turning around the corner, and we were offered the most incredible sight, thousands and thousands of pink flamingos, literally a pink carpet as far as the eye reaches. 
"This is success," he said, 
"Look at your bellies. Pink. 
They smash. 
Shut. I was completely confused. 
I said, "Miguel. Don't do your fish?" 





He 
said, "We're building extensively, not intensively." 
This is an ecological network 
that eats flamingos, shrimps, shrimps, 
phytoplankton. 
So the pinker your belly, the better the system. 
Okay. Let's rethink this. A farm that doesn't feed your animals. And a farm that measures your success in your predators' health. 
A fish farm, but also a bird reserve. 
Oh. And by the way, these flamingos should not even be there. 
They breed in a city 240 kilometers away, where the soil is better for nesting. 
Every morning, they fly 240 kilometers to the farm, 
and every night they fly 240 kilometers back. 
They do this because they can follow the white line cut off on 
the A92 highway. Seriously, 
I had imagined a kind of journey of penguins, so I looked at Miguel. 
I said, "Miguel, fly 240 kilometers to the farm, and then fly 240 kilometers back." In the 
evening, they do this for the kids. 
He looked at me as if I had just quoted a song from Whitney Houston. 
He said, "No, they do this because the food is better." 
I didn't mention the skin of my beloved fish, which was delicious, and I don't like any skin of fish. I don't like it. I don't like it. I don't like it. I can't crunch it. 
It's this biting, charred taste. 
I almost never cook with it. 
And yet, when I tried it in this restaurant in southern Spain, it didn't taste at all like skin of fish. 
It tasted sweet and pure as if you were taking a bite from the ocean. 
I mentioned this to Miguel, and he nodded. 
He said, "The skin looks like a sponge. 
It's the last defense before something enters the body. 
"It evolved in the course of evolution to sow impurities. 
And then he added, "But our water doesn't have impurities. 
Okay, a farm that doesn't feed its fish, a farm that measures its success, the success of its predators. 
"And then I realized, when he says, "A farm that doesn't have impurities undercuts the enormous power." Because the water that flows through this farm comes in from the Guadalquivir River. 
It's a river that carries all the things that rivers tend to carry with them nowadays: chemical pollutants, pesticide runoffs. 
And when it struggled through the system, and it leaves, the water is cleaner than it got in. 
The system is so healthy, cleans up the water. 
So not only a farm that doesn't feed its animals, not just a farm that measures its success in the health of its predators, but a farm that is literally a water purification plant, and not just for these fish, but also for you and me. 
Because when the water flows out, it sinks in the Atlantic, 
a drop in the ocean. But I know I take it, and you should do so, because this love story, however romantic, is also enlightening. 
You could say it's a recipe for the future of good food, whether we're talking about bush or beef cattle. 
What we need now is a radically new concept of agriculture, of what actually tastes good in food. 
But for many people, this is a little too radical. 
We're not realists. We're lovers. 
We love weekly markets. We love small family businesses. We talk about regional food. We eat organic food. 
And if you say that these are the things that assure the future of good food, somebody somewhere says, "Hey, people, I love pink flamingos. But how will you feed the world? 
How will you feed the world? 
"And let me be honest. 
I don't like this question. 
No, not because we're already producing enough calories to feed the world more than just. A 
billion people will starve today. 
A billion. This is more than ever because of gross inequalities in distribution, not total production. 
Now, I don't like this question because it has determined the logic of our food system for the last 50 years. 
Feed grain to herbivores, pesticides to monocultures, chemicals to the earth, chicken to fish. And all the time, the agro-industry simply asked: "If we feed more people cheaper, how horrible can that be?" 
That was the motivation. It was the justification. It was the business plan of American agriculture. 
We should call it what it is: a business in liquidation, a business that quickly eats ecological capital that allows precisely this production. This 
is not a business, and it is not agriculture. 
Our bread basket is under threat today, not because of diminishing inflows, but because of diminishing resources, 
not because of the latest dairy farmers and tractor inventions, but because of fertile land, not through pumps, but through fresh water, not through chainsaws, but through forests, not through fishing boats and nets, but through fish in the sea. 
They want to feed the world. 
Let's start with the question: How do we feed ourselves, 
or better? How can we create conditions that enable every community to feed itself 
to do this? Look at the agri-industrial model for the future. 
It's really old, and it's done. 
Capital, chemistry and machines are up there, and it's never really good at eating. 
Let's look at the ecological model 
instead. This is the one that goes back to two billion years of work experience. 
Look at Miguel. Farmers like Miguel, 
farms that are not worlds for themselves, farms that restore instead of using up, farms that grow extensively, instead of just intensive farmers that are not just producers, but experts in relations, 
because they are the ones that are also experts in taste. 
And if I'm really honest, they're a better chef than I'm ever going to be. 
You know, I'm right, because if this is the future of good food, it's going to be delicious. 
Thank you. 
I grew up with a lot of science fiction. 
In my school, I went to school by bus, every day, an hour per journey, and my 
nose was always in a book, a science fiction book that kidnapped my thoughts into other worlds. And in a narrative way, my deep-seated curiosity filled this curiosity. 
This curiosity also became that whenever I wasn't in school, I was scattered through the forests and collecting samples, frogs and snakes and beetles and pond water, bringing everything home, looking under the microscope, 
I was totally science-minded. You know, 
this was always about trying to understand the world and exploring the limits of what is possible. 
And my love of science fiction seemed to be reflected in my environment, because back in the late '60s, we flew to the moon and explored the deep sea. 
Jacques Cousteau came into our living rooms with his fascinating shows showing us animals and places and a world of wonder that we could never have imagined before. 
That probably fits perfectly into that science fiction role. 
And I was an artist. 
I could draw. I could paint. 
And because there was no video games, nor this over-saturation with computer-generated movies, nor the whole imagery in the media landscape, I had to create the pictures in my head. 
We all had to do that then. When we read a book as children, we took the author's description and projected it onto the screen in our heads. 
My reaction to that was drawing and painting alien alien worlds, robots, spaceships and all that. What 
happened in math teaching was I was constantly caught by the teacher, 
painting behind the textbook. Creativity had to stop somehow, and something 
interesting happened. What fascinated me about Jacques Cousteau's shows was the idea of a world that we were completely unfamiliar with here on our Earth. 
I would certainly never reach an alien world with a spaceship. That seemed pretty unlikely to 
me, but here was a world that I could actually enter, here on Earth, and it was as fascinating and exotic as all I had always imagined when I read these books. 
So when I was 15, I decided to become a diver. The 
only problem was that I lived in a small village in Canada, 1,000 kilometers from the next ocean. 
But I didn't let myself be discouraged from doing so. 
I nervous my father until he finally found a dive school in Buffalo, New York, right across the border, where we lived. 
I made my dive in a pool of the YMCA in the middle of winter in Buffalo, New York, 
but I only saw the ocean a real ocean two years later, when we moved to California. 
Since then, in the 40 years that have passed, I've spent about 3,000 hours underwater, 500 hours of it in submersibles. 
And I've learned that the deep-sea world itself, in the shallower oceans, is as rich in fascinating lives as we really can hardly imagine. 
Nature's imagination knows no boundaries, unlike our own miserable human imagination. 
To this day, I've been deeply reverent for what I see on my dives, and 
my love of the ocean continues at the same intensity as ever. When 
I chose a career as an adult, it was filmmaking. 
That seemed the best way to tell my inner urge stories with my need to create images. 
As a child, I constantly drew comic books, and so on. 
So films were the way to bring together images and stories. That fit 
together. Of course, the stories I chose were science fiction, terminator aliens, and Abyss. In 
Abyss, I could connect my preference for the underwater world and diving with filmmaking. 
So my two passions kind of intertwined. 
Something interesting happened in Abyss to solve a storytelling problem in this movie. And that was, we had to create a kind of liquid water system. We would revert to computer-generated animation. What 
came out of this was the first computer-generated soft surface figure ever seen in a movie. 
The movie didn't bring money. In fact, it just played its production costs, but I noticed something fascinating. The audiences around the world were hypnotized by the magic that came out of 
it. According to Arthur Clarke's law, we know that advanced technology and magic are no 
longer indistinguishable. So they saw something magical, 
and I found that tremendously exciting. 
And I thought, "Wow, this has to be included in filmmaking." So we 
went much further in Terminator 2, my next film. Together 
with ILM, we created the guy of liquid metal there. The success depended on how this effect would arrive, 
and it worked. Again, we had created something magical, and the impact in the audience was the same. But we had already played a little more money with the film. 
From these two experiences, a whole new world was achieved, a whole new world of creativity for filmmakers. So 
I started a company with my good friend Stan Winston, who was the best make-up and creature designer at the time. It was called the Digital Domain. 
The basic idea of this company was to skip the stage of analog processes with optical printers, etc., and start immediately with digital productions. 
We did that, and we gave ourselves a competitive advantage for a while. 
But in the mid-1990s, we realized that we were too slow in moving forward in creature and character design, which we actually created. I had written 
this piece, "Avatar," which was supposed to push the bar across visual effects and computer-generated effects to new heights, with realistic human, expressive characters made by CG. And the main characters were supposed to be all CG. And the world was supposed to be CG. 
But the bar was kind of pushing back. And the people in my company told me that we were not yet able to do that for the time 
being. So I shifted that, and I made this other movie about the big ship that sinks. 
I sold it to the film studio as Romeo and Julia on a ship. It became a love movie of epic proportions, a passionate film. 
In secret, but did I actually want to dive down to the real wreck of the 
Titanic? So I made the film. 
That's the truth. The studio knew that, but 
not. I convinced it, by saying, "We're diving into the wreck. We're filming the real wreck. We're going 
to show it in the opening sequence of the movie. 
"That's tremendously important. It's a good hanger for marketing. 
And I persuaded you to finance an expedition. 
Sounds crazy, but that's all back to the fact that your imagination can create a reality. 
We actually created a reality six months later, where I found myself again in a Russian submersible, four kilometers below the surface of the North Atlantic, and I looked at the real Titanic through a bullouggle. This 
was not a movie, no HD. This was real. 
So that really blew me up. 
And the preparations for this were enormous. We had to build cameras and spotlights and all kinds of things. 
And I noticed how much these deep-sea dives resembled a space mission. 
Well, they were also highly technical, and they needed extensive planning. 
You get into this capsule, you float down into this dark, hostile environment, where there is no hope of saving, if you don't get it back yourself. 
And I thought, "Wow, this is just like I was in a science fiction movie. " 
This is really cool. 
I was really obsessed with deep curiosity and science. It 
was all. It was adventure. It was curiosity. It was imagination. 
And it was an experience that Hollywood couldn't give you, 
because you know, I could imagine a creature for which we could then create a visual effect. But I couldn't imagine what I would see outside the window. 
In some of the subsequent expeditions, I've seen creatures in thermal wells, and sometimes things I've never seen before, sometimes things that no one had ever seen before, and for which science hadn't found words at the time we saw them. 
So that really overturned me. And I wanted more. 
And so I met a little unusual decision. 
After the success of Titanic, I said, "Okay, I want to put my main job as a Hollywood scientist on ice and I'm going to start 
planning these expeditions." 
We dived to Bismarck and we explored them with robotic vehicles. 
We returned to the wreck of the Titanic. 
We took small robots that we had built that would wind down a 
fiberglass. Our intention was to dive into the ship, looking at 
the ship's planks, which are pretty similar to these boards here, and 
I know that once the band was playing there, and I fly through the ship's corridors with 
a small robotic vehicle. I'm actually using it, 
but my consciousness is inside the vehicle. 
It felt like I was physically present inside the ship's wreck of the Titanic. 
This was the most surreal form of déjà vu I've ever experienced, because before I turned around a corner, I always knew what would appear in the light cone of the vehicle, because I had been walking over the movie for months. When we turned the film, 
the set was a precise copy of the ship's blueprints. So this 
was a very strange experience. 
It made me realize this telepresence experience that you can use such robotic avatars and so shift your consciousness into the vehicle into this other form of existence. 
It was really tremendously profound, 
and maybe also a little look at what might happen in a few decades, if you have cyborg bodies to explore something or do other things in all sorts of post-human scenarios for the future that I can imagine as a science fiction fan. 
After these expeditions, we started really to appreciate what we saw down there, like these deep-sea sources, where we saw these incredibly amazing animals. These are sort of aliens, but here on Earth, 
they live with the help of chemosynthesis. 
They don't exist in a sunlight-based system, as we do. 
And so you see animals living right next to a 500-degree- Celsius water cloud. 
And you can't imagine that they can survive there. 
At the same time, I also took a very interest in space science. This was again the science fiction influence of my childhood. 
And so I ended up with people who care about space and who have to do with NASA, and sit in NASA Advisory Council and plan real space missions. They go to Russia, they go through the biomedical protocol before the mission, and all the drum and drum, and then they fly to the international space station and they take our 3D camera systems. 
That was fascinating. 
But in the end, it boiled down to me taking space scientists with us into the deep 
sea. I took them with me and I gave them access to the world down there. Astrobiologists, planet scientists, people who were interested in such extreme situations. I took them with the sources so that they could look around, sample, test instruments and so on. 
We did documentary films, but actually science, more accurately space science. 
So the circle between my existence as a science fiction fan, back then, as a child, and the reality of the process, 
came to a close. I learned a lot about this voyage of discovery. I learned a 
lot about science, but I also learned a lot about leadership. 
Now, you probably think a director must also be able to lead, a leader like a ship captain or something. But 
I didn't understand much about leadership before I embarked on these expeditions, 
because at a certain point I had to say, "What am I doing here?" "Why 
am I doing this?" "What's coming out of it?" 
These stupid movies aren't bringing us money. We're 
just playing the production costs, fame, no trace. Everybody thinks 
I've walked between Titanic and Avatar and I've been bargaining the nails on a towel on a beach. 
I've made all these films, these documentaries, for a very small audience. 
No glory, no honor, no money. What are you doing? 
You're doing it for the sake of task, for the sake of challenge, and the ocean is the most challenging environment that exists. You're doing it for the discovery of mourning and for the strange connection that arises when a small group of people form a team. 
Because we've done all of this with only 10 to 12 people who've worked continuously for years. Sometimes we've been at sea for 2 to 3 months in succession, and 
in this community, you can see that the most important thing is respect that you have for each other, because you've done a task that you can't explain to anyone else 
when you return to land and you say, "We had to do it." The fiber glass, the sound loss, and all around it, the whole technology and the difficulties, the human capacity. If you work at sea, you can't explain it to others. This is like police officers or soldiers who've gone through something together, and they know they can't explain it 
to anybody. There's a connection, mutual respect. 
So when I came back to make my next movie, Avatar, I tried to apply the same leadership style, which is to respect your team and earn your respect in exchange. 
This really changed the dynamics. 
So I was back on a little team on unknown terrain. We turned Avatar with a new technology that didn't exist before. 
Huge exciting. 
A tremendous challenge. 
And we became a real family for a four and a half year. 
And so my way of making films changed 
completely. There were people who thought we had really been doing this ocean creature well and transporting it to the planet Pandora. For 
me, it was more a principled way of doing my job. The real process that has changed as a result. So 
what can we do about all of this? 
What lessons have we learned? I believe 
in the first place is curiosity. 
It's the most powerful human quality. Our 
imagination is a force that can even create a reality. 
And respect for your team is more important than all the laurels of the world. 
To me, young filmmakers who say, "Give me advice on how I can do this." 
And I say, "Don't restrict yourself, get others 
for you. Don't bet yourself, not against yourself, but take risks for you." 
NASA has such a favorite sentence. Failing is not an alternative, 
but in art and exploration, failure must be an alternative, because it guarantees a leap of trust. 
No important undertaking that required innovation has ever been tackled without risk. 
You have to be ready to take such risks. 
That's the idea I'd like to give you with. Failing is a very alternative. Fear is not a thank you. 
If I want to bring you one thing closer, it's that the total of data we consume is bigger than the sum of its parts. And instead of thinking about information overload, I want you to think about how we can use information in such a way that patterns emerge and we can see trends that would otherwise not have been visible. 
So what we're seeing here is a typical death chart by age. 
The program I'm using here is a little experiment. 
It's called pivot. And what I can do with pivot is I can filter after a particular cause of death. Let's say accidents. 
And immediately I see another pattern that emerges, 
and that's because in the middle, here people are the most active, and they're over here, the most frail. 
We can go a step further and reorder the data and see that circulatory diseases and cancer are the usual suspects, but not for everyone. 
Now if we go further and sort out age, we say, "40 years old," or " younger," we see that accidents are even the main cause that people should worry about. 
And who's going on to do research? That's particularly true for men. 
So you're real aware that the reputation of information and data in this way is very reminiscent of swimming in a living information graph. 
And if we can do this for raw data, why not for content itself? What 
we have here are the front pages of every single sports illustration that's ever printed. 
It's all here. It's a good place to 
test it in your rooms. 
With pivot, you can dive into a decade. 
You can dive into a certain year. 
You can jump directly to a specific edition. 
So when I look here, I see the athletes that appear in this edition and the sports. 
I'm an Lance Armstrong fan, so I click here, showing me all the expenses that Lance Armstrong's mention of. 
Now, if I just want to get a bigger overview, I could think, OK, what if I look at everything with the theme of cycling? 
So I'm going back a step and broadening the perspective. 
Now I see Greg Lemond, and 
so you get an idea of, if you zoom in in this way, through information, through targeted, broad zooms, you don't search, or surf, just don't just surf. 
You do something that's actually a little different. 
It's something in between, and we think it changes the way information can be used. 
I want to expand this idea a little bit further with something like what's a little crazy. 
What we've done here is, we've taken every single Wikipedia page and reduced it to a small summary. 
The summary contains a short summary and a symbol of the area from which it comes. 
I'm just going to show the top 500 of the most popular Wikipedia pages, but 
even in this narrow view, we can do a lot of things. 
We get a sense immediately of the issues that are most popular on Wikipedia. 
I'm going to vote on the issue of government. 
Now, after I elected government, I realize that the Wikipedia categories that coincide most with it are time magazines. People of the year. 
This is really important, because this is a realization that is not in a single Wikipedia page. 
This is only to be seen when you go back a step and look at it all, looking 
at one of these summaries, I can go into the issue of time magazines, people of the year, and see all of them 
together. Now, when I look at all of these people, I realize that the majority of them are government officials. Some come from science, some come even less from business. Here's my boss, and one comes from music. 
And interestingly, Bono is also a TED Prize winner. 
So we can jump and look at all the TED Prize winners. 
You can see that we're surfing the web for the first time, as if it's really a web, not just from page to page, but much more abstract. 
And so I want to show you what else a little surprise might be. 
I'm just showing you the New York Times website, pivot, 
this application. I don't want to call it a browser. It's really not a browser, but you can look at websites with it. And we bring this zoom technology to every single website like this. 
So I can take a step back and jump directly to a specific section. 
This is important because just looking at websites in this way can look at the whole web web process in the same way. 
So I can zoom in into my slide, in a certain timeframe. Here's 
the state of the entire demonstration I've been holding up here. 
And I can, so to speak, bring back everything I've been looking at today. 
And when I go out again and look at everything, I can reorder my trajectory, maybe after my search past. Here I've been looking for nepotism, here for Bing, here for Live Labs, pivot. 
And from here I can go into the page and call them up again. 
It's a metaphor that's used time and time again. And every time it does the overall picture, it makes it bigger than the sum of the data. 
Right now in this world, we think that data is a curse. 
We talk about the curse of information abundance. 
We talk about drowning in information. 
What if we could turn this situation around and turn the Internet on its head, so that instead of always going from one to the other, we can start to go from many things to many things, and thereby identify patterns that would otherwise have been hidden? 
If we can do this, then this data trap that has been used may become a new source of meaningful information. 
And instead of just moving into information, we can get knowledge from it. 
And if we know, we can perhaps even learn wisdom from it. 
So I stop. Thank you. 
Everybody talks about happiness today. 
I have let some people count the number of books that have been published with happiness in the title for the last five years. And they gave it up about 40 percent, and there were many more. 
There's a huge wave of interest in happiness among researchers. 
There's a lot of happiness coaching. 
Everybody would like to make people happier. 
But despite all this flood of work, there are several cognitive traps that make it almost impossible, so to speak, to think clearly about happiness. 
And my talk today will mainly be about these cognitive traps. 
This is true for laymen who think about their own happiness. And it's true for scientists who think about happiness, because it turns out that we're as confused as anyone else. 
The first of these traps is a reluctance to admit complexity. 
It turns out that the word "happiness" is simply no longer a useful word, because we apply it to too many different things. 
I think there's a certain meaning that we could restrict it to, but by and large, it's something that we'll have to give up. And we'll have to take the complicated view of what comfort is. 
The second trap is a confusion of experience and memory. Basically, it's between being happy in his life and being happy about his life or happy with his life. 
And these are two very different concepts, and they're both conflated into the notion of happiness. 
And the third is the concentration illusion. And this is the unfortunate fact that we can't think about a circumstance that affects well-being without distorting its meaning. 
I mean, this is a real cognitive trap. 
There's just no way to get it right. 
Now I'd like to start with an example of someone who had a question and answer session after one of my lectures, who reported a story, and [unclear] he said he had heard a symphony. And it was absolutely beautiful music. And at the end of the recording, there was a horrible, scrubbing sound. 
And then he added, "Really, quite emotional. This ruined the whole experience. 
But it didn't. 
"What it ruined was the memories of experience. 
He had had the experience. 
He had had 20 minutes of wonderful music. 
They didn't count because he had stayed with a memory. The memory was ruined. And the memory was all he had got to keep. 
What that really tells us is that we could think about ourselves and about other people in terms of two kinds of self. 
There is an experienced self that lives in the present, and the present is capable of relive the past, but basically only the present 
has. It is the experienced self that the doctor is appealing to. You know, if the doctor asks, "Do it hurt now, if I touch you here?" 
And then there is a remembering self. And the remembering self is that counting. And maintaining the story of our lives. And it's the one that the doctor is raising by asking the question, "How did you feel late?" Or 
"How was your journey to Albania?" or something like that? 
These are two very different units: the experiencing self and the remembering self. And confusing the two is part of the confusion of the term "happiness." 
Now, the remembering self is a storyteller. 
And this really starts with a fundamental response to our memories. It starts immediately. 
We don't just tell stories when we make it. Stories tell 
us stories. What we can keep from our experiences is a story. 
And let me start with an example. 
There's an old study. 
These are real patients who undergo a painful procedure. 
I won't go into detail. It's no longer painful nowadays, but it was painful when this study was done in the 1990s. 
They were asked to report every 60 seconds on their pain. And here 
are two patients. These are their records. 
And they're asked who has suffered more from both of them. 
And this is a very simple question. 
Patient B clearly suffered more. His intestinal level was longer, and every minute of pain that patients had A had patients B and more. 
But now there's another question: How much thought these patients had suffered? 
And here's a surprise. 
And the surprise is that patient A had a much worse intestinal level than patient B. 
The stories of intestinal level were different. And because a very critical part of the story is how it ends. 
And none of these stories is very edifying or great. But one of them is clear. But one of them is much worse than the other. 
And the one that's worse was the one where the pain ended up at its peak. It's a bad story. 
Where do we know this? 
Because we asked these people about their intestinal level. And also much later on, how bad was the whole thing? 
And it was much worse for A than for B in the 
intestinal level. Now, this is a direct conflict between the experienced self and the remembering self. 
From the perspective of the experiencing self, B clearly had a worse time. 
Now, what you could do with patient A. And we actually did clinical experiments. And it was done. And it works. You could actually extend the intestinal level of patient A by just letting the tube inside it without really touching it too much. 
This will cause the patient to suffer, but only a little bit less than before. 
And if you do this for a few minutes, you've caused the experiencing self to be worse off by patient A. And you've caused the remembering self by patient A to be much better off. Because now you've given patient A a better story about his experience. 
What makes a story draw? 
And this is true of the stories that memory provides us with. And it's also true of the stories that we create, which 
make a story distinctive. Reversations, significant moments and end 
ends are very, very important. And in this case, the end has 
now dominated the experience itself, lives its life continuously. 
It has moments of experience one after the other. 
And you ask, what happens to these moments? 
And the answer is really simple. You're lost forever. 
I mean, most moments of our lives. And I've calculated this. You know, the psychological present is considered to be about three seconds. What does you know that in a life, there are about 600 million of them? In a month, there are about 600,000. Most of them don't leave a trace. 
Most of them are completely ignored by the self-serving. They're 
supposed to count, that what happens during these moments of experience is our life. 
It's the limited resource that we use, while we're in this world 
and how we consume it would seem important. But this is not the story that the self-remembering self holds for us. 
So we have the self-remembering self and the self-perceived self, and they're really quite different. 
The biggest difference between them is how to deal with time 
from the perspective of the self-perceived holiday. And then the two-week holiday is twice as good as the one-week holiday. 
This is not how it works at all. For the memory self, 
for the memory self, a two-week holiday is hardly better than the one-week holiday, because there's no new memories added. 
You've not changed the way 
you remember, so time is actually the critical variable that distinguishes a remembering self from an experienced self. Time has very little influence on this story. 


The self-perceived person has no voice in this choice. 
Actually, we don't choose between experiences. We choose between memories of experiences. 
And even if we think about the future, we think about our future, usually not as experiences. 
We think about our future as anticipated memories. 
And basically, you can look at that. You know, as a tyranny of the remembering self, and you can think of the remembering self as one that kind of drags the experiencing self through experiences that the experienced self doesn't need. 
I get the impression that when we go on holiday, it's very often the case. That means we go on holiday largely in the service of the remembering self. 
And that's a little hard to justify. I think 
I mean, how much do we eat from our memories? 
This is one of the explanations given for the dominance of the remembering self. 
And when I think about it, I think of a holiday that we made a few years ago in Antarctica, which was clearly the best holiday I'd ever had. And I think relatively often, in relation to how often I think of other holidays, 
and I've probably been drawn from my memories of these three weeks of journey. I would say, for about 25 minutes, I'd been dragged for the last four years. 
Now, if I had ever opened the folder, with the 600 images in it, I would have spent another hour. 
Now, these are three weeks, and these are at most one and a half hours. 
There seems to be a disagreement. 
Now, I like to be a little extreme. You know, in it, how little appetite I have for the feeding of memories? But even if you do more of it, there's a real question: Why do we give memories so much weight in the cover of the weight we give experiences? 
So I want you to think about an thought experiment. 
Imagine your next holiday. You know that at the end of the holiday, all your pictures are destroyed, and you get an amnestic drug, so you'll remember nothing. 
Now, you would choose the same holiday. And if you chose another holiday, there's a conflict between your two kinds of self, and you need to think about how you decide this conflict. And that's really not obvious at all, because if you think about time, you get an answer. And if you think about memory, you could get another answer. 
Why we choose the vacations we choose is a problem that confronts us with a choice between the two kinds of self. 
Now, the two kinds of self throw two terms of happiness. 
There are actually two concepts of happiness that we can apply. One is pro-self. 
So you can ask, "How happy is the experienced self?" 
And then you would ask, "How happy are the moments in the life of the experienced self?" 
And you're all happiness for moments. A fairly complicated process is a process. 
What are the emotions that can be measured? 
And by the way, we're now able to get a pretty good idea of the happiness of the experienced self over time. 
When you ask about the happiness of the remembering self, it's a very different thing. 
This is not about how happy a person lives. 
It's about how happy or happy the person is when that person thinks about his or her life. 
Very different terms. 
Anyone who doesn't distinguish these terms will screw up the exploration of happiness. And I'm a member of a lot of researchers about well-being who've long screwed up the exploration of happiness. In this very way, the 
distinction between the happiness of the experiencing self and the happiness of the remembering self has been recognized in recent years. And now, you try to measure the two separately. 
The Gallup Organization has asked a global survey that has asked more than half a million people about what they think about their lives and about what they've experienced. And there's been other efforts in the direction. 
So in recent years, we've started learning about the happiness of the two kinds of self. 
And the main lesson that I think we've learned is that they're really different. 
You can know how happy someone is with their lives. And that really doesn't teach you much about how happy they live their lives. And vice versa, 
just to give you a sense of the correlation. The correlation is about five. 
What that means is that if you met someone, and you were told, "Oh, his father is a two-meter man. How much would you know about his size?" 
Well, you would know about his size. But there's a lot of uncertainty. 
You have so much uncertainty. 
When I tell you that someone has put his life on a scale of 10, you have a lot of uncertainty about how happy he is with his experienced self. 
So the correlation is low. 
We know about what determines happiness happiness itself. 
We know that money is very important. Targets are very important. 
We know that happiness means, essentially, to be happy with people we like, to spend time with people we like. 
There are other pleasures, but that's dominant. 
So if you want to maximize happiness between the two kinds of self, you will end up doing very different things. 
The conclusion from what I said here is that we really shouldn't imagine happiness as a substitute for well-being. 
It's a completely different term. 
Now, very briefly, another reason why we can't think clearly about happiness is that we don't pay attention to the same things when we think about life, and when we actually live, 
so when you ask the simple question, how happy people are in California, they won't get the correct answer. 
If you ask that question, you think that people in California need to be happier when they say, "We live in Ohio." 
And what happens is when you think about life in California, you think about the difference between California and other places. And that difference is, say, in climate. 
Well, it turns out that climate isn't very important for the experienced self, and it's not even very important for the thoughtful self to decide how happy people are. 
Now, because the thoughtful self is responsible, you can end up thinking about some people, at the end, moving to California. 
And it's kind of interesting to track what happens to people moving to California in the hope of becoming happier. 
Now, your experience self will not be happier. 
We know that, 
but one thing will happen. You'll think that you're happier, because if you think about it, you'll be reminded of how terrible the weather was in Ohio, and you'll feel that you made the right decision. 
It's very difficult to think clearly about well-being, and I hope I've given you a sense of how difficult it is. 
Thank you, 
Chris Anderson. Thank you. I have a question for you. 
Thank you very much. 
Now, when we talked about the telephone a few weeks ago, you mentioned to me that there was a pretty interesting result that came out of this Gallup survey. 
Is that something you can share with us, because you've got a few minutes left now? 
Daniel Kahneman: Sure. 
I think the most interesting result that we found in the Gallup survey is a number that we had absolutely not expected. 
We found that in terms of the happiness of the experienced person, 
even if we looked at how feelings vary with income. 
And it turns out that under an income of 60,000 dollars a year for Americans, and this is a very large sample of Americans, about 600,000. But it's a large representative sample. Under an income of 600,000 dollars a year, 
about 

60,000 dollars a year, people are unhappy, and they're becoming increasingly unhappy. The poorer they get, 
we'll get an absolutely flat line. 
I mean, I rarely saw such flat lines. 
What happened? Obviously, money doesn't procure an experience with happiness, but lack of money procures one, certainly misery. And we can measure that misery very, very clearly. 
In the sense of the other person, the remembering self, they get a different story. 
The more money you make, the more satisfied you are. 
This is not true of emotions. 
CA: But Danny, in the American endeavor as a whole, it's about life, freedom, the pursuit of happiness. 
If people took that finding seriously, I mean, it seems to upside down everything we believe, for example, in fiscal policy and so on, 
there's a chance that politicians would take the country as a whole, a finding like seriousness, and would make policies based on it. 
DK: You know, I think there's recognition for the role of happiness research in politics. Recognition 
will be slow, in the United States, not a question, but in the United Kingdom, it's happening, and in other countries, it's happening. 
People are recognizing that they should think about happiness when they think about politics. 
It's going to take a while, and people will discuss whether they want to study happiness experience, or whether they want to study life assessment. So we need to have this discussion quite soon. 
How to increase happiness is going to be very different depending on how they think and whether they think of the remembering self, or whether they think of the experiencing self. 
That's going to affect politics. I think in the coming years 
in the United States, you're going to be measuring the experience of happiness among the population. 
That's going to be part of national statistics, I think, in the next decade or two. 
CA: Well, it seems to me that this topic is going to be, or should at least be, the most interesting political debate about tracking over the next few years. 
Thank you very much for the invention of behavioral economics. 
Danny Kahneman: Today 
I'm talking to you about energy and climate, 
and that may surprise you a little bit, because my full-time work at the foundation is mainly about vaccines and seeds, about the things that we need to invent and deliver to make a better life for the poorest 2 billion. 
But energy and climate are extremely important for these people, actually more important than for anyone else on the planet. 
Climate degradation means that their seeds will not grow for many years. It means we will be too much or too little rain. Things will change as their fragile environment cannot withstand. This 
leads to starvation. It leads to insecurity. It leads to unrest. 
So climate change will be terrible for you. 
Moreover, energy prices are very important for you. 
The fact is that if you could only reduce the price by one thing, energy would be by far the most effective in reducing poverty. 
Now, the energy price has fallen over time. 
In fact, the progress society is based on energy progress. 
The coal revolution drove the industrial revolution, and even in the 20th century, there was a rapid fall in electricity prices, and so we have refrigerators, air conditioning. We can make modern materials and do so many things. 
So we are in a wonderful situation with electricity in the rich world. 
But if we reduce the price, we will cut the price by half, we will hit a new barrier, and that barrier is related to CO2. 
CO2 heats the planet, and the carbon equation is actually pretty clear. It adds 
the CO2 emitted, which leads to temperature increases, and that temperature increase has some very negative consequences: effects on the weather, and perhaps worse. The indirect consequence that natural ecosystems cannot adapt to such rapid changes, and thus entire systems collapse. 
Now, the exact correlation between a CO2 increase and the resulting temperature change, and where its further consequences lie, there are some ambiguities, but not very many, 
and there is certainly ambiguity about how bad these consequences will be. But they will be extremely bad. 
I have asked the top scientists several times, "Do we really have to get down to near zero? 
Isn't it enough half or a quarter? 
"The answer is," Until we get close to zero, will the temperature continue to rise? 
So it's a big challenge. 
"It's very different from saying, "We have a three-and-a-half-foot truck that has to be squeezed under a three-foot bridge." 
This is all down to zero. 
"Well, we run a lot of carbon dioxide every year, over 26 billion tons 
of every American, about 20 tons of people from poor countries, less than one. On 
average, it's about five tons for everyone on the planet. 
And somehow we need to make changes that reduce it to zero. 
It's been steadily increasing. Only 
different economic changes have actually affected it. And we need to go from rapid to reduction and to a reduction to zero. 
This equation has four factors: a little bit of multiplication. You have this thing on the left that you want to move to zero. And that will depend on the number of people, on the services that every human being uses on average, the average energy for every service, and the CO2 emitted per unit of energy. 
So let's look at each factor one by one. And let's think about how we get to zero. 
Probably one of these numbers needs to be very close to zero. 
Now, this is basic algebra. But let's go through it. 
First, we have the population. 
Today, 6.8 billion people 
live, and it goes to 9 billion who 
move to 9 billion. If we're very successful with new vaccines, health care and reproductive medicine, we could reduce that by 10 to 15 percent. But at the moment, we see a 1.3 percent increase. 
The second factor is the services that we use. 
This includes everything: the food that we eat, clothing, television, heating. 
These are very good things. And poverty reduction means making these services accessible to almost everyone on the planet. 
It's great that this number is rising. 
In the rich world, in the top billion, we could make cuts and use less. But on average, this number will increase every year, and thus more than double. The number of services that are provided per person. 
Here we see a very basic service. Are there lights at home to read the homework? 
And these students don't have it. So they go out and read their schoolwork under the street light. 
Well, in effectiveness, the E, the energy per service, there's finally good news. 
We have something that doesn't increase because 
of different successes in the light sector, through other car types, through new methods in house building. There are many services that you can drastically reduce your energy. Drastic reductions can be made. 103:00,05:50,000 Gt,00,05:53,000. Some services can be reduced by 90 percent. 
Some services can be reduced by 90 percent. 
In other services, like the production of fertilizers, 105,000,05:56,000 Gt,00,05:58,000, or air or air transport, the room for improvement is much smaller. Overall, 
if we're optimistic, we might get a reduction by a factor of three, or maybe even a factor of six. 
But in the first three, we've gone from 26 billion to maybe 13 billion tons, and that's just not enough. 
So let's look at the fourth factor, and this will be a key factor. That's the amount of CO2 emitted by each unit of energy. 
The question is, can you get that to zero 
if you burn coal? No. 
If you burn natural gas, no. 
Almost every method of production for electricity today emits CO2 except renewables and nuclear energy. So 
what we need to do at a global level is create a new system. 
We need energy miracles. 
Now, if I use the term "miracle," I don't use the impossible. 
The microprocessor is a miracle. The PC is a miracle. 
The Internet and its services is a miracle. 
The people here have contributed to the development of many of these miracles. 
Normally, there are no deadlines for you to need a certain date. 
Usually, you're just wrong, and some people don't. 
But now, 
I wondered, how can I really get this over? 
Is there a natural illustration, a demonstration that sparks the idea of people here? 
I remembered last year when I brought mosquitos, and somehow people liked it. 
The idea really became tangible for them. Do you know that there are people living with mosquitos? 
For energy, I noticed this. 
I decided that releasing fireflies would be my contribution to the environment this year. 
So here are some natural fireflies. 
I've been assured that they're not biting. In fact, they're not even going to leave the glass. 
Well, there's all sorts of gadget solutions like this, but they don't bring much. 
We need solutions either one or more that have unimaginable scale and unimaginable reliability. And although there are many directions where people are looking for them, I really see only five that can do these big things. 
I've left out tidal, geothermal fusion and biofuels. 
They may make a moderate contribution, and if they do better than I expect, it would be great. But my key message here is that we need to work on all of those five, and we can't give up on them because they intimidate, because everybody has significant problems. 
Let's first look at burning fossil fuels, burning either coal or natural gas, 
which you need to do there may just seem easy, but it's not. You need to capture all of the CO2 that comes out of the chimney after it comes out, under pressure, liquefied, and then store somewhere, hoping it stays there. 
There are some pilot projects that will create this at 60-80 levels, but getting it to 100 will be very difficult, and reaching an agreement on storing CO2 is a big challenge, but the biggest problem here is the storage time issue. 
Who will ensure it? Who 
can guarantee something that literally billions of times more than any kind of waste that you can imagine from nuclear and other things? 
That's a lot of volume. 
So this is a hard nut 
next. Nuclear energy, 
also has three big problems. The cost, especially in highly regulated countries, is high. The question of safety, that you really feel that nothing can go wrong, despite the human cooperation, that the fuel is not used for weapons. 
And what do you do with the waste? 
Because, although it's not very big, there's a lot of concern. 
People need to feel good about this. 
184, 00, 10, 20,000 Gt, 00, 10, 25,000, so three very difficult problems that may be soluble, so three very difficult problems that may be soluble, and that you should work on. 
The last three of the five, I've summarized, 
are renewable energy, as they're often called, 
and they've also had, although it's great that they don't need fuel. They have some drawbacks. 
On the one hand, the energy density that these technologies produce is dramatically lower than that of power plants. 
These are energy farms. You're talking about many square kilometers, a thousand times more surface than a normal power plant. 
And also, these sources are subject to interruptions. 
The sun doesn't shine all day. It doesn't shine every day, either. And just as the wind doesn't blow all the time, 
so if you depend on these sources, you have a way to get the energy in times when it's not available. 
So there are big price challenges here. There are challenges in terms of transmission. For example, if we say that the energy source is outside the country, not only do you need the technology, but you also need to deal with the risk that the energy comes from where 
it comes from. And there's the storage problem. 
And to show the dimension, I've looked at all the kinds of batteries that are produced that are for cars, computers, cell phones, flashlights for everything. And I've compared that to the amount of electronic energy that the world uses. I found that all the batteries that we're producing now could store less than 10 minutes of total energy. 
So we need a big breakthrough here, something that will be 100 percent better than the approaches at the moment. 
This is not impossible, but it's not that easy. This happens 
when you try to bring these disrupted sources, let's say, 20-30 percent of consumption. If you 
want to rely on 100 percent of that, you need an incredible miracle battery. 
Now, where are we going to go? What's the right approach? 
A Manhattan Project. How do we get to the goal? What 
we need are many companies working on it. Hundreds 
in each of these five areas, we need at least 100 people. 
In many, you'll say, "They're crazy. That's good. 
"I think there's a lot of people in the TED Group who're already engaged in this. 
Bill Gross has several companies, including one named Esolar, which has great solar thermal technologies. 
Vinod Khosla has invested in dozens of companies that do great things and have interesting opportunities. And I'm trying to support this. 
Nathan Myhrvold and I are funding a company that might surprisingly pursue the nuclear approach. 
There's some nuclear innovation, modular, liquid. 
The development of this industry stopped a while ago. So it's not a big surprise that some good concepts are lying around. The Terrapower concept means 
that instead of some of the uranium, you're going to burn one percent of the U235. We decided to burn the 99 percent. The U238. 
This is a pretty crazy idea, 
but actually, you've been thinking about it for a long time. But since there's modern supercomputers, you can simulate it and see that, yes, with the right materials, it looks like it works. And 
because you burn this 99 percent, the cost profile is much better. 
In fact, you burn the waste. And you can even use the waste from today's reactors 
as a propulsion material. Instead of shattering your head, you just burn it. A great thing. 
The uranium is consumed gradually. A little bit like a candle. 
You see that it's a kind of pillar, often called a migratory wave reactor. 
This really solves the fuel problem. 
Here's a picture of a place in Kentucky. 
This is the waste that's 99 percent. You took out the part that's being burned today. So it's called depleted uranium. 
The shoots that U.S. produces for hundreds of years. 
And if you're going to get ocean water cheaply, you get enough fuel for the rest of the life of the planet. 
You know, there's still a lot of challenges, but it's an example of hundreds of concepts that we need to move forward. 
Let's think about how we should measure our success. 
What should our certificate look like? 
Now let's go to the point that we need to achieve. And then we're talking about the intermediate 
step. Many people talk about an increase 

in CO2 

and so 




will the temperature. 
But actually, this note is for the things that we do. It's not completely leading to the big reductions, just the same, or even a little less important, like the other one, which is the speed of innovation for these breakthroughs, 
these breakthroughs. We need to track them with full gas, and we can measure that in company numbers, in pilot projects and in regulation. There are lots 
of great books on this issue, which are 
Al Gore Book. We have a choice, and David McKays: Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air. 
They're really going through it, and they're creating a framework where this can be widely discussed, because we need support from all sides for this. 
There's a lot to come together. 
This is a wish, 
a very concrete wish, that we're going to invent this technology 
if you allow me just one wish for the next 50 years. I could choose the President, a vaccine, and I love that wish, or I could choose that wish, which is: halved energy price without carbon is invented. I feed that wish. 
This one has the greatest impact. 
If we don't get that wish, the gap between long-term and short-term people will be terrible, between the US and China, between poor and rich countries, and almost all of them will live. This $2 billion will be much worse. 
So what do we need to do? 
What action do I want to take? 
We need to push for more research money. 
When countries meet in places like Koppenhagen, they should not just talk about carbon. 
They should discuss this innovation strategy, and they would be shocked by the ridiculously small money that is spent on these innovative approaches. 
We need market incentives, carbon taxes, cap & amp; trade, something that creates a price signal. 
We need to spread the message. 
We need to engage more rationally and fully, and also the things that the government is 
doing. It is an important wish, but I think we can fulfil it. 
Thank you very much. 
Thank you, 
Chris Anderson. Thank you. Thank you. 
Just to understand Terrapower a little bit better. For the first time, you can give us an idea of the scale of this investment. 
Bill Gates: To run the simulation on a supercomputer, to get all the big scientists. What we did is we just need a few 10 million. And even if we tested our materials in a Russian reactor to make sure it works sensibly, you only have to find billions of dollars in the 100s. 
The difficulty is to build the first reactor, find billions more. The regulations and the place that actually builds the first reactor, once 
the first one is ready, if it's as promised, then it's all very clear, because the efficiency, the energy density, is as different from the nuclear energy we know. 
CA: To understand that correctly, that means building deep into the ground, almost like a vertical pillar of nuclear fuel, this depleted uranium. And then the process begins up and continues to work down. 
BG: Exactly today, you've got to fill the reactor again. So there are lots of people and lots of controls that can go wrong, this thing where you open it up and bring things in or out. This is not good. 
But if you have very cheap fuel, you can fill it for 60 years. Think of a pillar that you can buried without all the complexities, and 
it sits there and burns for 60 years. And then it's finished. 
CA: A nuclear reactor that itself offers a solution to the waste. 
BG: Yeah. Now, what happens to the waste? You can leave it sitting. There's a lot less waste with this method. Then you take it and you pack it into the next reactor and you burn it further. 
And we start by taking the waste that already exists, which is in these cooling tanks or dry containers in the reactors. This is our starting fuel. So what 
was a problem for these reactors is what we fill in in ours, and that dramatically reduces the volume of waste during this process. 
CA: But while you've talked to different people in the world about these possibilities, where 
is the greatest interest? So what is really going on? 
BG: Well, we haven't yet set ourselves a place, and there's a lot of interesting disclosure rules for everything that nuclear carries in the name. There's a lot of interest, and the people of the company were in Russia, India, China. I was here and I met the Energy Minister and talked about how this fits into the energy agenda. 
I'm optimistic. You know, the French and the Japanese have made a move. 
This is a variant of one thing that's been done. 
This is an important step forward, but it's like a fast reactor, and some countries have built this. So anyone who's done a fast reactor is a candidate for our first CA 
in their imagination, timeframe and probability of really creating this. 
BG: Well, we need one of these scalable, power-generating things that are very cheap. We've made 20 years of inventing, and then 20 years of inventing. 
This is kind of the deadline that has shown us the environmental models that we need to keep, 
and you know, Terrapower. If everything works well, and this is a big wish, it could be easy to 
keep it, and fortunately there are dozens of companies today, and we need hundreds that can compete for their pilots just as much when their approaches work, and it would be best if they could 
do several things, because then you could use a mix. In any case, 
we need a solution. 
CA: For the big, possible breakthroughs, this is the biggest you know. 
BG: An energy breakthrough is the most important one. 
That would have been it without the environmental challenge, but power is even more important. 
In the nuclear sector, there are other innovative companies. 
You know, we don't know their work as well as this, but there's a modular method. This is another approach. 
There's a liquid reactor type that seems a little difficult, but maybe the one that says about us, 
and so there's different ones. But the beauty of this is that an uranium molecule has a million times as much energy as a, say, a coal molecule, and so if you can deal with the problems, and they're mainly the radiation, the footprint, and the cost, the potential, the impact on the land and other things, almost in a separate league. 
CA: If that doesn't work, what do 
we have to do to try to stabilize the Earth's temperature? 
BG: If you get to this situation, it's like you're too eating too much. And just before a heart attack, what you're doing is doing that. You might need a heart surgery or something 
like that. There's a field of research called geoengineering, which is using different techniques. To get warming to slow down, so that we can have 20 or 30 years longer. To get together, we're getting 
this. This is just an insurance method. 
You hope that we don't need it. 
Some people say, you shouldn't just start insurance. Because you have one, maybe lazy, so that you can get on with eating because you know. You have one that will save heart surgery. I don't 
know if it's smart. If you think about the importance of this problem, but there's a discourse in geoengineering about whether you're going to have it available. If things get faster or you're going to need this innovation longer than we expect, 
CA: Climate sceptics have you one or two sentences for them. Maybe to convince you, 
BG: Well, unfortunately, the sceptics live in very different camps. 
Those who make scientific arguments are very few. 
Tell you that there's negative effects that are with the clouds. Things are 
moving. There's very, very few things you can say at all, of which it's a chance in a million. 
The main problem here is similar to AIDS. 
You make the mistake now, and you pay for it. A lot later, 
and that's why the idea is now, if you all all kinds of urgent urgent problems. In something. To invest in something that you're only going to have later, what's got to happen? And then, to top it all, the investment isn't so clear. In fact, the IPCC report isn't necessarily the worst scenario, and there are people in the rich world who look at IPCC and say, "Okay, that's not a big drama." 
The fact is that this uncertainty should worry us. 
But my dream here is that if you can do it economically and at the same time eliminate CO2, then the skeptics say, "Okay, I'm not interested in not emitting CO2. I would almost like to do it, but I'll accept it, because it's cheaper than the previous method. 
CA: And that would be your answer to Björn Lomborg's argument that if you use all this time and energy to solve the CO2 problem, all the other goals, including poverty, are suffering. The fight against malaria and so on, that it's a stupid waste of resources. Money to invest in while it's better things that we do. 
BG: Well, actually spending on research, we say, the U.S. should be 10 billion a year more. More than they're doing today, that's not so dramatic. 
Amongst other things, you shouldn't suffer. You'll 
get too big a amount of money. And here, sensible people can disagree when you have something that isn't economic and try to finance. For me, most waste is happening here, 
unless you're very close to a break in costs, and you're just funding the learning curve. I think we should try more things that have the potential to be much cheaper if 
the cut you get is a very high energy price. Then only the rich can keep up. 
I mean, each of us here could be spending five times as much on our energy without changing our lifestyle 
for the lower two billion. But is it a disaster? 
And even Lomborg thinks about 
his new mesh now. Why isn't research discussed? He's still being 
associated with the sceptic Camp because of his earlier stories, but he understood that this is a very lonely group, and so he's now bringing the research argument, 
and this is a line of thought that I think is appropriate. 
Research. It's just crazy how little support is given. 
CA: Bill, I think I'm speaking for almost all the people here when I say, "I really hope your desire will come true." Thank you. 
BG: Thank you. 
I'd like to tell you something that I noticed a few months ago writing an article for Italian Wired. 
I always used to be synonymous with dictionary when I wrote, but I was already finished working the text, and I noticed I've never looked up in my life what the word "disabled" really means. I'm reading 
you the entry 
"disabled": "disabled": "adjective": "crippled": "defeated": "futile": "destroyed": "destroyed": "wounded": "wounded": "uncompetent": "Imppotent": "Castered": "Plastic": "Handicapt": "Senil": "Wak up": "Dressed": "Reproved": "Done": "Discarded": "See": "Injury": "Futile" and "weak": "Antonymes": "Healthy": "strong": "performance": "I read 
this list to a 
friend" and I had to laugh for the first time: "It was so ridiculous" but I only came to "Plaid up" and I couldn't talk any more and had to stop reading and gather for the first time. After this "Urgent": "Wurning" and the emotional shock that 
it caused, of course, this was a "Urgent": "Wornkey": "I just thought that the issue had to be pretty old." But 
in fact, it was an issue in the early 1980s, when I started elementary school and started building and shaping my self-image outside my family environment, also in relation to other children and around me 
and thank God I didn't use a synonym dictionary at 
the time. If I were to take this entry seriously, I would be born into a world that would perceive someone like me as a person whose lives can't be in any way positive. But today, I'm celebrated for the opportunities and adventures that I've experienced. So 
I immediately called for the online edition of 2009 and expected me to make a more appealing contribution here. 
Here's the updated version of this entry. 
Unfortunately, it's not much better. 
In particular, the last two words under "nearly antonym" are all healthy and healthy, 
but it's not just about the words. 
It's about what we think about the people that we describe with these words. 
It's about the values that are in those words, and how we construct those values. 
Our language influences our thinking and how we see the world and the people around us. Many 
ancient societies, including the Greeks and the Romans, really believed that the debate of a curse had a great force, because what you say loudly can manifest itself. So 
what do we actually want to manifest? A disabled person or a powerful person alone. To 
call a person careless as a child could be enough to restrict them and impose ideas on them. 
Wouldn't it be nice to open doors to them? A 
person who opened doors to me was my pediatrician at the A.I.Dupont Institute in Wilmington in Delaware. 
He's called Dr. Pizzutillo, an Italo-American whose name, as you can imagine, most Americans couldn't speak out very well. 
And Dr. P was always wearing very colorful flies and was just like created working with kids. 
I just loved the time I spent in this hospital — except for my physiotherapy. 
I had to repeat individual exercises seemingly infinitely often with these thick, elastic bands in different colors. You know that, to build my legs muscles. And I hated these bands more than anything else. I hated them. I cursed them. I hated them. 
And imagine, I even negotiated with Dr. P as a child with Dr. P., trying to stop these exercises, naturally, without success. 
And one day he watched me with one of my exercises. These exercises were just tedious and merciless. And he said to me, "Wow, Aimee, you're such a strong, powerful and young girl. You're going to tear one of these bands 
up. "And if you make it, I give you a hundred dollars. 
Of course, that was just a simple trick from Dr. P. to do the exercises that I didn't want to do, with the prospect of becoming the richest five-year-old in the hospital on the second floor. But he actually got me to see my daily exercise horror with new eyes. So this became a new and promising experience. 
And I wonder today how much his vision of me as a strong and powerful young girl has shaped my self-image. And I could imagine seeing myself as a naturally powerful, powerful and atlethic person. 
This is just one example of many of how adults in power positions can stimulate the imagination of a child. 
But as the examples I've already quoted from the synonym dictionaries show, our language leaves us no room to imagine something that we would all want to do: to allow every individual to see themselves as a powerful person. 
Our language lags behind the changes that have been triggered in many cases by technological change. From a medical point 
of view, of course, my legs, laser surgery for visual impairments, knee joints made of titanium waist joints and artificial hip joints for aging bodies, which allow people to really use all their possibilities to move beyond the limits that their natural destiny has set them. Not to speak of social networking platforms. People allow themselves to have their own identity, define themselves 
in ways that guide them globally to groups that choose them. So 
perhaps this technological change makes it clearer than ever that there has always been a different truth, that every human being can give something very special and very powerful to society, and that the human ability to adapt is our greatest asset. 
Our greatest asset is the human ability to adapt. This is an interesting story, because people keep asking me to tell me how to deal with adversity, and I will confess to you. This sentence never suits me, and I always felt very uncomfortable answering people's questions. And I think gradually I understand why this sentence 
lives on dealing with adversity, on the idea that success or happiness depends on mastering a challenge without being shaped by the experience that it entails, as if my life had been so successful, because I could avoid the possible traps of a life with a prosthetic, or, whatever people perceive me with my disability, 
the truth is that we are changing. Of course, we are shaped by the challenge, whether it is physical, emotional or even 
both, and I maintain that this is good. Adverseness is 
not an obstacle that we need to curve to get better at our lives. Adverseness is 
simply part of our lives, 
and I tend to see adversity as my shadow. 
Sometimes I notice it's very present, sometimes it's barely visible, but it's always with me, 
and I don't want to diminish the impact or the severity of a person's struggle. 
There are adversity and challenges in life, and they're only all too real, and every person is different in this way. But the question is not whether we're getting clear with adversity or not, but how we get clear with it. 
So we're not just responsible for saving the people we love from the fate blows, but also preparing them to get good, and 
we're not doing our children a favor if we give them the feeling that they can't adapt. You have 
to make two clear things: one, the medical fact of being amputated, and the other, the social opinion about whether or not I'm disabled. 
And to be honest, the only real and lasting disability I've had to deal with is that the world is constantly thinking it can describe me with these definitions, in 
our desire to protect the people we care about, and to tell them the cold, hard truth about their medical forecast, or even to predict the quality of life that they expect. Do we have to be careful that we don't lay the foundation for someone actually being disabled? 
Maybe the current concept that only cares about what's broken and how we fix it for each individual is a bigger disability than the pathology itself. 
If we don't treat a person holistically and not perceive and recognize all his forces and possibilities, we create another disease in addition to the natural struggle that you might have to fight. 
We downgrade a person who has a value for our society. 
So we have to look beyond the pathology and focus on all areas of human opportunity. 
Most importantly, there is a connection between the perception of our imperfections and our 
great inventiveness. We shouldn't devalue or deny these challenging times. We shouldn't try to avoid them, nor should we sweep them under the carpet, but rather to recognize opportunities in the adversity. 
I'm perhaps more interested in making it clear that we don't necessarily have to overcome adversity, but that we're open to embrace it, grab it at the bottom, to use a fight, and maybe even dance with it. 
And maybe we can see adversity as something natural, coherent and useful, and feel so burdened by its presence. 
This year, we celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin. And when he wrote about evolution 150 years ago, Darwin, in my view, referred to something very true in human character. I would describe 
it this way: not the strongest of its kind, nor the most intelligent of its kind, but the one that can best adapt to change. 
Conflicts create creativity, not just from 
Darwin's work. We know that the ability of man to survive and flourish is determined by the struggle of the human mind to change through conflict. So once 
again, change and adaptation are the greatest skills of 
man. And maybe we know only from the wood we are carved when we are really tested. 
Maybe that's the very meaning of adversity, a perception of the I, a sense of our own power. 
We can give ourselves something. 
We can give adversity a new meaning that goes beyond difficult times. 
Maybe we can see adversity as change. 
Adversity is for a change that we have not yet adapted. 
I think the greatest damage we have done to ourselves is to believe that we 
should be normal. Who is normal? 
There is no normal. 
There is the normal, the typical, but not the normal. And would you really want to know this poor, gray person if it really existed? 
I don't think so. 
It would be great if we could exchange this paradigm of normality against another of the possibilities or strength, even a little more dangerous. So we can release the forces of very many children and invite them to bring their very special and valuable skills into society. 
Anthropologists have found that we humans have always been demanding from the members of our society to be useful and to contribute. 
There is evidence that the Neanderthals, 60,000 years ago, were carrying older people and people with severe physical injuries. And this was perhaps because the life experience of these people's struggle for survival was valuable to society. 
They didn't consider these people to be broken and useless. They were treated as something special and valuable. 
A few years ago, I went to a food market in the city I grew up in, in the Red Zone in Northeast Pennsylvania, and I was standing there in front of a bushel tomato. 
It was summer, and I had shorts, and 
I hear a guy behind me say, "Well, if this is not Aimee Mullins, 
and I turn around and see this older man, I had no idea who he was." 
And I said, "Excuse me, Sir, we know each other. I can't remember them." And 
he said, "Well, you're hardly going to remember me. "When 
I first saw them, I took them out of their mother's gut. 
Oh, so the 
one, and of course it did, but click. 
That was Dr. Kean, a man I knew only from my mother's narratives about this day, because of course, I came two weeks late, quite typical of my 
birthday. The doctor for prenatal diagnosis of my mother was on holiday, and so my parents didn't know the man who gave me birth at all. And 
because I was born without legs of a calf and my feet had turned to them and I only had a few toes on that one and a few toes on the other, he was the messenger. That stranger had to bring the bad news. 
He said to me, "I had to tell your parents that you would never walk and you would never be as agile as other children, or that you would never live an independent life." And since then, they have just been telling me lies. What I found really 
extraordinary was that he has collected newspaper clips of my entire childhood, whether I'd won a second-class spelling competition, whether I'd been traveling with the scouts at the parade to Halloween, whether I'd won my scholarship or one of my sporting victories, and he used these clips to teach his students medical students from Hahnemann Medical School and Hershey Medical School, 
and he called this part of his class the X-factor, the potential of human will. 
You can't just emphasize enough how critical this factor can be to a human life. 
And Dr. Kean went on to tell us, "I've learned that if children don't always get something else, and if they get just a little bit of support, if you leave children to themselves, then children can do a lot." You see, 
Dr. Kean changed his thinking. 
He understood that medical diagnosis and how someone deals with it 
are two different things. And I also changed my thinking over time. If you asked me at the age of 15 if I had exchanged my prosthetics for legs of meat and bone, I wouldn't have hesitated for a second. 
I wanted to be normal at the time. If 
you ask me that today, I'm not so sure, 
and that's because I've experienced something with my legs, not despite those experiences. 
And maybe that change could also happen because I've met so many people who have opened doors to me, rather than meeting people who wanted to restrict me or impose an idea on me. 
See, it really only takes a person to demonstrate how they can manifest their forces. And they're through, if 
they allow someone to activate their own internal forces — the human mind is so receptive — if they can do that and open a door for someone at a critical moment, they're a very good teacher for these people. 
They bring them to open doors for themselves. 
The real meaning of the word "educe" is rooted in the word "educe." 
It means creating something that is in one thing: to chew out the 
potential. Again, what potential do we want to tap into? 
In the 1960s, a case study was carried out in Britain. Back then, high schools were converted to high schools. 
They call this "streaming trials." In the United States, we call this "tracking." Students are divided up 
according to grades, and A students are tested verbally more hard, 
the better teachers, etc. They then gave students with a sufficient 
grade very well over a three-month period. They were told they were asse that they were very smart, and after those three months, they really wrote one, and 
of course it breaks the heart of hearing that vice versa, the one students were told they were just enough. 
And then, after the three months, it was also crucial, but 
only those who were still in school — apart from the students who had thrown out 
the school — that the teachers were not initiated. 
The teachers did not know that something was changed. 
They were simply told that they were the one students, and that the students with a grade were sufficient. And they also taught them something, 
and they treated them. The only real disability is a broken mind. A spirit that was broken no longer has any hope. It no longer finds anything beautiful. It lacks our natural childhood curiosity and our inherent capacity for imagination. 
But if we can continue to support the human spirit in finding beautiful ways to find oneself and other people around it, to be beautiful and imaginative, we will really use our forces positively. 
If a mind has these qualities, we can create a new reality and new forms of existence. 
I want to end with a poem written by a Persian poet named Hafiz in the 14th century, who told me my friend Jacques Demois. And the poem is called "The God, who knows only four words." Every child knows God, not the God of names, not the God of prohibitions, but the God who knows only four words and repeats them all the time. 

