So let me start.
It's this: flapping birds, toys, cootie catchers, that sort of thing.
It's become an art form, a form of sculpture.
Every Japanese kid learns how to fold that crane.
But even more importantly, he created a language -- a way we could communicate, a code of dots, dashes and arrows.
This is an origami figure: one sheet, no cuts, folding only, hundreds of folds.
This too is origami, and this shows where we've gone in the modern world.
You can get horns, antlers -- even if you look close, cloven hooves.
And it raises a question: what changed?
And what changed is something you might not have expected in an art, which is math.
That is, people applied mathematical principles to the art, to discover the underlying laws.
And that leads to a very powerful tool.
The secret to productivity in so many fields -- and in origami -- is letting dead people do your work for you.
The crease pattern shown here is the underlying blueprint for an origami figure.
And you can't just draw them arbitrarily.
They have to obey four simple laws.
And they're very simple, easy to understand.
The first law is two-colorability.
If you look at the angles around the fold, you find that if you number the angles in a circle, all the even-numbered angles add up to a straight line.
All the odd-numbered angles add up to a straight line.
If we obey these laws, we can do amazing things.
Or you can ramp up and go up to 50 stars on a flag, with 13 stripes.
And if you want to go really crazy, 1,000 scales on a rattlesnake.
And this guy's on display downstairs, so take a look if you get a chance.
The most powerful tools in origami have related to how we get parts of creatures.
And I can put it in this simple equation.
We take an idea, combine it with a square, and you get an origami figure.
Now the first step: pretty easy.
Take an idea, draw a stick figure.
But we're going to start small.
I could use that for a leg, an arm, anything like that.
Well, there's other ways of making a flap.
If I make the flaps skinnier, I can use a bit less paper.
If I make the flap as skinny as possible, I get to the limit of the minimum amount of paper needed.
There's other ways of making flaps.
And if I make the flap from the middle, it uses a full circle.
So no matter how I make a flap, it needs some part of a circular region of paper.
Because lots of people have studied the problem of packing circles.
You shape the base.
You get a folded shape -- in this case, a cockroach.
And you say, "Well, you know, how simple is that?"
We found we could do insects, spiders, which are close -- things with legs, things with legs and wings, things with legs and antennae.
And if folding a single praying mantis from a single uncut square wasn't interesting enough, then you could do two praying mantises from a single uncut square.
I call it "Snack Time."
Actually, lots of people in origami now put toes into their models.
You can make multiple subjects.
Everything you'll see here, except the car, is origami.
One of the earliest was this pattern: this folded pattern, studied by Koryo Miura, a Japanese engineer.
And he used it to design this solar array.
It's an artist's rendition, but it flew in a Japanese telescope in 1995.
Now, there is actually a little origami in the James Webb space telescope, but it's very simple.
It's a very simple pattern -- you wouldn't even call that origami.
They certainly didn't need to talk to origami artists.
But if you want to go higher and go larger than this, then you might need some origami.
So, imagine a lens the size of a football field.
Whether you look up or look down, how do you get it up in space?
You've got to get it up there in a rocket.
How do you make a large sheet of glass smaller?
So you have to do something like this -- this was a small model.
But this pattern's not going to work to get something 100 meters down to a few meters.
So they looked into the origami community, we got in touch with them, and I started working with them.
And they adopted that for their first generation, which was not 100 meters -- it was a five-meter.
And it works perfectly on its test range, and it indeed folds up into a neat little bundle.
Now, there is other origami in space.
The problem that's being solved here is something that needs to be big and sheet-like at its destination, but needs to be small for the journey.
And this stent folds down using an origami pattern, based on a model called the water-bomb base.
Airbag designers also have the problem of getting flat sheets into a small space.
And the algorithms that we developed to do insects turned out to be the solution for airbags to do their simulation.
And so they can do a simulation like this.
Those are the origami creases forming, and now you can see the airbag inflate and find out: does it work?
Well, the heart stent came from that little blow-up box that you might have learned in elementary school.
When you get math involved, problems that you solve for aesthetic value only, or to create something beautiful, turn around and turn out to have an application in the real world.
And as weird and surprising as it may sound, origami may someday even save a life.
And so plants and animals developed their own internal clocks so that they would be ready for these changes in light.
If you take a horseshoe crab off the beach, and you fly it all the way across the continent, and you drop it into a sloped cage, it will scramble up the floor of the cage as the tide is rising on its home shores, and it'll skitter down again right as the water is receding thousands of miles away.
It'll do this for weeks, until it kind of gradually loses the plot.
And in humans, we call it the body clock.
You can see this most clearly when you take away someone's watch and you shut them into a bunker, deep underground, for a couple of months.
People actually volunteer for this, and they usually come out kind of raving about their productive time in the hole.
And so, in this way, we know that they are working on their own internal clocks, rather than somehow sensing the day outside.
It's a huge driver for culture, and I think that it's the most underrated force on our behavior.
So, what would our natural rhythm look like?
What would our sleeping patterns be in the sort of ideal sense?
Well, it turns out that, when people are living without any sort of artificial light at all, they sleep twice every night.
They go to bed around 8:00 pm.
until midnight and then again, they sleep from about 2:00 am until sunrise.
It can be a very complicated thing, the ocean.
And it can be a very complicated thing, what human health is.
But what I'm going to try to say is that even in that complexity, there's some simple themes that I think, if we understand, we can really move forward.
And those simple themes aren't really themes about the complex science of what's going on, but things that we all pretty well know.
If momma ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.
And we're making the ocean pretty unhappy in a lot of different ways.
That pollution was money to that community.
Because when an ecologist looks at the ocean, we see all those interconnections.
And that flow, that flow of life, from the very base up to the very top, is the flow that ecologists see.
Pollutants, some pollutants have been created by us, molecules like PCBs that can't be broken down by our bodies.
Now, to bring that home, I thought I'd invent a little game.
Imagine that when we got on this boat, we were all given two Styrofoam peanuts.
There's no mechanism in this game for them to go anywhere but into a bigger and bigger pile of indigestible Styrofoam peanuts.
And that's exactly what happens with PDBs in this food pyramid.
Well, some of us would be eating those chocolates instead of passing them around.
And instead of accumulating, they will just pass into our group here and not accumulate in any one group.
They get into the food chain.
The dolphins eat the fish that have PCBs from the plankton, and those PCBs, being fat-soluble, accumulate in these dolphins.
In mother's milk.
Here's a diagram of the PCB load of dolphins in Sarasota bay.
Adult males, a huge load.
Juveniles, a huge load.
Females after their first calf is already weaned, a lower load.
Those females, they're not trying to.
Those females are passing the PCBs in the fat of their own mother's milk into their offspring.
These mothers pump their first offspring full of this pollutant.
And most of them die.
Now, the mother then can go and reproduce, but what a terrible price to pay for the accumulation of this pollutant in these animals -- the death of the first born calf.
That top predator, of course, is us.
And we also are eating meat that comes from some of these same places.
It turns out that a lot of dolphins are being sold as meat in the whale meat market around the world.
It had two-to-three-to-400 times the toxic loads ever allowed by the EPA.
And for the very first time in my scientific career I broke scientific protocol, which is that you take the data and publish them in scientific journals, and then begin to talk about them.
We sent a very polite letter to the minister of health in Japan and simply pointed out that this is an intolerable situation, not for us, but for the people of Japan.
And I'm really proud to say that at this point, it's very difficult to buy anything in Japan that's labeled incorrectly, even though they're still selling whale meat, which I believe they shouldn't.
But at least it's labeled correctly, and you're no longer going to be buying toxic dolphin meat instead.
It isn't just there that this happens, but in a natural diet of some communities in the Canadian arctic and in the United States and in the European arctic, a natural diet of seals and whales leads to an accumulation of PCBs that have gathered up from all parts of the world and ended up in these women.
These women have toxic breast milk.
And we end up with things we've heard about before: red tides for example, which are blooms of toxic algae floating through the oceans causing neurological damage.
How many people have seen a "beach closed" sign?
Often what jams us up is sewage.
It's also a question of how those organisms then turn into human disease.
These vibrios, these bacteria, can actually infect people.
Surfers, for example, know this incredibly.
And if you can see on some surfing sites, in fact, not only do you see what the waves are like or what the weather's like, but on some surf rider sites, you see a little flashing poo alert.
Those blooms are generating other kinds of chemicals.
This is just a simple list of some of the types of poisons that come out of these harmful algal blooms: shellfish poisoning,fish ciguatera, diarrhetic shellfish poisoning -- you don't want to know about that -- neurotoxic shellfish poisoning, paralytic shellfish poisoning.
Rita Calwell very famously traced a very interesting story of cholera into human communities, brought there, not by a normal human vector, but by a marine vector, this copepod.
So what do you do?
Well, there's a bunch of things you could do.
I started out showing how much we had distressed the Monterey Bay ecosystem with pollution and the canning industry and all of the attendant problems.
The canneries are gone. The pollution has abated.
They need a functioning pyramid from the base all the way to the top.
That change in thinking has led to a dramatic shift, not only in the fortunes of Monterey Bay, but other places around the world.
But the pyramid of life in the ocean and our own lives on land are intricately connected.
And it's only through having the ocean being healthy that we can remain healthy ourselves.
The beginning of any collaboration starts with a conversation.
This is a land yacht racing across the desert in Nevada.
And I also had an interest in dangerous inventions.
This is a 100,000-volt Tesla coil that I built in my bedroom, much to the dismay of my mother.
And I brought this all together, this passion with alternative energy. And raced a solar car across Australia.
Also the U.S. and Japan.
Really make a fully integrated product, something beautiful.
Can you bring out our baby?
It goes 150 miles an hour.
It was wonderful working with Yves Behar.
And we've only got three minutes.
And I realized how few of the grown-ups that I knew were able to withstand the tragedies that the war visited on them -- how few of them could even resemble a normal, contented, satisfied, happy life once their job, their home, their security was destroyed by the war.
Actually I was at a ski resort in Switzerland without any money to actually enjoy myself, because the snow had melted and there was -- I didn't have money to go to a movie, but I found that on the -- I read in the newspapers that there was to be a presentation by someone in a place that I'd seen in the center of Zurich, and it was about flying saucers he was going to talk.
And the man who talked at that evening lecture was very interesting.
And it -- actually, instead of talking about little green men, he talked about how the psyche of the Europeans had been traumatized by the war and now they're projecting flying saucers into the sky, kind of as a -- he talked about how the mandalas of ancient Hindu religion were kind of projected into the sky as an attempt to regain some sense of order after the chaos of war.
Whereas the personal income, on a scale that has been held constant to accommodate for inflation, has more than doubled, almost tripled, in that period.
And, in fact, you can find that the lack of basic resources, material resources, contributes to unhappiness, but the increase in material resources do not increase happiness.
And the interview was 40 pages long.
And it describes how he feels when composing is going well.
And it's interesting, if you think about it, how, when we think about the civilizations that we look up to as having been pinnacles of human achievement -- whether it's China, Greece, Hindu civilization, or the Mayas, or Egyptians -- what we know about them is really about their ecstasies, not about their everyday life.
Now, this man doesn't need to go to a place like this, which is also -- this place, this arena, which is built like a Greek amphitheatre, is a place for ecstasy also.
But this man doesn't need to go to there.
So once he gets to that point of beginning to create -- like Jennifer did in her improvisation -- a new reality, that is a moment of ecstasy.
And he says that his hand seems to be moving by itself.
And it has become a kind of a truism in the study of creativity that you can't be creating anything with less than 10 years of technical knowledge immersion in a particular field.
Whether it's mathematics or music -- it takes that long to be able to begin to change something in a way that it's better than what was there before.
Now, when that happens, he says the music just flows out.
And it happens in different realms.
It happens also, actually, in the most recent book I wrote, called "Good Business," where I interviewed some of the CEOs who had been nominated by their peers as being both very successful and very ethical, very socially responsible.
There's this focus that once it becomes intense, leads to a sense of ecstasy, a sense of clarity, you know exactly what you want to do from one moment to the other, you get immediate feedback.
So for each person we can establish an average, which is the center of the diagram.
That would be your mean level of challenge and skill, which will be different from that of anybody else.
And you may be doing things very differently from other people, but for everyone that flow channel, that area there, will be when you are doing what you really like to do -- play the piano, probably, be with your best friend, perhaps work, if work is what provides flow for you.
Arousal is still good because you are over-challenged there.
And if you want to enter flow from control, you have to increase the challenges.
The other combinations of challenge and skill become progressively less optimal.
The largest single contributor to that experience is watching television, the next one is being in the bathroom, sitting.
So the question we are trying to address -- and I'm way over time -- is how to put more and more of everyday life in that flow channel.
And that is the kind of challenge that we're trying to understand.
And some of you obviously know how to do that spontaneously without any advice, but unfortunately a lot of people don't.
And that's what our mandate is in a way to do. OK.
We all know which side of these we'd like to be on.
What Rockefeller called "The business of benevolence."
For philanthropy to become open and big and fast and connected, in service of the long term.
This entrepreneurial energy is emerging from many quarters.
What I want to do is share some of the coolest things that are going on with you.
And as I do that, I'm not going to dwell much on the very large philanthropy that everybody already knows about, the Gates and the Soros and the Google.
This is a moment in history when the average person has more power than at any time.
But remember, philanthropy is about giving of time and talent, not just money.
Clay Shirky, that great chronicler of everything networked, has captured the assumption that this challenges in such a beautiful way.
He said, "We have lived in this world where little things are done for love and big things for money.
Humanity's collective immune response to today's threats.
Now, all of these big things for love experiments aren't going to take off.
Second category is online philanthropy marketplaces.
And this challenges yet another assumption, which is that organized philanthropy is only for the very wealthy.
Take a look at Changing the Present, started by a TEDster, next time you need a wedding present or a holiday present.
The third category is represented by Warren Buffet, which I call aggregated giving.
It's not just that Warren Buffet was so amazingly generous in that historic act last summer.
These funds are to philanthropy what venture capital, private equity, and eventually mutual funds are to investing.
But with a twist, because often a community forms around these funds, as it has at Acumen and other places.
