unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	When I was in my 20s, I saw my very first psychotherapy client.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I was a Ph.D. student in clinical psychology at Berkeley.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	She was a 26-year-old woman named Alex.
female	Alex	Now Alex walked into her first session wearing jeans and a big slouchy top, and she dropped onto the couch in my office and kicked off her flats and told me she was there to talk about guy problems.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Now when I heard this, I was so relieved.
female	My classmate	My classmate got an arsonist for her first client.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And I got a twentysomething who wanted to talk about boys.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	This I thought I could handle.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But I didn 't handle it.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	With the funny stories that Alex would bring to session, it was easy for me just to nod my head while we kicked the can down the road.
female	Alex	"Thirty 's the new 20," Alex would say, and as far as I could tell, she was right.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Work happened later, marriage happened later, kids happened later, even death happened later.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Twentysomethings like Alex and I had nothing but time.
female	Alex	But before long, my supervisor pushed me to push Alex about her love life.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I pushed back.
female	the guy	I said, "Sure, she 's dating down, she 's sleeping with a knucklehead, but it 's not like she 's going to marry the guy."
female	my supervisor	And then my supervisor said, "Not yet, but she might marry the next one.
female	Alex	Besides, the best time to work on Alex 's marriage is before she has one. "
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	That 's what psychologists call an "Aha!" Moment.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	That was the moment I realized, 30 is not the new 20.
neutral	Alex	Yes, people settle down later than they used to, but that didn 't make Alex 's 20s a developmental downtime.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	That made Alex 's 20s a developmental sweet spot, and we were sitting there blowing it.
female	Alex	That was when I realized that this sort of benign neglect was a real problem, and it had real consequences, not just for Alex and her love life but for the careers and the families and the futures of twentysomethings everywhere.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	There are 50 million twentysomethings in the United States right now.
neutral	their 20s	We 're talking about 15 percent of the population, or 100 percent if you consider that no one 's getting through adulthood without going through their 20s first.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Raise your hand if you 're in your 20s.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I really want to see some twentysomethings here.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Oh, yay! Y 'all 's awesome.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	If you work with twentysomethings, you love a twentysomething, you 're losing sleep over twentysomethings, I want to see - Okay. Awesome, twentysomethings really matter.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So I specialize in twentysomethings because I believe that every single one of those 50 million twentysomethings deserves to know what psychologists, sociologists, neurologists and fertility specialists already know: That claiming your 20s is one of the simplest, yet most transformative, things you can do for work, for love, for your happiness, maybe even for the world.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	This is not my opinion. These are the facts.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	We know that 80 percent of life 's most defining moments take place by age 35.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	That means that eight out of 10 of the decisions and experiences and "Aha!" Moments that make your life what it is will have happened by your mid-30s.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	People who are over 40, don 't panic.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	This crowd is going to be fine, I think.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	We know that the first 10 years of a career has an exponential impact on how much money you 're going to earn.
neutral	their future partner	We know that more than half of Americans are married or are living with or dating their future partner by 30.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	We know that the brain caps off its second and last growth spurt in your 20s as it rewires itself for adulthood, which means that whatever it is you want to change about yourself, now is the time to change it.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	We know that personality changes more during your 20s than at any other time in life, and we know that female fertility peaks at age 28, and things get tricky after age 35.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So your 20s are the time to educate yourself about your body and your options.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So when we think about child development, we all know that the first five years are a critical period for language and attachment in the brain.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It 's a time when your ordinary, day-to-day life has an inordinate impact on who you will become.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But what we hear less about is that there 's such a thing as adult development, and our 20s are that critical period of adult development.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But this isn 't what twentysomethings are hearing.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Newspapers talk about the changing timetable of adulthood.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Researchers call the 20s an extended adolescence.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Journalists coin silly nicknames for twentysomethings like "twixters" and "kidults."
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It 's true.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	As a culture, we have trivialized what is actually the defining decade of adulthood.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Leonard Bernstein said that to achieve great things, you need a plan and not quite enough time.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Isn 't that true?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So what do you think happens when you pat a twentysomething on the head and you say, "You have 10 extra years to start your life"?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Nothing happens.
male	that person	You have robbed that person of his urgency and ambition, and absolutely nothing happens.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And then every day, smart, interesting twentysomethings like you or like your sons and daughters come into my office and say things like this: "I know my boyfriend 's no good for me, but this relationship doesn 't count. I 'm just killing time."
neutral	the time	Or they say, "Everybody says as long as I get started on a career by the time I 'm 30, I 'll be fine."
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But then it starts to sound like this: "My 20s are almost over, and I have nothing to show for myself.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I had a better résumé the day after I graduated from college. "
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And then it starts to sound like this: "Dating in my 20s was like musical chairs.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Everybody was running around and having fun, but then sometime around 30 it was like the music turned off and everybody started sitting down.
male	my husband	I didn 't want to be the only one left standing up, so sometimes I think I married my husband because he was the closest chair to me at 30. "
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Where are the twentysomethings here?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Do not do that.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Okay, now that sounds a little flip, but make no mistake, the stakes are very high.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	When a lot has been pushed to your 30s, there is enormous thirtysomething pressure to jump-start a career, pick a city, partner up, and have two or three kids in a much shorter period of time.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Many of these things are incompatible, and as research is just starting to show, simply harder and more stressful to do all at once in our 30s.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	The post-millennial midlife crisis isn 't buying a red sports car.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It 's realizing you can 't have that career you now want.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It 's realizing you can 't have that child you now want, or you can 't give your child a sibling.
neutral	20s	Too many thirtysomethings and fortysomethings look at themselves, and at me, sitting across the room, and say about their 20s, "What was I doing? What was I thinking?"
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I want to change what twentysomethings are doing and thinking.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Here 's a story about how that can go.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It 's a story about a woman named Emma.
female	Emma	At 25, Emma came to my office because she was, in her words, having an identity crisis.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	She said she thought she might like to work in art or entertainment, but she hadn 't decided yet, so she 'd spent the last few years waiting tables instead.
male	a boyfriend	Because it was cheaper, she lived with a boyfriend who displayed his temper more than his ambition.
female	20s	And as hard as her 20s were, her early life had been even harder.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	She often cried in our sessions, but then would collect herself by saying, "You can 't pick your family, but you can pick your friends."
female	Emma	Well one day, Emma comes in and she hangs her head in her lap, and she sobbed for most of the hour.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	She 'd just bought a new address book, and she 'd spent the morning filling in her many contacts, but then she 'd been left staring at that empty blank that comes after the words "In case of emergency, please call...."
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	She was nearly hysterical when she looked at me and said, "Who 's going to be there for me if I get in a car wreck?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Who 's going to take care of me if I have cancer? "
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Now in that moment, it took everything I had not to say, "I will."
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But what Emma needed wasn 't some therapist who really, really cared.
female	Emma	Emma needed a better life, and I knew this was her chance.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I had learned too much since I first worked with Alex to just sit there while Emma 's defining decade went parading by.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So over the next weeks and months, I told Emma three things that every twentysomething, male or female, deserves to hear.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	First, I told Emma to forget about having an identity crisis and get some identity capital.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	By get identity capital, I mean do something that adds value to who you are.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Do something that 's an investment in who you might want to be next.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I didn 't know the future of Emma 's career, and no one knows the future of work, but I do know this: Identity capital begets identity capital.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So now is the time for that cross-country job, that internship, that startup you want to try.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I 'm not discounting twentysomething exploration here, but I am discounting exploration that 's not supposed to count, which, by the way, is not exploration.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	That 's procrastination.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I told Emma to explore work and make it count.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Second, I told Emma that the urban tribe is overrated.
neutral	Best friends	Best friends are great for giving rides to the airport, but twentysomethings who huddle together with like-minded peers limit who they know, what they know, how they think, how they speak, and where they work.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	That new piece of capital, that new person to date almost always comes from outside the inner circle.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	New things come from what are called our weak ties, our friends of friends of friends.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So yes, half of twentysomethings are un- or under-employed.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But half aren 't, and weak ties are how you get yourself into that group.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Half of new jobs are never posted, so reaching out to your neighbor 's boss is how you get that un-posted job.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It 's not cheating. It 's the science of how information spreads.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Last but not least, Emma believed that you can 't pick your family, but you can pick your friends.
female	Emma	Now this was true for her growing up, but as a twentysomething, soon Emma would pick her family when she partnered with someone and created a family of her own.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I told Emma the time to start picking your family is now.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Now you may be thinking that 30 is actually a better time to settle down than 20, or even 25, and I agree with you.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But grabbing whoever you 're living with or sleeping with when everyone on Facebook starts walking down the aisle is not progress.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	The best time to work on your marriage is before you have one, and that means being as intentional with love as you are with work.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Picking your family is about consciously choosing who and what you want rather than just making it work or killing time with whoever happens to be choosing you.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So what happened to Emma?
female	an old roommate's cousin	Well, we went through that address book, and she found an old roommate 's cousin who worked at an art museum in another state.
female	That weak tie	That weak tie helped her get a job there.
female	that live-in boyfriend	That job offer gave her the reason to leave that live-in boyfriend.
female	a special events planner	Now, five years later, she 's a special events planner for museums.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	She 's married to a man she mindfully chose.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	She loves her new career, she loves her new family, and she sent me a card that said, "Now the emergency contact blanks don 't seem big enough."
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Now Emma 's story made that sound easy, but that 's what I love about working with twentysomethings.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	They are so easy to help.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Twentysomethings are like airplanes just leaving LAX, bound for somewhere west.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Right after takeoff, a slight change in course is the difference between landing in Alaska or Fiji.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Likewise, at 21 or 25 or even 29, one good conversation, one good break, one good TED Talk, can have an enormous effect across years and even generations to come.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So here 's an idea worth spreading to every twentysomething you know.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It 's as simple as what I learned to say to Alex.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It 's what I now have the privilege of saying to twentysomethings like Emma every single day: Thirty is not the new 20, so claim your adulthood, get some identity capital, use your weak ties, pick your family.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Don 't be defined by what you didn 't know or didn 't do.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	You 're deciding your life right now.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Thank you.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Throughout the history of computers we 've been striving to shorten the gap between us and digital information, the gap between our physical world and the world in the screen where our imagination can go wild.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And this gap has become shorter, shorter, and even shorter, and now this gap is shortened down to less than a millimeter, the thickness of a touch-screen glass, and the power of computing has become accessible to everyone.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But I wondered, what if there could be no boundary at all?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I started to imagine what this would look like.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	First, I created this tool which penetrates into the digital space, so when you press it hard on the screen, it transfers its physical body into pixels.
neutral	3D	Designers can materialize their ideas directly in 3D, and surgeons can practice on virtual organs underneath the screen.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So with this tool, this boundary has been broken.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But our two hands still remain outside the screen.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	How can you reach inside and interact with the digital information using the full dexterity of our hands?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	At Microsoft Applied Sciences, along with my mentor Cati Boulanger, I redesigned the computer and turned a little space above the keyboard into a digital workspace.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	By combining a transparent display and depth cameras for sensing your fingers and face, now you can lift up your hands from the keyboard and reach inside this 3D space and grab pixels with your bare hands.
neutral	files	Because windows and files have a position in the real space, selecting them is as easy as grabbing a book off your shelf.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Then you can flip through this book while highlighting the lines, words on the virtual touch pad below each floating window.
neutral	their two hands	Architects can stretch or rotate the models with their two hands directly.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So in these examples, we are reaching into the digital world.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But how about reversing its role and having the digital information reach us instead?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I 'm sure many of us have had the experience of buying and returning items online.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But now you don 't have to worry about it.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	What I got here is an online augmented fitting room.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	This is a view that you get from head-mounted or see-through display when the system understands the geometry of your body.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Taking this idea further, I started to think, instead of just seeing these pixels in our space, how can we make it physical so that we can touch and feel it?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	What would such a future look like?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	At MIT Media Lab, along with my advisor Hiroshi Ishii and my collaborator Rehmi Post, we created this one physical pixel.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Well, in this case, this spherical magnet acts like a 3D pixel in our space, which means that both computers and people can move this object to anywhere within this little 3D space.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	What we did was essentially canceling gravity and controlling the movement by combining magnetic levitation and mechanical actuation and sensing technologies.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And by digitally programming the object, we are liberating the object from constraints of time and space, which means that now, human motions can be recorded and played back and left permanently in the physical world.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So choreography can be taught physically over distance and Michael Jordan 's famous shooting can be replicated over and over as a physical reality.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Students can use this as a tool to learn about the complex concepts such as planetary motion, physics, and unlike computer screens or textbooks, this is a real, tangible experience that you can touch and feel, and it 's very powerful.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And what 's more exciting than just turning what 's currently in the computer physical is to start imagining how programming the world will alter even our daily physical activities.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	As you can see, the digital information will not just show us something but it will start directly acting upon us as a part of our physical surroundings without disconnecting ourselves from our world.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Today, we started by talking about the boundary, but if we remove this boundary, the only boundary left is our imagination.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Thank you.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So I was trained to become a gymnast for two years in Hunan, China in the 1970s.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	When I was in the first grade, the government wanted to transfer me to a school for athletes, all expenses paid.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But my tiger mother said, "No."
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	My parents wanted me to become an engineer like them.
neutral	the Cultural Revolution	After surviving the Cultural Revolution, they firmly believed there 's only one sure way to happiness: A safe and well-paid job.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It is not important if I like the job or not.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But my dream was to become a Chinese opera singer.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	That is me playing my imaginary piano.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	An opera singer must start training young to learn acrobatics, so I tried everything I could to go to opera school.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I even wrote to the school principal and the host of a radio show.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But no adults liked the idea.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	No adults believed I was serious.
neutral	Only my friends	Only my friends supported me, but they were kids, just as powerless as I was.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So at age 15, I knew I was too old to be trained.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	My dream would never come true.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I was afraid that for the rest of my life some second-class happiness would be the best I could hope for.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But that 's so unfair.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So I was determined to find another calling.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Nobody around to teach me? Fine.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I turned to books.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I satisfied my hunger for parental advice from this book by a family of writers and musicians.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I found my role model of an independent woman when Confucian tradition requires obedience.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And I learned to be efficient from this book.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And I was inspired to study abroad after reading these.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I came to the U.S. in 1995, so which books did I read here first?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Books banned in China, of course.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	"The Good Earth" is about Chinese peasant life.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	That 's just not convenient for propaganda. Got it.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	The Bible is interesting, but strange.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	That 's a topic for a different day.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But the fifth commandment gave me an epiphany: "You shall honor your father and mother."
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	"Honor," I said. "That 's so different, and better, than obey."
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So it becomes my tool to climb out of this Confucian guilt trap and to restart my relationship with my parents.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Encountering a new culture also started my habit of comparative reading.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It offers many insights.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	For example, I found this map out of place at first because this is what Chinese students grew up with.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It had never occurred to me, China doesn 't have to be at the center of the world.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	A map actually carries somebody 's view.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Comparative reading actually is nothing new.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It 's a standard practice in the academic world.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	There are even research fields such as comparative religion and comparative literature.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Compare and contrast gives scholars a more complete understanding of a topic.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So I thought, well, if comparative reading works for research, why not do it in daily life too?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So I started reading books in pairs.
neutral	shared experiences	So they can be about people who are involved in the same event, or friends with shared experiences.
male	Joseph Campbell	I also compare the same stories in different genres or similar stories from different cultures, as Joseph Campbell did in his wonderful book.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	For example, both the Christ and the Buddha went through three temptations.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	For the Christ, the temptations are economic, political and spiritual.
neutral	the Buddha	For the Buddha, they are all psychological: Lust, fear and social duty -- interesting.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So if you know a foreign language, it 's also fun to read your favorite books in two languages.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Instead of lost in translation, I found there is much to gain.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	For example, it 's through translation that I realized "happiness" in Chinese literally means "fast joy." Huh!
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	"Bride" in Chinese literally means "new mother." Uh-oh.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Books have given me a magic portal to connect with people of the past and the present.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I know I shall never feel lonely or powerless again.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Having a dream shattered really is nothing compared to what many others have suffered.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I have come to believe that coming true is not the only purpose of a dream.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Its most important purpose is to get us in touch with where dreams come from, where passion comes from, where happiness comes from.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Even a shattered dream can do that for you.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So because of books, I 'm here today, happy, living again with a purpose and a clarity, most of the time.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So may books be always with you.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Thank you.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Thank you.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Thank you.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Hello, TEDWomen, what 's up.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Not good enough.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Hello, TEDWomen, what is up?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	My name is Maysoon Zayid, and I am not drunk, but the doctor who delivered me was.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	He cut my mom six different times in six different directions, suffocating poor little me in the process.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	As a result, I have cerebral palsy, which means I shake all the time.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Look.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It 's exhausting. I 'm like Shakira, Shakira meets Muhammad Ali.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	C.P. is not genetic.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It 's not a birth defect. You can 't catch it.
neutral	cousins	No one put a curse on my mother 's uterus, and I didn 't get it because my parents are first cousins, which they are.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It only happens from accidents, like what happened to me on my birth day.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Now, I must warn you, I 'm not inspirational, and I don 't want anyone in this room to feel bad for me, because at some point in your life, you have dreamt of being disabled.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Come on a journey with me.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It 's Christmas Eve, you 're at the mall, you 're driving around in circles looking for parking, and what do you see?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Sixteen empty handicapped spaces.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And you 're like, "God, can 't I just be a little disabled?"
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Also, I gotta tell you, I got 99 problems, and palsy is just one.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	If there was an Oppression Olympics, I would win the gold medal.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I 'm Palestinian, Muslim, I 'm female, I 'm disabled, and I live in New Jersey.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	If you don 't feel better about yourself, maybe you should.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Cliffside Park, New Jersey is my hometown.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I have always loved the fact that my hood and my affliction share the same initials.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I also love the fact that if I wanted to walk from my house to New York City, I could.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	A lot of people with C.P. don 't walk, but my parents didn 't believe in "can 't."
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	My father 's mantra was, "You can do it, yes you can can."
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So, if my three older sisters were mopping, I was mopping.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	If my three older sisters went to public school, my parents would sue the school system and guarantee that I went too, and if we didn 't all get A 's, we all got my mother 's slipper.
male	My father	My father taught me how to walk when I was five years old by placing my heels on his feet and just walking.
male	Another tactic	Another tactic that he used is he would dangle a dollar bill in front of me and have me chase it.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	My inner stripper was very strong, and by -- Yeah. No, by the first day of kindergarten, I was walking like a champ who had been punched one too many times.
neutral	only six Arabs	Growing up, there were only six Arabs in my town, and they were all my family.
neutral	20 Arabs	Now there are 20 Arabs in town, and they are still all my family.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I don 't think anyone even noticed we weren 't Italian.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	This was before 9 / 11 and before politicians thought it was appropriate to use "I hate Moslems" as a campaign slogan.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	The people that I grew up with had no problem with my faith.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	They did, however, seem very concerned that I would starve to death during Ramadan.
neutral	piece	I would explain to them that I have enough fat to live off of for three whole months, so fasting from sunrise to sunset is a piece of cake.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I have tap-danced on Broadway.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Yeah, on Broadway. It 's crazy.
neutral	parents	My parents couldn 't afford physical therapy, so they sent me to dancing school.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I learned how to dance in heels, which means I can walk in heels.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And I 'm from Jersey, and we are really concerned with being chic, so if my friends wore heels, so did I.
neutral	the Jersey Shore	And when my friends went and spent their summer vacations on the Jersey Shore, I did not.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I spent my summers in a war zone, because my parents were afraid that if we didn 't go back to Palestine every single summer, we 'd grow up to be Madonna.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Summer vacations often consisted of my father trying to heal me, so I drank deer 's milk, I had hot cups on my back, I was dunked in the Dead Sea, and I remember the water burning my eyes and thinking, "It 's working! It 's working!"
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But one miracle cure we did find was yoga.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I have to tell you, it 's very boring, but before I did yoga, I was a stand-up comedian who can 't stand up.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And now I can stand on my head.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	My parents reinforced this notion that I could do anything, that no dream was impossible, and my dream was to be on the daytime soap opera "General Hospital."
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I went to college during affirmative action and got a sweet scholarship to ASU, Arizona State University, because I fit every single quota.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I was like the pet lemur of the theater department.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Everybody loved me.
neutral	my classes	I did all the less-than-intelligent kids 'homework, I got A 's in all of my classes, A 's in all of their classes.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Every time I did a scene from "The Glass Menagerie," my professors would weep.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But I never got cast.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Finally, my senior year, ASU decided to do a show called "They Dance Real Slow in Jackson."
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It 's a play about a girl with C.P.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I was a girl with C.P.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So I start shouting from the rooftops, "I 'm finally going to get a part!
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I have cerebral palsy!
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Free at last! Free at last!
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Thank God almighty, I 'm free at last! "
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I didn 't get the part.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Sherry Brown got the part.
neutral	the theater department	I went racing to the head of the theater department crying hysterically, like someone shot my cat, to ask her why, and she said it was because they didn 't think I could do the stunts.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I said, "Excuse me, if I can 't do the stunts, neither can the character."
neutral	a non-palsy actress	This was a part that I was literally born to play and they gave it, they gave it to a non-palsy actress.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	College was imitating life.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Hollywood has a sordid history of casting able-bodied actors to play disabled onscreen.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Upon graduating, I moved back home, and my first acting gig was as an extra on a daytime soap opera.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	My dream was coming true.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And I knew that I would be promoted from "diner diner" to "wacky best friend" in no time.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But instead, I remained a glorified piece of furniture that you could only recognize from the back of my head, and it became clear to me that casting directors didn 't hire fluffy, ethnic, disabled actors.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	They only hired perfect people.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But there were exceptions to the rule.
neutral	these women	I grew up watching Whoopi Goldberg, Roseanne Barr, Ellen, and all of these women had one thing in common: They were comedians.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So I became a comic.
male	New Jersey Turnpike	My first gig was driving famous comics from New York City to shows in New Jersey, and I 'll never forget the face of the first comic I ever drove when he realized that he was speeding down the New Jersey Turnpike with a chick with C.P. driving him.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I 've performed in clubs all over America, and I 've also performed in Arabic in the Middle East, uncensored and uncovered.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Some people say I 'm the first stand-up comic in the Arab world.
neutral	women	I never like to claim first, but I do know that they never heard that nasty little rumor that women aren 't funny, and they find us hysterical.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	In 2003, my brother from another mother and father Dean Obeidallah and I started the New York Arab-American Comedy Festival, now in its 10th year.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Our goal was to change the negative image of Arab-Americans in media, while also reminding casting directors that South Asian and Arab are not synonymous.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Mainstreaming Arabs was much, much easier than conquering the challenge against the stigma against disability.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	My big break came in 2010.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I was invited to be a guest on the cable news show "Countdown With Keith Olbermann."
neutral	the prom	I walked in looking like I was going to the prom, and they shuffle me into a studio and seat me on a spinning, rolling chair.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So I looked at the stage manager and I 'm like, "Excuse me, can I have another chair?"
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	And she looked at me and she went, "Five, four, three, two..."
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And we were live, right?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So I had to grip onto the anchor 's desk so that I wouldn 't roll off the screen during the segment, and when the interview was over, I was livid.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I had finally gotten my chance and I blew it, and I knew I would never get invited back.
male	Mr. Olbermann	But not only did Mr. Olbermann invite me back, he made me a full-time contributor, and he taped down my chair.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	One fun fact I learned while on the air with Keith Olbermann was that humans on the Internet are scumbags.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	People say children are cruel, but I was never made fun of as a child or an adult.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Suddenly, my disability on the world wide web is fair game.
female	clips	I would look at clips online and see comments like, "Yo, why 's she tweakin?"
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	"Yo, is she retarded?"
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And my favorite, "Poor Gumby-mouth terrorist.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	What does she suffer from?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	We should really pray for her. "
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	One commenter even suggested that I add my disability to my credits: Screenwriter, comedian, palsy.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Disability is as visual as race.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	If a wheelchair user can 't play Beyoncé, then Beyoncé can 't play a wheelchair user.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	The disabled are the largest - Yeah, clap for that, man. C 'mon.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	People with disabilities are the largest minority in the world, and we are the most underrepresented in entertainment.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	The doctors said that I wouldn 't walk, but I am here in front of you.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	However, if I grew up with social media, I don 't think I would be.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I hope that together we can create more positive images of disability in the media and in everyday life.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Perhaps if there were more positive images, it would foster less hate on the Internet.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Or maybe not.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Maybe it still takes a village to teach our children well.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	My crooked journey has taken me to some very spectacular places.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I got to walk the red carpet flanked by soap diva Susan Lucci and the iconic Lorraine Arbus.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I got to act in a movie with Adam Sandler and work with my idol, the amazing Dave Matthews.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I toured the world as a headliner on Arabs Gone Wild.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I was a delegate representing the great state of New Jersey at the 2008 DNC.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And I founded Maysoon 's Kids, a charity that hopes to give Palestinian refugee children a sliver of the chance my parents gave me.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But the one moment that stands out the most was when I got -- before this moment -- - but the one moment that stands out the most was when I got to perform for the man who floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee, has Parkinson 's and shakes just like me, Muhammad Ali.
male	my father	It was the only time that my father ever saw me perform live, and I dedicate this talk to his memory.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	My name is Maysoon Zayid, and if I can can, you can can.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I 'd like to invite you to close your eyes.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Imagine yourself standing outside the front door of your home.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I 'd like you to notice the color of the door, the material that it 's made out of.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Now visualize a pack of overweight nudists on bicycles.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	They are competing in a naked bicycle race, and they are headed straight for your front door.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I need you to actually see this.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	They are pedaling really hard, they 're sweaty, they 're bouncing around a lot.
neutral	the front door	And they crash straight into the front door of your home.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Bicycles fly everywhere, wheels roll past you, spokes end up in awkward places.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Step over the threshold of your door into your foyer, your hallway, whatever 's on the other side, and appreciate the quality of the light.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	The light is shining down on Cookie Monster.
male	Cookie Monster	Cookie Monster is waving at you from his perch on top of a tan horse.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It 's a talking horse.
male	his blue fur	You can practically feel his blue fur tickling your nose.
male	the oatmeal raisin cookie	You can smell the oatmeal raisin cookie that he 's about to shovel into his mouth.
male	living room	Walk past him. Walk past him into your living room.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	In your living room, in full imaginative broadband, picture Britney Spears.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	She is scantily clad, she 's dancing on your coffee table, and she 's singing "Hit Me Baby One More Time."
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And then follow me into your kitchen.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	In your kitchen, the floor has been paved over with a yellow brick road and out of your oven are coming towards you Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow and the Lion from "The Wizard of Oz," hand-in-hand skipping straight towards you.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Okay. Open your eyes.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I want to tell you about a very bizarre contest that is held every spring in New York City.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It 's called the United States Memory Championship.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And I had gone to cover this contest a few years back as a science journalist expecting, I guess, that this was going to be like the Superbowl of savants.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	This was a bunch of guys and a few ladies, widely varying in both age and hygienic upkeep.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	They were memorizing hundreds of random numbers, looking at them just once.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	They were memorizing the names of dozens and dozens and dozens of strangers.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	They were memorizing entire poems in just a few minutes.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	They were competing to see who could memorize the order of a shuffled pack of playing cards the fastest.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I was like, this is unbelievable.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	These people must be freaks of nature.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And I started talking to a few of the competitors.
male	Ed Cook	This is a guy called Ed Cook who had come over from England where he had one of the best trained memories.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And I said to him, "Ed, when did you realize that you were a savant?"
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And Ed was like, "I 'm not a savant.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	In fact, I have just an average memory.
neutral	just an average memory	Everybody who competes in this contest will tell you that they have just an average memory.
male	Cicero	We 've all trained ourselves to perform these utterly miraculous feats of memory using a set of ancient techniques, techniques invented 2,500 years ago in Greece, the same techniques that Cicero had used to memorize his speeches, that medieval scholars had used to memorize entire books. "
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And I was like, "Whoa. How come I never heard of this before?"
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And we were standing outside the competition hall, and Ed, who is a wonderful, brilliant, but somewhat eccentric English guy, says to me, "Josh, you 're an American journalist.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Do you know Britney Spears? "
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I 'm like, "What? No. Why?"
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	"Because I really want to teach Britney Spears how to memorize the order of a shuffled pack of playing cards on U.S. national television.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It will prove to the world that anybody can do this. "
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I was like, "Well I 'm not Britney Spears, but maybe you could teach me.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I mean, you 've got to start somewhere, right? "
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And that was the beginning of a very strange journey for me.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I ended up spending the better part of the next year not only training my memory, but also investigating it, trying to understand how it works, why it sometimes doesn 't work and what its potential might be.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I met a host of really interesting people.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	This is a guy called E.P.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	He 's an amnesic who had, very possibly, the very worst memory in the world.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	His memory was so bad that he didn 't even remember he had a memory problem, which is amazing.
male	this incredibly tragic figure	And he was this incredibly tragic figure, but he was a window into the extent to which our memories make us who we are.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	The other end of the spectrum: I met this guy.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	This is Kim Peek.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	He was the basis for Dustin Hoffman 's character in the movie "Rain Man."
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	We spent an afternoon together in the Salt Lake City Public Library memorizing phone books, which was scintillating.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And I went back and I read a whole host of memory treatises, treatises written 2,000-plus years ago in Latin in Antiquity and then later in the Middle Ages.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And I learned a whole bunch of really interesting stuff.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	One of the really interesting things that I learned is that once upon a time, this idea of having a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory was not nearly so alien as it would seem to us to be today.
neutral	their memories	Once upon a time, people invested in their memories, in laboriously furnishing their minds.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Over the last few millenia we 've invented a series of technologies -- from the alphabet to the scroll to the codex, the printing press, photography, the computer, the smartphone -- that have made it progressively easier and easier for us to externalize our memories, for us to essentially outsource this fundamental human capacity.
neutral	These technologies	These technologies have made our modern world possible, but they 've also changed us.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	They 've changed us culturally, and I would argue that they 've changed us cognitively.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Having little need to remember anymore, it sometimes seems like we 've forgotten how.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	One of the last places on Earth where you still find people passionate about this idea of a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory is at this totally singular memory contest.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It 's actually not that singular, there are contests held all over the world.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And I was fascinated, I wanted to know how do these guys do it.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	A few years back a group of researchers at University College London brought a bunch of memory champions into the lab.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	They wanted to know: Do these guys have brains that are somehow structurally, anatomically different from the rest of ours?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	The answer was no.
neutral	the rest	Are they smarter than the rest of us?
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	They gave them a bunch of cognitive tests, and the answer was not really.
neutral	the brains	There was however one really interesting and telling difference between the brains of the memory champions and the control subjects that they were comparing them to.
neutral	an fMRI machine	When they put these guys in an fMRI machine, scanned their brains while they were memorizing numbers and people 's faces and pictures of snowflakes, they found that the memory champions were lighting up different parts of the brain than everyone else.
neutral	the brain	Of note, they were using, or they seemed to be using, a part of the brain that 's involved in spatial memory and navigation.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Why? And is there something the rest of us can learn from this?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	The sport of competitive memorizing is driven by a kind of arms race where every year somebody comes up with a new way to remember more stuff more quickly, and then the rest of the field has to play catchup.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	This is my friend Ben Pridmore, three-time world memory champion.
male	36 shuffled packs	On his desk in front of him are 36 shuffled packs of playing cards that he is about to try to memorize in one hour, using a technique that he invented and he alone has mastered.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	He used a similar technique to memorize the precise order of 4,140 random binary digits in half an hour.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Yeah.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And while there are a whole host of ways of remembering stuff in these competitions, everything, all of the techniques that are being used, ultimately come down to a concept that psychologists refer to as elaborative encoding.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And it 's well illustrated by a nifty paradox known as the Baker / baker paradox, which goes like this: If I tell two people to remember the same word, if I say to you, "Remember that there is a guy named Baker."
male	his name	That 's his name.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And I say to you, "Remember that there is a guy who is a baker."
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And I come back to you at some point later on, and I say, "Do you remember that word that I told you a while back?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Do you remember what it was? "
male	Baker	The person who was told his name is Baker is less likely to remember the same word than the person was told his job is that he is a baker.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Same word, different amount of remembering; that 's weird.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	What 's going on here?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Well the name Baker doesn 't actually mean anything to you.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It is entirely untethered from all of the other memories floating around in your skull.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But the common noun baker, we know bakers.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Bakers wear funny white hats.
neutral	Bakers	Bakers have flour on their hands.
neutral	Bakers	Bakers smell good when they come home from work.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Maybe we even know a baker.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And when we first hear that word, we start putting these associational hooks into it that make it easier to fish it back out at some later date.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	The entire art of what is going on in these memory contests and the entire art of remembering stuff better in everyday life is figuring out ways to transform capital B Bakers into lower-case B bakers -- to take information that is lacking in context, in significance, in meaning and transform it in some way so that it becomes meaningful in the light of all the other things that you have in your mind.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	One of the more elaborate techniques for doing this dates back 2,500 years to Ancient Greece.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It came to be known as the memory palace.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	The story behind its creation goes like this: There was a poet called Simonides who was attending a banquet.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	He was actually the hired entertainment, because back then if you wanted to throw a really slamming party, you didn 't hire a D.J., you hired a poet.
male	the moment	And he stands up, delivers his poem from memory, walks out the door, and at the moment he does, the banquet hall collapses, kills everybody inside.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It doesn 't just kill everybody, it mangles the bodies beyond all recognition.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	Nobody can say who was inside, nobody can say where they were sitting.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	The bodies can 't be properly buried.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It 's one tragedy compounding another.
male	Simonides	Simonides, standing outside, the sole survivor amid the wreckage, closes his eyes and has this realization, which is that in his mind 's eye, he can see where each of the guests at the banquet had been sitting.
neutral	the hand	And he takes the relatives by the hand and guides them each to their loved ones amid the wreckage.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	What Simonides figured out at that moment is something that I think we all kind of intuitively know, which is that, as bad as we are at remembering names and phone numbers and word-for-word instructions from our colleagues, we have really exceptional visual and spatial memories.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	If I asked you to recount the first 10 words of the story that I just told you about Simonides, chances are you would have a tough time with it.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But I would wager that if I asked you to recall who is sitting on top of a talking tan horse in your foyer right now, you would be able to see that.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	The idea behind the memory palace is to create this imagined edifice in your mind 's eye and populate it with images of the things that you want to remember -- the crazier, weirder, more bizarre, funnier, raunchier, stinkier the image is, the more unforgettable it 's likely to be.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	This is advice that goes back 2,000-plus years to the earliest Latin memory treatises.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So how does this work?
male	Cicero	Let 's say that you 've been invited to TED center stage to give a speech and you want to do it from memory, and you want to do it the way that Cicero would have done it if he had been invited to TEDxRome 2,000 years ago.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	What you might do is picture yourself at the front door of your house.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And you 'd come up with some sort of an absolutely crazy, ridiculous, unforgettable image to remind you that the first thing you want to talk about is this totally bizarre contest.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And then you 'd go inside your house, and you would see an image of Cookie Monster on top of Mister Ed.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And that would remind you that you would want to then introduce your friend Ed Cook.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And then you 'd see an image of Britney Spears to remind you of this funny anecdote you want to tell.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And you go into your kitchen, and the fourth topic you were going to talk about was this strange journey that you went on for a year, and you have some friends to help you remember that.
neutral	Roman orators	This is how Roman orators memorized their speeches -- not word-for-word, which is just going to screw you up, but topic-for-topic.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	In fact, the phrase "topic sentence," that comes from the Greek word "topos," which means "place."
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	That 's a vestige of when people used to think about oratory and rhetoric in these sorts of spatial terms.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	The phrase "in the first place," that 's like in the first place of your memory palace.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I thought this was just fascinating, and I got really into it.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And I went to a few more of these memory contests.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And I had this notion that I might write something longer about this subculture of competitive memorizers.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But there was a problem.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	The problem was that a memory contest is a pathologically boring event.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Truly, it is like a bunch of people sitting around taking the SATs.
neutral	temples	I mean, the most dramatic it gets is when somebody starts massaging their temples.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And I 'm a journalist, I need something to write about.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I know that there 's this incredible stuff happening in these people 's minds, but I don 't have access to it.
neutral	their shoes	And I realized, if I was going to tell this story, I needed to walk in their shoes a little bit.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And so I started trying to spend 15 or 20 minutes every morning before I sat down with my New York Times just trying to remember something.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Maybe it was a poem.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Maybe it was names from an old yearbook that I bought at a flea market.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And I found that this was shockingly fun.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I never would have expected that.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It was fun because this is actually not about training your memory.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	What you 're doing is you 're trying to get better and better and better at creating, at dreaming up, these utterly ludicrous, raunchy, hilarious and hopefully unforgettable images in your mind 's eye.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And I got pretty into it.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	This is me wearing my standard competitive memorizer 's training kit.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It 's a pair of earmuffs and a set of safety goggles that have been masked over except for two small pinholes, because distraction is the competitive memorizer 's greatest enemy.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I ended up coming back to that same contest that I had covered a year earlier.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And I had this notion that I might enter it, sort of as an experiment in participatory journalism.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It 'd make, I thought, maybe a nice epilogue to all my research.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Problem was the experiment went haywire.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I won the contest, which really wasn 't supposed to happen.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Now it is nice to be able to memorize speeches and phone numbers and shopping lists, but it 's actually kind of beside the point.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	These are just tricks.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	They are tricks that work because they 're based on some pretty basic principles about how our brains work.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And you don 't have to be building memory palaces or memorizing packs of playing cards to benefit from a little bit of insight about how your mind works.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	We often talk about people with great memories as though it were some sort of an innate gift, but that is not the case.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Great memories are learned.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	At the most basic level, we remember when we pay attention.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	We remember when we are deeply engaged.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	We remember when we are able to take a piece of information and experience and figure out why it is meaningful to us, why it is significant, why it 's colorful, when we 're able to transform it in some way that it makes sense in the light of all of the other things floating around in our minds, when we 're able to transform Bakers into bakers.
neutral	these memory techniques	The memory palace, these memory techniques, they 're just shortcuts.
neutral	really shortcuts	In fact, they 're not even really shortcuts.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	They work because they make you work.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	They force a kind of depth of processing, a kind of mindfulness, that most of us don 't normally walk around exercising.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But there actually are no shortcuts.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	This is how stuff is made memorable.
male	E.P.	And I think if there 's one thing that I want to leave you with, it 's what E.P., the amnesic who couldn 't even remember that he had a memory problem, left me with, which is the notion that our lives are the sum of our memories.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives by losing ourselves in our Blackberries, our iPhones, by not paying attention to the human being across from us who is talking with us, by being so lazy that we 're not willing to process deeply?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I learned firsthand that there are incredible memory capacities latent in all of us.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But if you want to live a memorable life, you have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Thank you.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	When I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding: Teaching.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I went to teach seventh graders math in the New York City public schools.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And like any teacher, I made quizzes and tests.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I gave out homework assignments.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	When the work came back, I calculated grades.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	What struck me was that I.Q. was not the only difference between my best and my worst students.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Some of my strongest performers did not have stratospheric I.Q. scores.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Some of my smartest kids weren 't doing so well.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And that got me thinking.
neutral	The kinds	The kinds of things you need to learn in seventh grade math, sure, they 're hard: Ratios, decimals, the area of a parallelogram.
neutral	students	But these concepts are not impossible, and I was firmly convinced that every one of my students could learn the material if they worked hard and long enough.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	After several more years of teaching, I came to the conclusion that what we need in education is a much better understanding of students and learning from a motivational perspective, from a psychological perspective.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	In education, the one thing we know how to measure best is I.Q., but what if doing well in school and in life depends on much more than your ability to learn quickly and easily?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So I left the classroom, and I went to graduate school to become a psychologist.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I started studying kids and adults in all kinds of super challenging settings, and in every study my question was, who is successful here and why?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	My research team and I went to West Point Military Academy.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	We tried to predict which cadets would stay in military training and which would drop out.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	We went to the National Spelling Bee and tried to predict which children would advance farthest in competition.
neutral	the school year	We studied rookie teachers working in really tough neighborhoods, asking which teachers are still going to be here in teaching by the end of the school year, and of those, who will be the most effective at improving learning outcomes for their students?
neutral	these salespeople	We partnered with private companies, asking, which of these salespeople is going to keep their jobs?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And who 's going to earn the most money?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	In all those very different contexts, one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And it wasn 't social intelligence.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It wasn 't good looks, physical health, and it wasn 't I.Q.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It was grit.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Grit is having stamina.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working really hard to make that future a reality.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Grit is living life like it 's a marathon, not a sprint.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	A few years ago, I started studying grit in the Chicago public schools.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I asked thousands of high school juniors to take grit questionnaires, and then waited around more than a year to see who would graduate.
neutral	kids	Turns out that grittier kids were significantly more likely to graduate, even when I matched them on every characteristic I could measure, things like family income, standardized achievement test scores, even how safe kids felt when they were at school.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So it 's not just at West Point or the National Spelling Bee that grit matters. It 's also in school, especially for kids at risk for dropping out.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows, about building it.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Every day, parents and teachers ask me, "How do I build grit in kids?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic?
neutral	the long run	How do I keep them motivated for the long run? "
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	The honest answer is, I don 't know.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	What I do know is that talent doesn 't make you gritty.
neutral	their commitments	Our data show very clearly that there are many talented individuals who simply do not follow through on their commitments.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	In fact, in our data, grit is usually unrelated or even inversely related to measures of talent.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So far, the best idea I 've heard about building grit in kids is something called "growth mindset."
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	This is an idea developed at Stanford University by Carol Dweck, and it is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed, that it can change with your effort.
neutral	Dr. Dweck	Dr. Dweck has shown that when kids read and learn about the brain and how it changes and grows in response to challenge, they 're much more likely to persevere when they fail, because they don 't believe that failure is a permanent condition.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So growth mindset is a great idea for building grit.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But we need more.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And that 's where I 'm going to end my remarks, because that 's where we are.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	That 's the work that stands before us.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	We need to take our best ideas, our strongest intuitions, and we need to test them.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	We need to measure whether we 've been successful, and we have to be willing to fail, to be wrong, to start over again with lessons learned.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	In other words, we need to be gritty about getting our kids grittier.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Thank you.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	My work focuses on the connection of both thinking about our community life being part of the environment where architecture grows from the natural local conditions and traditions.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Today I brought two recent projects as an example of this.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Both projects are in emerging countries, one in Ethiopia and another one in Tunisia.
neutral	perspectives	And also they have in common that the different analyses from different perspectives becomes an essential part of the final piece of architecture.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	The first example started with an invitation to design a multistory shopping mall in Ethiopia 's capital city Addis Ababa.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And this is the type of building we were shown as an example, to my team and myself, of what we had to design.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	At first, the first thing I thought was, I want to run away.
neutral	these buildings	After seeing a few of these buildings -- there are many in the city -- we realized that they have three very big points.
neutral	buildings	First, these buildings, they are almost empty because they have very large shops where people cannot afford to buy things.
neutral	the skin treatment	Second, they need tons of energy to perform because of the skin treatment with glass that creates heat in the inside, and then you need a lot of cooling.
neutral	20 to 25 degrees	In a city where this shouldn 't happen because they have really mild weather that ranges from 20 to 25 degrees the whole year.
neutral	image	And third is that their image has nothing to do with Africa and with Ethiopia.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It is a pity in a place that has such rich culture and traditions.
neutral	thousands	Also during our first visit to Ethiopia, I was really captivated by the old merkato that is this open-air structure where thousands of people, they go and buy things every day from small vendors.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And also it has this idea of the public space that uses the outdoors to create activity.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So I thought, this is what I really want to design, not a shopping mall.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But the question was how we could do a multistory, contemporary building with these principles.
neutral	these buildings	The next challenge was when we looked at the site, that is, in a really growing area of the city, where most of these buildings that you see in the image, they were not there.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And it 's also between two parallel streets that don 't have any connection for hundreds of meters.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So the first thing we did was to create a connection between these two streets, putting all the entrances of the building.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And this extends with an inclined atrium that creates an open-air space in the building that self-protects itself with its own shape from the sun and the rain.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And around this void we placed this idea of the market with small shops, that change in each floor because of the shape of the void.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I also thought, how to close the building?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And I really wanted to find a solution that would respond to the local climate conditions.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And I started thinking about the textile like a shell made of concrete with perforations that would let the air in, and also the light, but in a filtered way.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And then the inspiration came from these beautiful buttons of the Ethiopian women 's dresses.
neutral	fractal geometry properties	That they have fractal geometry properties and this helped me to shape the whole facade.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And we are building that with these small prefabricated pieces that are the windows that let the air and the light in a controlled way inside the building.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And this is complemented by these small colored glasses that use the light from the inside of the building to light up the building at night.
neutral	developers	With these ideas it was not easy first to convince the developers because they were like, "This is not a shopping mall. We didn 't ask for that."
neutral	the market	But then we all realized that this idea of the market happened to be a lot more profitable than the idea of the shopping mall because basically they had more shops to sell.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And also that the idea of the facade was much, much cheaper, not only because of the material compared with the glass, but also because we didn 't need to have air conditioning anymore.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So we created some budget savings that we used to implement the project.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And the first implementation was to think about how we could make the building self-sufficient in terms of energy in a city that has electricity cuts almost every day.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So we created a huge asset by placing photovoltaics there on the roof.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And then under those panels we thought about the roof like a new public space with gathering areas and bars that would create this urban oasis.
neutral	these porches	And these porches on the roof, all together they collect the water to reuse for sanitation on the inside.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Hopefully by the beginning of next year, because we are already on the fifth floor of the construction.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	The second example is a master plan of 2,000 apartments and facilities in the city of Tunis.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And for doing such a big project, the biggest project I 've ever designed, I really needed to understand the city of Tunis, but also its surroundings and the tradition and culture.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	During that analysis I paid special attention to the medina that is this 1,000-year-old structure that used to be closed by a wall, opened by twelve different gates, connected by almost straight lines.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	When I went to the site, the first design operation we did was to extend the existing streets, creating 12 initial blocks similar in size and characteristics to the ones we have in Barcelona and other cities in Europe with these courtyards.
neutral	points	On top of that, we selected some strategic points reminded of this idea of the gates and connecting them by straight lines, and this modified this initial pattern.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And the last operation was to think about the cell, the small cell of the project, like the apartment, as an essential part of the master plan.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And for that I thought, what would be the best orientation in the Mediterranean climate for an apartment?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And it 's north-south, because it creates a thermal difference between both sides of the house and then a natural ventilation.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So we overlap a pattern that makes sure that most of the apartments are perfectly oriented in that direction.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And this is the result that is almost like a combination of the European block and the Arab city.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It has these blocks with courtyards, and then on the ground floor you have all these connections for the pedestrians.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And also it responds to the local regulations that establish a higher density on the upper levels and a lower density on the ground floor.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And it also reinforces this idea of the gates.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	The volume has this connecting shape that shades itself with three different types of apartments and also lets the light go on the ground floor in a very dense neighborhood And in the courtyards there are the different facilities, such as a gym and a kindergarten and close by, a series of commercial [spaces] that bring activity to the ground floor.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	The roof, which is my favorite space of the project is almost like giving back to the community the space taken by the construction.
neutral	neighbors	And it 's where all the neighbors, they can go up and socialize, and do activities such as having a two-kilometer run in the morning, jumping from one building to another.
neutral	examples	These two examples, they have a common approach in the design process.
neutral	the cities	And also, they are in emerging countries where you can see the cities literally growing.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	In these cities, the impact of architecture in people 's lives of today and tomorrow changes the local communities and economies at the same speed as the buildings grow.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	For this reason, I see even more importance to look at architecture finding simple but affordable solutions that enhance the relationship between the community and the environment and that aim to connect nature and people.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Thank you very much.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So I 'm going to talk about trust, and I 'm going to start by reminding you of the standard views that people have about trust.
neutral	our society	I think these are so commonplace, they 've become clichés of our society.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And I think there are three.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	One 's a claim: There has been a great decline in trust, very widely believed.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	The second is an aim: We should have more trust.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And the third is a task: We should rebuild trust.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I think that the claim, the aim and the task are all misconceived.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So what I 'm going to try to tell you today is a different story about a claim, an aim and a task which I think give one quite a lot better purchase on the matter.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	First the claim: Why do people think trust has declined?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And if I really think about it on the basis of my own evidence, I don 't know the answer.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I 'm inclined to think it may have declined in some activities or some institutions and it might have grown in others.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I don 't have an overview.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But, of course, I can look at the opinion polls, and the opinion polls are supposedly the source of a belief that trust has declined.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	When you actually look at opinion polls across time, there 's not much evidence for that.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	That 's to say, the people who were mistrusted 20 years ago, principally journalists and politicians, are still mistrusted.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And the people who were highly trusted 20 years ago are still rather highly trusted: Judges, nurses.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	The rest of us are in between, and by the way, the average person in the street is almost exactly midway.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But is that good evidence?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	What opinion polls record is, of course, opinions.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	What else can they record?
neutral	the generic attitudes	So they 're looking at the generic attitudes that people report when you ask them certain questions.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Do you trust politicians? Do you trust teachers?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Now if somebody said to you, "Do you trust greengrocers?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Do you trust fishmongers?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Do you trust elementary school teachers? "
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	You would probably begin by saying, "To do what?"
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And that would be a perfectly sensible response.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And you might say, when you understood the answer to that, "Well, I trust some of them, but not others."
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	That 's a perfectly rational thing.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	In short, in our real lives, we seek to place trust in a differentiated way.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	We don 't make an assumption that the level of trust that we will have in every instance of a certain type of official or office-holder or type of person is going to be uniform.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I might, for example, say that I certainly trust a certain elementary school teacher I know to teach the reception class to read, but in no way to drive the school minibus.
female	a good driver	I might, after all, know that she wasn 't a good driver.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I might trust my most loquacious friend to keep a conversation going but not -- but perhaps not to keep a secret.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Simple.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So if we 've got those evidence in our ordinary lives of the way that trust is differentiated, why do we sort of drop all that intelligence when we think about trust more abstractly?
neutral	polls	I think the polls are very bad guides to the level of trust that actually exists, because they try to obliterate the good judgment that goes into placing trust.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Secondly, what about the aim?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	The aim is to have more trust.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Well frankly, I think that 's a stupid aim.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It 's not what I would aim at.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I would aim to have more trust in the trustworthy but not in the untrustworthy.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	In fact, I aim positively to try not to trust the untrustworthy.
neutral	Mr. Madoff	And I think, of those people who, for example, placed their savings with the very aptly named Mr. Madoff, who then made off with them, and I think of them, and I think, well, yes, too much trust.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	More trust is not an intelligent aim in this life.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Intelligently placed and intelligently refused trust is the proper aim.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Well once one says that, one says, yeah, okay, that means that what matters in the first place is not trust but trustworthiness.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It 's judging how trustworthy people are in particular respects.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And I think that judgment requires us to look at three things.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	Are they competent? Are they honest? Are they reliable?
neutral	a person	And if we find that a person is competent in the relevant matters, and reliable and honest, we 'll have a pretty good reason to trust them, because they 'll be trustworthy.
neutral	the other hand	But if, on the other hand, they 're unreliable, we might not.
neutral	friends	I have friends who are competent and honest, but I would not trust them to post a letter, because they 're forgetful.
neutral	friends	I have friends who are very confident they can do certain things, but I realize that they overestimate their own competence.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And I 'm very glad to say, I don 't think I have many friends who are competent and reliable but extremely dishonest.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	If so, I haven 't yet spotted it.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But that 's what we 're looking for: Trustworthiness before trust.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Trust is the response.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Trustworthiness is what we have to judge. And, of course, it 's difficult.
neutral	professionals	Across the last few decades, we 've tried to construct systems of accountability for all sorts of institutions and professionals and officials and so on that will make it easier for us to judge their trustworthiness.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	A lot of these systems have the converse effect.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	They don 't work as they 're supposed to.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I remember I was talking with a midwife who said, "Well, you see, the problem is it takes longer to do the paperwork than to deliver the baby."
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And all over our public life, our institutional life, we find that problem, that the system of accountability that is meant to secure trustworthiness and evidence of trustworthiness is actually doing the opposite.
neutral	difficult tasks	It is distracting people who have to do difficult tasks, like midwives, from doing them by requiring them to tick the boxes, as we say.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	You can all give your own examples there.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So so much for the aim.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	The aim, I think, is more trustworthiness, and that is going to be different if we are trying to be trustworthy and communicate our trustworthiness to other people, and if we are trying to judge whether other people or office-holders or politicians are trustworthy.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It 's not easy. It is judgment, and simple reaction, attitudes, don 't do adequately here.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Now thirdly, the task.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Calling the task rebuilding trust, I think, also gets things backwards.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It suggests that you and I should rebuild trust.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Well, we can do that for ourselves.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	We can rebuild a bit of trustworthiness.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	We can do it two people together trying to improve trust.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But trust, in the end, is distinctive because it 's given by other people.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	You can 't rebuild what other people give you.
neutral	trust	You have to give them the basis for giving you their trust.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So you have to, I think, be trustworthy.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And that, of course, is because you can 't fool all of the people all of the time, usually.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But you also have to provide usable evidence that you are trustworthy.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	How to do it?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Well every day, all over the place, it 's being done by ordinary people, by officials, by institutions, quite effectively.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Let me give you a simple commercial example.
neutral	socks	The shop where I buy my socks says I may take them back, and they don 't ask any questions.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	They take them back and give me the money or give me the pair of socks of the color I wanted.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	That 's super. I trust them because they have made themselves vulnerable to me.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I think there 's a big lesson in that.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	If you make yourself vulnerable to the other party, then that is very good evidence that you are trustworthy and you have confidence in what you are saying.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So in the end, I think what we are aiming for is not very difficult to discern.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It is relationships in which people are trustworthy and can judge when and how the other person is trustworthy.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So the moral of all this is, we need to think much less about trust, let alone about attitudes of trust detected or mis-detected by opinion polls, much more about being trustworthy, and how you give people adequate, useful and simple evidence that you 're trustworthy.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Thanks.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	You know, my favorite part of being a dad is the movies I get to watch.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I love sharing my favorite movies with my kids, and when my daughter was four, we got to watch "The Wizard of Oz" together.
female	imagination	It totally dominated her imagination for months.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	Her favorite character was Glinda, of course.
female	a sparkly dress	It gave her a great excuse to wear a sparkly dress and carry a wand.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But you watch that movie enough times, and you start to realize how unusual it is.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Now we live today, and are raising our children, in a kind of children 's-fantasy-spectacular-industrial complex.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But "The Wizard of Oz" stood alone.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It did not start that trend.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Forty years later was when the trend really caught on, with, interestingly, another movie that featured a metal guy and a furry guy rescuing a girl by dressing up as the enemy 's guards.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Do you know what I 'm talking about?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Yeah.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Now, there 's a big difference between these two movies, a couple of really big differences between "The Wizard of Oz" and all the movies we watch today.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	One is there 's very little violence in "The Wizard of Oz."
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	The monkeys are rather aggressive, as are the apple trees.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But I think if "The Wizard of Oz" were made today, the wizard would say, "Dorothy, you are the savior of Oz that the prophecy foretold.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Use your magic slippers to defeat the computer-generated armies of the Wicked Witch. "
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But that 's not how it happens.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Another thing that 's really unique about "The Wizard of Oz" to me is that all of the most heroic and wise and even villainous characters are female.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Now I started to notice this when I actually showed "Star Wars" to my daughter, which was years later, and the situation was different.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	At that point I also had a son.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	He was only three at the time.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	He was not invited to the screening. He was too young for that.
male	the second child	But he was the second child, and the level of supervision had plummeted.
male	duckling	So he wandered in, and it imprinted on him like a mommy duck does to its duckling, and I don 't think he understands what 's going on, but he is sure soaking in it.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	And I wonder what he 's soaking in.
male	themes	Is he picking up on the themes of courage and perseverance and loyalty?
male	the government	Is he picking up on the fact that Luke joins an army to overthrow the government?
male	Aunt Beru	Is he picking up on the fact that there are only boys in the universe except for Aunt Beru, and of course this princess, who 's really cool, but who kind of waits around through most of the movie so that she can award the hero with a medal and a wink to thank him for saving the universe, which he does by the magic that he was born with?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Compare this to 1939 with "The Wizard of Oz."
female	movie	How does Dorothy win her movie?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	By making friends with everybody and being a leader.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	That 's kind of the world I 'd rather raise my kids in -- Oz, right? -- and not the world of dudes fighting, which is where we kind of have to be.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Why is there so much Force -- capital F, Force -- in the movies we have for our kids, and so little yellow brick road?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	There is a lot of great writing about the impact that the boy-violent movie has on girls, and you should do that reading. It 's very good.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I haven 't read as much on how boys are picking up on this vibe.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I know from my own experience that Princess Leia did not provide the adequate context that I could have used in navigating the adult world that is co-ed.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I think there was a first-kiss moment when I really expected the credits to start rolling because that 's the end of the movie, right?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I finished my quest, I got the girl.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Why are you still standing there?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I don 't know what I 'm supposed to do.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	The movies are very, very focused on defeating the villain and getting your reward, and there 's not a lot of room for other relationships and other journeys.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It 's almost as though if you 're a boy, you are a dopey animal, and if you are a girl, you should bring your warrior costume.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	There are plenty of exceptions, and I will defend the Disney princesses in front of any you.
neutral	the boys	But they do send a message to boys, that they are not, the boys are not really the target audience.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	They are doing a phenomenal job of teaching girls how to defend against the patriarchy, but they are not necessarily showing boys how they 're supposed to defend against the patriarchy.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	There 's no models for them.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And we also have some terrific women who are writing new stories for our kids, and as three-dimensional and delightful as Hermione and Katniss are, these are still war movies.
male	the most successful studio	And, of course, the most successful studio of all time continues to crank out classic after classic, every single one of them about the journey of a boy, or a man, or two men who are friends, or a man and his son, or two men who are raising a little girl.
neutral	Brave	Until, as many of you are thinking, this year, when they finally came out with "Brave."
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I recommend it to all of you. It 's on demand now.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Do you remember what the critics said when "Brave" came out?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	"Aw, I can 't believe Pixar made a princess movie."
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It 's very good. Don 't let that stop you.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Now, almost none of these movies pass the Bechdel Test.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I don 't know if you 've heard of this.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It has not yet caught on and caught fire, but maybe today we will start a movement.
neutral	Alison Bechdel	Alison Bechdel is a comic book artist, and back in the mid- '80s, she recorded this conversation she 'd had with a friend about assessing the movies that they saw.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And it 's very simple. There 's just three questions you should ask: Is there more than one character in the movie that is female who has lines?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So try to meet that bar.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And do these women talk to each other at any point in the movie?
neutral	their conversation	And is their conversation about something other than the guy that they both like?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Right? Thank you.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Thank you very much.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Two women who exist and talk to each other about stuff.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It does happen. I 've seen it, and yet I very rarely see it in the movies that we know and love.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	In fact, this week I went to see a very high-quality movie, "Argo."
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Right? Oscar buzz, doing great at the box office, a consensus idea of what a quality Hollywood film is.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It pretty much flunks the Bechdel test.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And I don 't think it should, because a lot of the movie, I don 't know if you 've seen it, but a lot of the movie takes place in this embassy where men and women are hiding out during the hostage crisis.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	We 've got quite a few scenes of the men having deep, angst-ridden conversations in this hideout, and the great moment for one of the actresses is to peek through the door and say, "Are you coming to bed, honey?"
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	That 's Hollywood for you.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So let 's look at the numbers.
neutral	the 100 most popular movies	2011, of the 100 most popular movies, how many of them do you think actually have female protagonists?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Eleven. It 's not bad.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It 's not as many percent as the number of women we 've just elected to Congress, so that 's good.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But there is a number that is greater than this that 's going to bring this room down.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Last year, The New York Times published a study that the government had done.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Here 's what it said.
neutral	five women	One out of five women in America say that they have been sexually assaulted some time in their life.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Now, I don 't think that 's the fault of popular entertainment.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I don 't think kids 'movies have anything to do with that.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I don 't even think that music videos or pornography are really directly related to that, but something is going wrong, and when I hear that statistic, one of the things I think of is that 's a lot of sexual assailants.
neutral	these guys	Who are these guys? What are they learning?
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	What are they failing to learn?
neutral	a male hero's job	Are they absorbing the story that a male hero 's job is to defeat the villain with violence and then collect the reward, which is a woman who has no friends and doesn 't speak?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Are we soaking up that story?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	You know, as a parent with the privilege of raising a daughter like all of you who are doing the same thing, we find this world and this statistic very alarming and we want to prepare them.
neutral	our sons	We have tools at our disposal like "girl power," and we hope that that will help, but I gotta wonder, is girl power going to protect them if, at the same time, actively or passively, we are training our sons to maintain their boy power?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I mean, I think the Netflix queue is one way that we can do something very important, and I 'm talking mainly to the dads here.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I think we have got to show our sons a new definition of manhood.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	The definition of manhood is already turning upside down.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	You 've read about how the new economy is changing the roles of caregiver and wage earner.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	They 're throwing it up in the air.
neutral	the women	So our sons are going to have to find some way of adapting to this, some new relationship with each other, and I think we really have to show them, and model for them, how a real man is someone who trusts his sisters and respects them, and wants to be on their team, and stands up against the real bad guys, who are the men who want to abuse the women.
neutral	those heroines	And I think our job in the Netflix queue is to look out for those movies that pass the Bechdel Test, if we can find them, and to seek out the heroines who are there, who show real courage, who bring people together, and to nudge our sons to identify with those heroines and to say, "I want to be on their team," because they 're going to be on their team.
female	Star Wars	When I asked my daughter who her favorite character was in "Star Wars," do you know what she said?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Obi-Wan.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Obi-Wan Kenobi and Glinda.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	What do these two have in common?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Maybe it 's not just the sparkly dress.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I think these people are experts.
neutral	the two people	I think these are the two people in the movie who know more than anybody else, and they love sharing their knowledge with other people to help them reach their potential.
neutral	leaders	Now, they are leaders.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I like that kind of quest for my daughter, and I like that kind of quest for my son.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I want more quests like that.
male	my son	I want fewer quests where my son is told, "Go out and fight it alone," and more quests where he sees that it 's his job to join a team, maybe a team led by women, to help other people become better and be better people, like the Wizard of Oz.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Thank you.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I would like to talk to you about a story about a small town kid.
male	his name	I don 't know his name, but I do know his story.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	He lives in a small village in southern Somalia.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	His village is near Mogadishu.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Drought drives the small village into poverty and to the brink of starvation.
male	case	With nothing left for him there, he leaves for the big city, in this case, Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia.
male	no opportunities	When he arrives, there are no opportunities, no jobs, no way forward.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	He ends up living in a tent city on the outskirts of Mogadishu.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Maybe a year passes, nothing.
male	gentleman	One day, he 's approached by a gentleman who offers to take him to lunch, then to dinner, to breakfast.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	He meets this dynamic group of people, and they give him a break.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	He 's given a bit of money to buy himself some new clothes, money to send back home to his family.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	He is introduced to this young woman.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	He eventually gets married.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	He starts this new life.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	He has a purpose in life.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	One beautiful day in Mogadishu, under an azure blue sky, a car bomb goes off.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	That small town kid with the big city dreams was the suicide bomber, and that dynamic group of people were al Shabaab, a terrorist organization linked to al Qaeda.
male	a small town kid	So how does the story of a small town kid just trying to make it big in the city end up with him blowing himself up?
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	He was waiting.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	He was waiting for an opportunity, waiting to begin his future, waiting for a way forward, and this was the first thing that came along.
male	waithood	This was the first thing that pulled him out of what we call waithood.
male	the world	And his story repeats itself in urban centers around the world.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It is the story of the disenfranchised, unemployed urban youth who sparks riots in Johannesburg, sparks riots in London, who reaches out for something other than waithood.
neutral	the city	For young people, the promise of the city, the big city dream is that of opportunity, of jobs, of wealth, but young people are not sharing in the prosperity of their cities.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Often it 's youth who suffer from the highest unemployment rates.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	By 2030, three out of five people living in cities will be under the age of 18.
neutral	young people	If we do not include young people in the growth of our cities, if we do not provide them opportunities, the story of waithood, the gateway to terrorism, to violence, to gangs, will be the story of cities 2.0.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And in my city of birth, Mogadishu, 70 percent of young people suffer from unemployment.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	70 percent don 't work, don 't go to school.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	They pretty much do nothing.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I went back to Mogadishu last month, and I went to visit Madina Hospital, the hospital I was born in.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I remember standing in front of that bullet-ridden hospital thinking, what if I had never left?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	What if I had been forced into that same state of waithood?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Would I have become a terrorist?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I 'm not really sure about the answer.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	My reason for being in Mogadishu that month was actually to host a youth leadership and entrepreneurship summit.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I brought together about 90 young Somali leaders.
neutral	city	We sat down and brainstormed on solutions to the biggest challenges facing their city.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	One of the young men in the room was Aden.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	He went to university in Mogadishu, graduated.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	There were no jobs, no opportunities.
male	al Shabaab	I remember him telling me, because he was a college graduate, unemployed, frustrated, that he was the perfect target for al Shabaab and other terrorist organizations, to be recruited.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	They sought people like him out.
male	his story	But his story takes a different route.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	In Mogadishu, the biggest barrier to getting from point A to point B are the roads.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Twenty-three years of civil war have completely destroyed the road system, and a motorbike can be the easiest way to get around.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Aden saw an opportunity and seized it.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	He started a motorbike company.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	He began renting out motorbikes to local residents who couldn 't normally afford them.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	He bought 10 bikes, with the help of family and friends, and his dream is to eventually expand to several hundred within the next three years.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	How is this story different?
male	story	What makes his story different?
male	his ability	I believe it is his ability to identify and seize a new opportunity.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It 's entrepreneurship, and I believe entrepreneurship can be the most powerful tool against waithood.
neutral	young people	It empowers young people to be the creators of the very economic opportunities they are so desperately seeking.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And you can train young people to be entrepreneurs.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I want to talk to you about a young man who attended one of my meetings, Mohamed Mohamoud, a florist.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	He was helping me train some of the young people at the summit in entrepreneurship and how to be innovative and how to create a culture of entrepreneurship.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	He 's actually the first florist Mogadishu has seen in over 22 years, and until recently, until Mohamed came along, if you wanted flowers at your wedding, you used plastic bouquets shipped from abroad.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	If you asked someone, "When was the last time you saw fresh flowers?" For many who grew up under civil war, the answer would be, "Never."
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So Mohamed saw an opportunity.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	He started a landscaping and design floral company.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	He created a farm right outside of Mogadishu, and started growing tulips and lilies, which he said could survive the harsh Mogadishu climate.
male	Mogadishu	And he began delivering flowers to weddings, creating gardens at homes and businesses around the city, and he 's now working on creating Mogadishu 's first public park in 22 years.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	There 's no public park in Mogadishu.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	He wants to create a space where families, young people, can come together, and, as he says, smell the proverbial roses.
neutral	the way	And he doesn 't grow roses because they use too much water, by the way.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So the first step is to inspire young people, and in that room, Mohamed 's presence had a really profound impact on the youth in that room.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	They had never really thought about starting up a business.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	They 've thought about working for an NGO, working for the government, but his story, his innovation, really had a strong impact on them.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	He forced them to look at their city as a place of opportunity.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	He empowered them to believe that they could be entrepreneurs, that they could be change makers.
neutral	innovative solutions	By the end of the day, they were coming up with innovative solutions to some of the biggest challenges facing their city.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	They came up with entrepreneurial solutions to local problems.
neutral	young people	So inspiring young people and creating a culture of entrepreneurship is a really great step, but young people need capital to make their ideas a reality.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	They need expertise and mentorship to guide them in developing and launching their businesses.
neutral	young people	Connect young people with the resources they need, provide them the support they need to go from ideation to creation, and you will create catalysts for urban growth.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	For me, entrepreneurship is more than just starting up a business.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It 's about creating a social impact.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Mohamed is not simply selling flowers.
male	hope	I believe he is selling hope.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	His Peace Park, and that 's what he calls it, when it 's created, will actually transform the way people see their city.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Aden hired street kids to help rent out and maintain those bikes for him.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	He gave them the opportunity to escape the paralysis of waithood.
neutral	their cities	These young entrepreneurs are having a tremendous impact in their cities.
neutral	youth	So my suggestion is, turn youth into entrepreneurs, incubate and nurture their inherent innovation, and you will have more stories of flowers and Peace Parks than of car bombs and waithood.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Thank you.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	When I was a child growing up in Maine, one of my favorite things to do was to look for sand dollars on the seashores of Maine, because my parents told me it would bring me luck.
neutral	shells	But you know, these shells, they 're hard to find.
unknown	ROBERTA-TAG-EXCEPTION	They 're covered in sand. They 're difficult to see.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	However, overtime, I got used to looking for them.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	I started seeing shapes and patterns that helped me to collect them.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	This grew into a passion for finding things, a love for the past and archaeology.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And eventually when I started studying Egyptology, I realized that seeing with my naked eyes alone wasn 't enough.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Because all of the sudden in Egypt my beach had grown from a tiny beach in Maine to one eight hundred miles long next to the Nile, and my sand dollars had grown to the size of cities.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	This is really what brought me to using satellite imagery.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	For trying to map the past, I knew that I had to see differently.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So I want to show you an example of how we see differently using the infrared.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	This is a site located in the eastern Egyptian delta called Bendix.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And the site visibly appears brown, but when we use the infrared and we process it, all of the sudden, using false color, the site appears as bright pink.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	What you are seeing are the actual chemical changes to the landscape caused by the building materials and activities of the ancient Egyptians.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	What I want to share with you today is how we 've used satellite data to find an ancient Egyptian city, called Itjtawy, missing for thousands of years.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Itjtawy was ancient Egypt 's capital for over four hundred years, at a period of time called the Middle Kingdom about four thousand years ago.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	The site is located in the Faiyum of Egypt and site is really important because in the Middle Kingdom there was this great renaissance for ancient Egyptian art, architecture and religion.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Egyptologists have always known the site of Itjtawy was located somewhere near the pyramids of the two kings who built it, indicated within the red circles here, but somewhere within this massive flood plane.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	This area is huge -- it 's four miles by three miles in size.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	The Nile used to flow right next to the city of Itjtawy, and as it shifted and changed and moved over time to the east, it covered over the city.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So, how do you find a buried city in a vast landscape?
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Finding it randomly would be the equivalent of locating a needle in a haystack, blindfolded wearing baseball mitts.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So what we did is we used NASA topography data to map out the landscape, very subtle changes.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	We started to be able to see where the Nile used to flow.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	But you can see in more detail -- and even more interesting -- this very slight raised area seen within the circle up here, which we thought could possibly be the location of the city of Itjtawy.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So we collaborated with the Egyptian scientists to do coring work, which you see here.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	When I say coring, it 's like ice coring, but instead of layers of climate change you 're looking for layers of human occupation.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	And five meters down, underneath a thick layer of mud, we found a dense layer of pottery.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	What this shows is that at this possible location of Itjtawy, five meters down, we have of layer of occupation for several hundred years dating to the Middle Kingdom, dating to the exact period of time we think Itjtawy is.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	We also found work stone -- carnelian, quartz and agate that shows that there was a jewelers workshop here.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	These might not look like much, but when you think about the most common stones used in jewelry from the Middle Kingdom, these are the stones that were used.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So, we have a dense layer of occupation dating to the Middle Kingdom at this site.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	We also have evidence of an elite jewelers workshop, showing that whatever was there was a very important city.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	No Itjtawy was here yet, but we 're going to be returning to the site in the near future to map it out.
neutral	young Egyptians	And even more importantly, we have funding to train young Egyptians in the use of satellite technology so they can be the ones making great discoveries as well.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So I wanted to end with my favorite quote from the Middle Kingdom -- it was probably written at the city of Itjtawy four thousand years ago.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	"Sharing knowledge is the greatest of all callings.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	There 's nothing like it in the land. "
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	So as it turns out, TED was not founded in 1984 AD.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Making ideas actually started in 1984 BC at a not-lost-for-long city, found from above.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	It certainly puts finding seashells by the seashore in perspective.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Thank you very much.
unknown	ROBERTA-NO-TAG	Thank you.
