Thank you so much, Chris. 
And it's truly a great honor to have the opportunity to come to this stage twice; I'm extremely grateful. 
I have been blown away by this conference, and I want to thank all of you for the many nice comments about what I had to say the other night. 
And I say that sincerely, partly because (Mock sob) I need that. 
(Laughter) Put yourselves in my position. 
(Laughter) I flew on Air Force Two for eight years. 
(Laughter) Now I have to take off my shoes or boots to get on an airplane! 
(Laughter) (Applause) I'll tell you one quick story to illustrate what that's been like for me. 
(Laughter) It's a true story -- every bit of this is true. 
Soon after Tipper and I left the -- (Mock sob) White House -- (Laughter) we were driving from our home in Nashville to a little farm we have 50 miles east of Nashville. 
Driving ourselves. 
(Laughter) I know it sounds like a little thing to you, but -- (Laughter) I looked in the rear-view mirror and all of a sudden it just hit me. 
There was no motorcade back there. 
(Laughter) You've heard of phantom limb pain? 
(Laughter) This was a rented Ford Taurus. 
(Laughter) It was dinnertime, and we started looking for a place to eat. 
We were on I-40. 
We got to Exit 238, Lebanon, Tennessee. 
We got off the exit, we found a Shoney's restaurant. 
Low-cost family restaurant chain, for those of you who don't know it. 
We went in and sat down at the booth, and the waitress came over, made a big commotion over Tipper. 
(Laughter) She took our order, and then went to the couple in the booth next to us, and she lowered her voice so much, I had to really strain to hear what she was saying. 
And she said "Yes, that's former Vice President Al Gore and his wife, Tipper." 
And the man said, "He's come down a long way, hasn't he?" 
(Laughter) (Applause) There's been kind of a series of epiphanies. 
(Laughter) The very next day, continuing the totally true story, I got on a G-V to fly to Africa to make a speech in Nigeria, in the city of Lagos, on the topic of energy. 
And I began the speech by telling them the story of what had just happened the day before in Nashville. 
And I told it pretty much the same way I've just shared it with you: Tipper and I were driving ourselves, Shoney's, low-cost family restaurant chain, what the man said -- they laughed. 
I gave my speech, then went back out to the airport to fly back home. 
I fell asleep on the plane until, during the middle of the night, we landed on the Azores Islands for refueling. 
I woke up, they opened the door, I went out to get some fresh air, and I looked, and there was a man running across the runway. 
And he was waving a piece of paper, and he was yelling, "Call Washington! Call Washington!" 
And I thought to myself, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the Atlantic, what in the world could be wrong in Washington? 
Then I remembered it could be a bunch of things. 
(Laughter) But what it turned out to be, was that my staff was extremely upset because one of the wire services in Nigeria had already written a story about my speech, and it had already been printed in cities all across the United States of America. 
It was printed in Monterey, I checked. 
(Laughter) And the story began, "Former Vice President Al Gore announced in Nigeria yesterday," quote: 'My wife Tipper and I have opened a low-cost family restaurant'" -- (Laughter) "'named Shoney's, and we are running it ourselves.'" (Laughter) Before I could get back to U.S. soil, David Letterman and Jay Leno had already started in on -- one of them had me in a big white chef's hat, Tipper was saying, "One more burger with fries!" 
(Laughter) Three days later, I got a nice, long, handwritten letter from my friend and partner and colleague Bill Clinton, saying, "Congratulations on the new restaurant, Al!" 
(Laughter) We like to celebrate each other's successes in life. 
(Laughter) I was going to talk about information ecology. 
But I was thinking that, since I plan to make a lifelong habit of coming back to TED, that maybe I could talk about that another time. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: It's a deal! 
(Applause) Al Gore: I want to focus on what many of you have said you would like me to elaborate on: What can you do about the climate crisis? 
I want to start with a couple of -- I'm going to show some new images, and I'm going to recapitulate just four or five. 
Now, the slide show. 
I update the slide show every time I give it. 
I add new images, because I learn more about it every time I give it. 
It's like beach-combing, you know? 
Every time the tide comes in and out, you find some more shells. 
Just in the last two days, we got the new temperature records in January. 
This is just for the United States of America. 
Historical average for Januarys is 31 degrees; last month was 39.5 degrees. 
Now, I know that you wanted some more bad news about the environment -- I'm kidding. 
But these are the recapitulation slides, and then I'm going to go into new material about what you can do. 
But I wanted to elaborate on a couple of these. 
First of all, this is where we're projected to go with the U.S. contribution to global warming, under business as usual. 
Efficiency in end-use electricity and end-use of all energy is the low-hanging fruit. 
Efficiency and conservation -- it's not a cost; it's a profit. 
The sign is wrong. 
It's not negative; it's positive. 
These are investments that pay for themselves. 
But they are also very effective in deflecting our path. 
Cars and trucks -- I talked about that in the slideshow, but I want you to put it in perspective. 
It's an easy, visible target of concern -- and it should be -- but there is more global warming pollution that comes from buildings than from cars and trucks. 
Cars and trucks are very significant, and we have the lowest standards in the world. 
And so we should address that. But it's part of the puzzle. 
Other transportation efficiency is as important as cars and trucks. 
Renewables at the current levels of technological efficiency can make this much difference. 
And with what Vinod, and John Doerr and others, many of you here -- there are a lot of people directly involved in this -- this wedge is going to grow much more rapidly than the current projection shows it. 
Carbon Capture and Sequestration -- that's what CCS stands for -- is likely to become the killer app that will enable us to continue to use fossil fuels in a way that is safe. 
Not quite there yet. 
OK. Now, what can you do? 
Most of these expenditures are also profitable. 
Insulation, better design. 
I mentioned automobiles -- buy a hybrid. 
Use light rail. 
Figure out some of the other options that are much better. 
It's important. 
Be a green consumer. 
You have choices with everything you buy, between things that have a harsh effect, or a much less harsh effect on the global climate crisis. 
Consider this: Make a decision to live a carbon-neutral life. 
Those of you who are good at branding, I'd love to get your advice and help on how to say this in a way that connects with the most people. 
It is easier than you think. 
A lot of us in here have made that decision, and it is really pretty easy. 
It means reduce your carbon dioxide emissions with the full range of choices that you make, and then purchase or acquire offsets for the remainder that you have not completely reduced. 
And what it means is elaborated at climatecrisis.net. 
There is a carbon calculator. 
Participant Productions convened -- with my active involvement -- the leading software writers in the world, on this arcane science of carbon calculation, to construct a consumer-friendly carbon calculator. 
You can very precisely calculate what your CO2 emissions are, and then you will be given options to reduce. 
And by the time the movie comes out in May, this will be updated to 2.0, and we will have click-through purchases of offsets. 
Next, consider making your business carbon-neutral. 
Again, some of us have done that, and it's not as hard as you think. 
Integrate climate solutions into all of your innovations, whether you are from the technology, or entertainment, or design and architecture community. 
Invest sustainably. 
Majora mentioned this. 
Listen, if you have invested money with managers who you compensate on the basis of their annual performance, don't ever again complain about quarterly report CEO management. 
Over time, people do what you pay them to do. 
And if they judge how much they're going to get paid on your capital that they've invested, based on the short-term returns, you're going to get short-term decisions. 
A lot more to be said about that. 
Become a catalyst of change. 
Teach others, learn about it, talk about it. 
The movie is a movie version of the slideshow I gave two nights ago, except it's a lot more entertaining. 
And it comes out in May. 
Many of you here have the opportunity to ensure that a lot of people see it. 
Consider sending somebody to Nashville. 
Pick well. 
And I am personally going to train people to give this slideshow -- re-purposed, with some of the personal stories obviously replaced with a generic approach, and it's not just the slides, it's what they mean. 
And it's how they link together. 
And so I'm going to be conducting a course this summer for a group of people that are nominated by different folks to come and then give it en masse, in communities all across the country, and we're going to update the slideshow for all of them every single week, to keep it right on the cutting edge. 
Working with Larry Lessig, it will be, somewhere in that process, posted with tools and limited-use copyrights, so that young people can remix it and do it in their own way. 
(Applause) Where did anybody get the idea that you ought to stay arm's length from politics? 
We need Republicans as well. 
This used to be a bipartisan issue, and I know that in this group it really is. 
Become politically active. 
Make our democracy work the way it's supposed to work. 
Support the idea of capping carbon dioxide emissions -- global warming pollution -- and trading it. 
Here's why: as long as the United States is out of the world system, it's not a closed system. 
Once it becomes a closed system, with U.S. participation, then everybody who's on a board of directors -- how many people here serve on the board of directors of a corporation? 
Once it's a closed system, you will have legal liability if you do not urge your CEO to get the maximum income from reducing and trading the carbon emissions that can be avoided. 
The market will work to solve this problem -- if we can accomplish this. 
Help with the mass persuasion campaign that will start this spring. 
We have to change the minds of the American people. 
Because presently, the politicians do not have permission to do what needs to be done. 
And in our modern country, the role of logic and reason no longer includes mediating between wealth and power the way it once did. 
It's now repetition of short, hot-button, 30-second, 28-second television ads. 
We have to buy a lot of those ads. 
Let's re-brand global warming, as many of you have suggested. 
I like "climate crisis" instead of "climate collapse," but again, those of you who are good at branding, I need your help on this. 
Somebody said the test we're facing now, a scientist told me, is whether the combination of an opposable thumb and a neocortex is a viable combination. 
(Laughter) That's really true. 
Again, the Republicans here -- this shouldn't be partisan. 
You have more influence than some of us who are Democrats do. 
This is an opportunity. 
Not just this, but connected to the ideas that are here, to bring more coherence to them. 
We are one. 
Thank you very much, I appreciate it. 
(Applause) 

We're here to celebrate compassion. 
But compassion, from my vantage point, has a problem. 
As essential as it is across our traditions, as real as so many of us know it to be in particular lives, the word "compassion" is hollowed out in our culture, and it is suspect in my field of journalism. 
It's seen as a squishy kumbaya thing, or it's seen as potentially depressing. 
Karen Armstrong has told what I think is an iconic story of giving a speech in Holland and, after the fact, the word "compassion" was translated as "pity." 
Now compassion, when it enters the news, too often comes in the form of feel-good feature pieces or sidebars about heroic people you could never be like or happy endings or examples of self-sacrifice that would seem to be too good to be true most of the time. 
Our cultural imagination about compassion has been deadened by idealistic images. 
And so what I'd like to do this morning for the next few minutes is perform a linguistic resurrection. 
And I hope you'll come with me on my basic premise that words matter, that they shape the way we understand ourselves, the way we interpret the world and the way we treat others. 
When this country first encountered genuine diversity in the 1960s, we adopted tolerance as the core civic virtue with which we would approach that. 
Now the word "tolerance," if you look at it in the dictionary, connotes "allowing," "indulging" and "enduring." 
In the medical context that it comes from, it is about testing the limits of thriving in an unfavorable environment. 
Tolerance is not really a lived virtue; it's more of a cerebral ascent. 
And it's too cerebral to animate guts and hearts and behavior when the going gets rough. 
And the going is pretty rough right now. 
I think that without perhaps being able to name it, we are collectively experiencing that we've come as far as we can with tolerance as our only guiding virtue. 
Compassion is a worthy successor. 
It is organic, across our religious, spiritual and ethical traditions, and yet it transcends them. 
Compassion is a piece of vocabulary that could change us if we truly let it sink into the standards to which we hold ourselves and others, both in our private and in our civic spaces. 
So what is it, three-dimensionally? 
What are its kindred and component parts? 
What's in its universe of attendant virtues? 
To start simply, I want to say that compassion is kind. 
Now "kindness" might sound like a very mild word, and it's prone to its own abundant cliche. 
But kindness is an everyday byproduct of all the great virtues. 
And it is a most edifying form of instant gratification. 
Compassion is also curious. 
Compassion cultivates and practices curiosity. 
I love a phrase that was offered me by two young women who are interfaith innovators in Los Angeles, Aziza Hasan and Malka Fenyvesi. 
They are working to create a new imagination about shared life among young Jews and Muslims, and as they do that, they cultivate what they call "curiosity without assumptions." 
Well that's going to be a breeding ground for compassion. 
Compassion can be synonymous with empathy. 
It can be joined with the harder work of forgiveness and reconciliation, but it can also express itself in the simple act of presence. 
It's linked to practical virtues like generosity and hospitality and just being there, just showing up. 
I think that compassion also is often linked to beauty -- and by that I mean a willingness to see beauty in the other, not just what it is about them that might need helping. 
I love it that my Muslim conversation partners often speak of beauty as a core moral value. 
And in that light, for the religious, compassion also brings us into the territory of mystery -- encouraging us not just to see beauty, but perhaps also to look for the face of God in the moment of suffering, in the face of a stranger, in the face of the vibrant religious other. 
I'm not sure if I can show you what tolerance looks like, but I can show you what compassion looks like -- because it is visible. 
When we see it, we recognize it and it changes the way we think about what is doable, what is possible. 
It is so important when we're communicating big ideas -- but especially a big spiritual idea like compassion -- to root it as we present it to others in space and time and flesh and blood -- the color and complexity of life. 
And compassion does seek physicality. 
I first started to learn this most vividly from Matthew Sanford. 
And I don't imagine that you will realize this when you look at this photograph of him, but he's paraplegic. 
He's been paralyzed from the waist down since he was 13, in a car crash that killed his father and his sister. 
Matthew's legs don't work, and he'll never walk again, and -- and he does experience this as an "and" rather than a "but" -- and he experiences himself to be healed and whole. 
And as a teacher of yoga, he brings that experience to others across the spectrum of ability and disability, health, illness and aging. 
He says that he's just at an extreme end of the spectrum we're all on. 
He's doing some amazing work now with veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. 
And Matthew has made this remarkable observation that I'm just going to offer you and let it sit. 
I can't quite explain it, and he can't either. 
But he says that he has yet to experience someone who became more aware of their body, in all its frailty and its grace, without, at the same time, becoming more compassionate towards all of life. 
Compassion also looks like this. 
This is Jean Vanier. 
Jean Vanier helped found the L'Arche communities, which you can now find all over the world, communities centered around life with people with mental disabilities -- mostly Down syndrome. 
The communities that Jean Vanier founded, like Jean Vanier himself, exude tenderness. 
"Tender" is another word I would love to spend some time resurrecting. 
We spend so much time in this culture being driven and aggressive, and I spend a lot of time being those things too. 
And compassion can also have those qualities. 
But again and again, lived compassion brings us back to the wisdom of tenderness. 
Jean Vanier says that his work, like the work of other people -- his great, beloved, late friend Mother Teresa -- is never in the first instance about changing the world; it's in the first instance about changing ourselves. 
He's says that what they do with L'Arche is not a solution, but a sign. 
Compassion is rarely a solution, but it is always a sign of a deeper reality, of deeper human possibilities. 
And compassion is unleashed in wider and wider circles by signs and stories, never by statistics and strategies. 
We need those things too, but we're also bumping up against their limits. 
And at the same time that we are doing that, I think we are rediscovering the power of story -- that as human beings, we need stories to survive, to flourish, to change. 
Our traditions have always known this, and that is why they have always cultivated stories at their heart and carried them forward in time for us. 
There is, of course, a story behind the key moral longing and commandment of Judaism to repair the world -- tikkun olam. 
And I'll never forget hearing that story from Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, who told it to me as her grandfather told it to her, that in the beginning of the Creation something happened and the original light of the universe was shattered into countless pieces. 
It lodged as shards inside every aspect of the Creation. 
And that the highest human calling is to look for this light, to point at it when we see it, to gather it up, and in so doing, to repair the world. 
Now this might sound like a fanciful tale. 
Some of my fellow journalists might interpret it that way. 
Rachel Naomi Remen says this is an important and empowering story for our time, because this story insists that each and every one of us, frail and flawed as we may be, inadequate as we may feel, has exactly what's needed to help repair the part of the world that we can see and touch. 
Stories like this, signs like this, are practical tools in a world longing to bring compassion to abundant images of suffering that can otherwise overwhelm us. 
Rachel Naomi Remen is actually bringing compassion back to its rightful place alongside science in her field of medicine in the training of new doctors. 
And this trend of what Rachel Naomi Remen is doing, how these kinds of virtues are finding a place in the vocabulary of medicine -- the work Fred Luskin is doing -- I think this is one of the most fascinating developments of the 21st century -- that science, in fact, is taking a virtue like compassion definitively out of the realm of idealism. 
This is going to change science, I believe, and it will change religion. 
But here's a face from 20th century science that might surprise you in a discussion about compassion. 
We all know about the Albert Einstein who came up with E = mc2. 
We don't hear so much about the Einstein who invited the African American opera singer, Marian Anderson, to stay in his home when she came to sing in Princeton because the best hotel there was segregated and wouldn't have her. 
We don't hear about the Einstein who used his celebrity to advocate for political prisoners in Europe or the Scottsboro boys in the American South. 
Einstein believed deeply that science should transcend national and ethnic divisions. 
But he watched physicists and chemists become the purveyors of weapons of mass destruction in the early 20th century. 
He once said that science in his generation had become like a razor blade in the hands of a three-year-old. 
And Einstein foresaw that as we grow more modern and technologically advanced, we need the virtues our traditions carry forward in time more, not less. 
He liked to talk about the spiritual geniuses of the ages. 
Some of his favorites were Moses, Jesus, Buddha, St. Francis of Assisi, Gandhi -- he adored his contemporary, Gandhi. 
And Einstein said -- and I think this is a quote, again, that has not been passed down in his legacy -- that "these kinds of people are geniuses in the art of living, more necessary to the dignity, security and joy of humanity than the discoverers of objective knowledge." 
Now invoking Einstein might not seem the best way to bring compassion down to earth and make it seem accessible to all the rest of us, but actually it is. 
I want to show you the rest of this photograph, because this photograph is analogous to what we do to the word "compassion" in our culture -- we clean it up and we diminish its depths and its grounding in life, which is messy. 
So in this photograph you see a mind looking out a window at what might be a cathedral -- it's not. 
This is the full photograph, and you see a middle-aged man wearing a leather jacket, smoking a cigar. 
And by the look of that paunch, he hasn't been doing enough yoga. 
We put these two photographs side-by-side on our website, and someone said, "When I look at the first photo, I ask myself, what was he thinking? 
And when I look at the second, I ask, what kind of person was he? What kind of man is this?" 
Well, he was complicated. 
He was incredibly compassionate in some of his relationships and terribly inadequate in others. 
And it is much harder, often, to be compassionate towards those closest to us, which is another quality in the universe of compassion, on its dark side, that also deserves our serious attention and illumination. 
Gandhi, too, was a real flawed human being. 
So was Martin Luther King, Jr. So was Dorothy Day. 
So was Mother Teresa. 
So are we all. 
And I want to say that it is a liberating thing to realize that that is no obstacle to compassion -- following on what Fred Luskin says -- that these flaws just make us human. 
Our culture is obsessed with perfection and with hiding problems. 
But what a liberating thing to realize that our problems, in fact, are probably our richest sources for rising to this ultimate virtue of compassion, towards bringing compassion towards the suffering and joys of others. 
Rachel Naomi Remen is a better doctor because of her life-long struggle with Crohn's disease. 
Einstein became a humanitarian, not because of his exquisite knowledge of space and time and matter, but because he was a Jew as Germany grew fascist. 
And Karen Armstrong, I think you would also say that it was some of your very wounding experiences in a religious life that, with a zigzag, have led to the Charter for Compassion. 
Compassion can't be reduced to sainthood any more than it can be reduced to pity. 
So I want to propose a final definition of compassion -- this is Einstein with Paul Robeson by the way -- and that would be for us to call compassion a spiritual technology. 
Now our traditions contain vast wisdom about this, and we need them to mine it for us now. 
But compassion is also equally at home in the secular as in the religious. 
So I will paraphrase Einstein in closing and say that humanity, the future of humanity, needs this technology as much as it needs all the others that have now connected us and set before us the terrifying and wondrous possibility of actually becoming one human race. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

It's great being here at TED. 
You know, I think there might be some presentations that will go over my head, but the most amazing concepts are the ones that go right under my feet. 
The little things in life, sometimes that we forget about, like pollination, that we take for granted. 
And you can't tell the story about pollinators -- bees, bats, hummingbirds, butterflies -- without telling the story about the invention of flowers and how they co-evolved over 50 million years. 
I've been filming time-lapse flowers 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for over 35 years. 
To watch them move is a dance I'm never going to get tired of. 
It fills me with wonder, and it opens my heart. 
Beauty and seduction, I believe, is nature's tool for survival, because we will protect what we fall in love with. 
Their relationship is a love story that feeds the Earth. 
It reminds us that we are a part of nature, and we're not separate from it. 
When I heard about the vanishing bees, Colony Collapse Disorder, it motivated me to take action. 
We depend on pollinators for over a third of the fruits and vegetables we eat. 
And many scientists believe it's the most serious issue facing mankind. 
It's like the canary in the coalmine. 
If they disappear, so do we. 
It reminds us that we are a part of nature and we need to take care of it. 
What motivated me to film their behavior was something that I asked my scientific advisers: "What motivates the pollinators?" 
Well, their answer was, "It's all about risk and reward." 
Like a wide-eyed kid, I'd say, "Why is that?" 
And they'd say, "Well, because they want to survive." 
I go, "Why?" 
"Well, in order to reproduce." 
"Well, why?" 
And I thought that they'd probably say, "Well, it's all about sex." 
And Chip Taylor, our monarch butterfly expert, he replied, "Nothing lasts forever. 
Everything in the universe wears out." 
And that blew my mind. 
Because I realized that nature had invented reproduction as a mechanism for life to move forward, as a life force that passes right through us and makes us a link in the evolution of life. 
Rarely seen by the naked eye, this intersection between the animal world and the plant world is truly a magic moment. 
It's the mystical moment where life regenerates itself, over and over again. 
So here is some nectar from my film. 
I hope you'll drink, tweet and plant some seeds to pollinate a friendly garden. 
And always take time to smell the flowers, and let it fill you with beauty, and rediscover that sense of wonder. 
Here are some images from the film. 
(Music) (Applause) Thank you. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

(Music) (Applause) (Music) (Applause) 

A few years ago, I felt like I was stuck in a rut, so I decided to follow in the footsteps of the great American philosopher, Morgan Spurlock, and try something new for 30 days. 
The idea is actually pretty simple. 
Think about something you've always wanted to add to your life and try it for the next 30 days. 
It turns out 30 days is just about the right amount of time to add a new habit or subtract a habit -- like watching the news -- from your life. 
There's a few things I learned while doing these 30-day challenges. 
The first was, instead of the months flying by, forgotten, the time was much more memorable. 
This was part of a challenge I did to take a picture every day for a month. 
And I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing that day. 
I also noticed that as I started to do more and harder 30-day challenges, my self-confidence grew. 
I went from desk-dwelling computer nerd to the kind of guy who bikes to work. 
For fun! 
(Laughter) Even last year, I ended up hiking up Mt. Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa. 
I would never have been that adventurous before I started my 30-day challenges. 
I also figured out that if you really want something badly enough, you can do anything for 30 days. 
Have you ever wanted to write a novel? 
Every November, tens of thousands of people try to write their own 50,000-word novel, from scratch, in 30 days. 
It turns out, all you have to do is write 1,667 words a day for a month. 
So I did. 
By the way, the secret is not to go to sleep until you've written your words for the day. 
You might be sleep-deprived, but you'll finish your novel. 
Now is my book the next great American novel? 
No. I wrote it in a month. 
It's awful. 
(Laughter) But for the rest of my life, if I meet John Hodgman at a TED party, I don't have to say, "I'm a computer scientist." 
No, no, if I want to, I can say, "I'm a novelist." 
(Laughter) So here's one last thing I'd like to mention. 
I learned that when I made small, sustainable changes, things I could keep doing, they were more likely to stick. 
There's nothing wrong with big, crazy challenges. 
In fact, they're a ton of fun. 
But they're less likely to stick. 
When I gave up sugar for 30 days, day 31 looked like this. 
(Laughter) So here's my question to you: What are you waiting for? 
I guarantee you the next 30 days are going to pass whether you like it or not, so why not think about something you have always wanted to try and give it a shot! 
For the next 30 days. 
Thanks. 
(Applause) 

We are losing our listening. 
We spend roughly 60 percent of our communication time listening, but we're not very good at it. 
We retain just 25 percent of what we hear. 
Now -- not you, not this talk, but that is generally true. 
(Laughter) Let's define listening as making meaning from sound. 
It's a mental process, and it's a process of extraction. 
We use some pretty cool techniques to do this. 
One of them is pattern recognition. 
(Crowd noises) So in a cocktail party like this, if I say, "David, Sara, pay attention" -- some of you just sat up. 
We recognize patterns to distinguish noise from signal, and especially our name. 
Differencing is another technique we use. 
If I left this pink noise on for more than a couple of minutes, (Pink noise) you would literally cease to hear it. 
We listen to differences; we discount sounds that remain the same. 
And then there is a whole range of filters. 
These filters take us from all sound down to what we pay attention to. 
Most people are entirely unconscious of these filters. 
But they actually create our reality in a way, because they tell us what we're paying attention to right now. 
I'll give you one example of that. 
Intention is very important in sound, in listening. 
When I married my wife, I promised her I would listen to her every day as if for the first time. 
(Laughter) But it's a great intention to have in a relationship. 
(Laughter) But that's not all. 
If you close your eyes right now in this room, you're aware of the size of the room from the reverberation and the bouncing of the sound off the surfaces; you're aware of how many people are around you, because of the micro-noises you're receiving. 
And sound places us in time as well, because sound always has time embedded in it. 
In fact, I would suggest that our listening is the main way that we experience the flow of time from past to future. 
So, "Sonority is time and meaning" -- a great quote. 
I said at the beginning, we're losing our listening. 
Why did I say that? 
First of all, we invented ways of recording -- first writing, then audio recording and now video recording as well. 
The premium on accurate and careful listening has simply disappeared. 
Secondly, the world is now so noisy, (Noise) with this cacophony going on visually and auditorily, it's just hard to listen; it's tiring to listen. 
Many people take refuge in headphones, but they turn big, public spaces like this, shared soundscapes, into millions of tiny, little personal sound bubbles. 
In this scenario, nobody's listening to anybody. 
We're becoming impatient. 
We don't want oratory anymore; we want sound bites. 
And the art of conversation is being replaced -- dangerously, I think -- by personal broadcasting. 
I don't know how much listening there is in this conversation, which is sadly very common, especially in the UK. 
We're becoming desensitized. 
Our media have to scream at us with these kinds of headlines in order to get our attention. 
And that means it's harder for us to pay attention to the quiet, the subtle, the understated. 
This is a serious problem that we're losing our listening. 
This is not trivial, because listening is our access to understanding. 
Conscious listening always creates understanding, and only without conscious listening can these things happen. 
A world where we don't listen to each other at all is a very scary place indeed. 
So I'd like to share with you five simple exercises, tools you can take away with you, to improve your own conscious listening. 
Audience: Yes! 
Good. The first one is silence. 
Just three minutes a day of silence is a wonderful exercise to reset your ears and to recalibrate, so that you can hear the quiet again. 
If you can't get absolute silence, go for quiet, that's absolutely fine. 
Second, I call this "the mixer." 
(Noise) So even if you're in a noisy environment like this -- and we all spend a lot of time in places like this -- listen in the coffee bar to how many channels of sound can I hear? 
How many individual channels in that mix am I listening to? 
You can do it in a beautiful place as well, like in a lake. 
How many birds am I hearing? 
Where are they? Where are those ripples? 
It's a great exercise for improving the quality of your listening. 
Third, this exercise I call "savoring," and this is a beautiful exercise. 
It's about enjoying mundane sounds. 
This, for example, is my tumble dryer. 
(Dryer) It's a waltz -- one, two, three; one, two, three; one, two, three. 
I love it! 
Or just try this one on for size. 
(Coffee grinder) Wow! 
So, mundane sounds can be really interesting -- if you pay attention. 
I call that the "hidden choir" -- it's around us all the time. 
The next exercise is probably the most important of all of these, if you just take one thing away. 
This is listening positions -- the idea that you can move your listening position to what's appropriate to what you're listening to. 
This is playing with those filters. 
Remember I gave you those filters? 
It's starting to play with them as levers, to get conscious about them and to move to different places. 
These are just some of the listening positions, or scales of listening positions, that you can use. 
There are many. 
Have fun with that. It's very exciting. 
And finally, an acronym. 
You can use this in listening, in communication. 
If you're in any one of those roles -- and I think that probably is everybody who's listening to this talk -- the acronym is RASA, which is the Sanskrit word for "juice" or "essence." 
And RASA stands for "Receive," which means pay attention to the person; "Appreciate," making little noises like "hmm," "oh," "OK"; "Summarize" -- the word "so" is very important in communication; and "Ask," ask questions afterwards. 
Now sound is my passion, it's my life. 
I wrote a whole book about it. So I live to listen. 
That's too much to ask for most people. 
But I believe that every human being needs to listen consciously in order to live fully -- connected in space and in time to the physical world around us, connected in understanding to each other, not to mention spiritually connected, because every spiritual path I know of has listening and contemplation at its heart. 
That's why we need to teach listening in our schools as a skill. 
Why is it not taught? It's crazy. 
And if we can teach listening in our schools, we can take our listening off that slippery slope to that dangerous, scary world that I talked about, and move it to a place where everybody is consciously listening all the time, or at least capable of doing it. 
Now, I don't know how to do that, but this is TED, and I think the TED community is capable of anything. 
So I invite you to connect with me, connect with each other, take this mission out. 
And let's get listening taught in schools, and transform the world in one generation to a conscious, listening world -- a world of connection, a world of understanding and a world of peace. 
Thank you for listening to me today. 
(Applause) 

Meet Tony. He's my student. 
He's about my age, and he's in San Quentin State Prison. 
When Tony was 16 years old, one day, one moment, "It was mom's gun. 
Just flash it, scare the guy. He's a punk. 
He took some money; we'll take his money. That'll teach him. 
Then last minute, I'm thinking, 'Can't do this. This is wrong.' My buddy says, 'C'mon, let's do this.' I say, 'Let's do this.'" And those three words, Tony's going to remember, because the next thing he knows, he hears the pop. 
There's the punk on the ground, puddle of blood. 
And that's felony murder -- 25 to life, parole at 50 if you're lucky, and Tony's not feeling very lucky. 
So when we meet in my philosophy class in his prison and I say, "In this class, we will discuss the foundations of ethics," Tony interrupts me. 
"What are you going to teach me about right and wrong? 
I know what is wrong. I have done wrong. 
I am told every day, by every face I see, every wall I face, that I am wrong. 
If I ever get out of here, there will always be a mark by my name. 
I'm a convict; I am branded 'wrong.' What are you going to tell me about right and wrong?" 
So I say to Tony, "Sorry, but it's worse than you think. 
You think you know right and wrong? 
Then can you tell me what wrong is? 
No, don't just give me an example. 
I want to know about wrongness itself, the idea of wrong. 
What is that idea? 
What makes something wrong? 
How do we know that it's wrong? Maybe you and I disagree. 
Maybe one of us is wrong about the wrong. 
Maybe it's you, maybe it's me -- but we're not here to trade opinions; everyone's got an opinion. 
We are here for knowledge. 
Our enemy is thoughtlessness. This is philosophy." 
And something changes for Tony. 
"Could be I'm wrong. I'm tired of being wrong. 
I want to know what is wrong. 
I want to know what I know." 
What Tony sees in that moment is the project of philosophy, the project that begins in wonder -- what Kant called "admiration and awe at the starry sky above and the moral law within." 
What can creatures like us know of such things? 
It is the project that always takes us back to the condition of existence -- what Heidegger called "the always already there." 
It is the project of questioning what we believe and why we believe it -- what Socrates called "the examined life." 
Socrates, a man wise enough to know that he knows nothing. 
Socrates died in prison, his philosophy intact. 
So Tony starts doing his homework. 
He learns his whys and wherefores, his causes and correlations, his logic, his fallacies. 
Turns out, Tony's got the philosophy muscle. 
His body is in prison, but his mind is free. 
Tony learns about the ontologically promiscuous, the epistemologically anxious, the ethically dubious, the metaphysically ridiculous. 
That's Plato, Descartes, Nietzsche and Bill Clinton. 
So when he gives me his final paper, in which he argues that the categorical imperative is perhaps too uncompromising to deal with the conflict that affects our everyday and challenges me to tell him whether therefore we are condemned to moral failure, I say, "I don't know. 
Let us think about that." 
Because in that moment, there's no mark by Tony's name; it's just the two of us standing there. 
It is not professor and convict, it is just two minds ready to do philosophy. 
And I say to Tony, "Let's do this." 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

The Value of Nothing: Out of Nothing Comes Something. 
That was an essay I wrote when I was 11 years old and I got a B+. (Laughter) What I'm going to talk about: nothing out of something, and how we create. 
And I'm gonna try and do that within the 18-minute time span that we were told to stay within, and to follow the TED commandments: that is, actually, something that creates a near-death experience, but near-death is good for creativity. 
(Laughter) OK. 
So, I also want to explain, because Dave Eggers said he was going to heckle me if I said anything that was a lie, or not true to universal creativity. 
And I've done it this way for half the audience, who is scientific. 
When I say we, I don't mean you, necessarily; I mean me, and my right brain, my left brain and the one that's in between that is the censor and tells me what I'm saying is wrong. 
And I'm going do that also by looking at what I think is part of my creative process, which includes a number of things that happened, actually -- the nothing started even earlier than the moment in which I'm creating something new. 
And that includes nature, and nurture, and what I refer to as nightmares. 
Now in the nature area, we look at whether or not we are innately equipped with something, perhaps in our brains, some abnormal chromosome that causes this muse-like effect. 
And some people would say that we're born with it in some other means. 
And others, like my mother, would say that I get my material from past lives. 
Some people would also say that creativity may be a function of some other neurological quirk -- van Gogh syndrome -- that you have a little bit of, you know, psychosis, or depression. 
I do have to say, somebody -- I read recently that van Gogh wasn't really necessarily psychotic, that he might have had temporal lobe seizures, and that might have caused his spurt of creativity, and I don't -- I suppose it does something in some part of your brain. 
And I will mention that I actually developed temporal lobe seizures a number of years ago, but it was during the time I was writing my last book, and some people say that book is quite different. 
I think that part of it also begins with a sense of identity crisis: you know, who am I, why am I this particular person, why am I not black like everybody else? 
And sometimes you're equipped with skills, but they may not be the kind of skills that enable creativity. 
I used to draw. I thought I would be an artist. 
And I had a miniature poodle. 
And it wasn't bad, but it wasn't really creative. 
Because all I could really do was represent in a very one-on-one way. 
And I have a sense that I probably copied this from a book. 
And then, I also wasn't really shining in a certain area that I wanted to be, and you know, you look at those scores, and it wasn't bad, but it was not certainly predictive that I would one day make my living out of the artful arrangement of words. 
Also, one of the principles of creativity is to have a little childhood trauma. 
And I had the usual kind that I think a lot of people had, and that is that, you know, I had expectations placed on me. 
That figure right there, by the way, figure right there was a toy given to me when I was but nine years old, and it was to help me become a doctor from a very early age. 
I have some ones that were long lasting: from the age of five to 15, this was supposed to be my side occupation, and it led to a sense of failure. 
But actually, there was something quite real in my life that happened when I was about 14. 
And it was discovered that my brother, in 1967, and then my father, six months later, had brain tumors. 
And my mother believed that something had gone wrong, and she was gonna find out what it was, and she was gonna fix it. 
My father was a Baptist minister, and he believed in miracles, and that God's will would take care of that. 
But, of course, they ended up dying, six months apart. 
And after that, my mother believed that it was fate, or curses -- she went looking through all the reasons in the universe why this would have happened. 
Everything except randomness. She did not believe in randomness. 
There was a reason for everything. 
And one of the reasons, she thought, was that her mother, who had died when she was very young, was angry at her. 
And so, I had this notion of death all around me, because my mother also believed that I would be next, and she would be next. 
And when you are faced with the prospect of death very soon, you begin to think very much about everything. 
You become very creative, in a survival sense. 
And this, then, led to my big questions. 
And they're the same ones that I have today. 
And they are: why do things happen, and how do things happen? 
And the one my mother asked: how do I make things happen? 
It's a wonderful way to look at these questions, when you write a story. 
Because, after all, in that framework, between page one and 300, you have to answer this question of why things happen, how things happen, in what order they happen. What are the influences? 
How do I, as the narrator, as the writer, also influence that? 
And it's also one that, I think, many of our scientists have been asking. 
It's a kind of cosmology, and I have to develop a cosmology of my own universe, as the creator of that universe. 
And you see, there's a lot of back and forth in trying to make that happen, trying to figure it out -- years and years, oftentimes. 
So, when I look at creativity, I also think that it is this sense or this inability to repress, my looking at associations in practically anything in life. 
And I got a lot of them during what's been going on throughout this conference, almost everything that's been going on. 
And so I'm going to use, as the metaphor, this association: quantum mechanics, which I really don't understand, but I'm still gonna use it as the process for explaining how it is the metaphor. 
So, in quantum mechanics, of course, you have dark energy and dark matter. 
And it's the same thing in looking at these questions of how things happen. 
There's a lot of unknown, and you often don't know what it is except by its absence. 
But when you make those associations, you want them to come together in a kind of synergy in the story, and what you're finding is what matters. The meaning. 
And that's what I look for in my work, a personal meaning. 
There is also the uncertainty principle, which is part of quantum mechanics, as I understand it. (Laughter) And this happens constantly in the writing. 
And there's the terrible and dreaded observer effect, in which you're looking for something, and you know, things are happening simultaneously, and you're looking at it in a different way, and you're trying to really look for the about-ness, or what is this story about. And if you try too hard, then you will only write the about. 
You won't discover anything. 
And what you were supposed to find, what you hoped to find in some serendipitous way, is no longer there. 
Now, I don't want to ignore the other side of what happens in our universe, like many of our scientists have. 
And so, I am going to just throw in string theory here, and just say that creative people are multidimensional, and there are 11 levels, I think, of anxiety. 
(Laughter) And they all operate at the same time. 
There is also a big question of ambiguity. 
And I would link that to something called the cosmological constant. 
And you don't know what is operating, but something is operating there. 
And ambiguity, to me, is very uncomfortable in my life, and I have it. Moral ambiguity. 
It is constantly there. And, just as an example, this is one that recently came to me. 
It was something I read in an editorial by a woman who was talking about the war in Iraq. And she said, "Save a man from drowning, you are responsible to him for life." 
A very famous Chinese saying, she said. 
And that means because we went into Iraq, we should stay there until things were solved. You know, maybe even 100 years. 
So, there was another one that I came across, and it's "saving fish from drowning." 
And it's what Buddhist fishermen say, because they're not supposed to kill anything. 
And they also have to make a living, and people need to be fed. 
So their way of rationalizing that is they are saving the fish from drowning, and unfortunately, in the process the fish die. 
Now, what's encapsulated in both these drowning metaphors -- actually, one of them is my mother's interpretation, and it is a famous Chinese saying, because she said it to me: "save a man from drowning, you are responsible to him for life." 
And it was a warning -- don't get involved in other people's business, or you're going to get stuck. 
OK. I think if somebody really was drowning, she'd save them. 
But, both of these sayings -- saving a fish from drowning, or saving a man from drowning -- to me they had to do with intentions. 
And all of us in life, when we see a situation, we have a response. 
And then we have intentions. 
There's an ambiguity of what that should be that we should do, and then we do something. 
And the results of that may not match what our intentions had been. 
Maybe things go wrong. And so, after that, what are our responsibilities? 
What are we supposed to do? 
Do we stay in for life, or do we do something else and justify and say, well, my intentions were good, and therefore I cannot be held responsible for all of it? 
That is the ambiguity in my life that really disturbed me, and led me to write a book called "Saving Fish From Drowning." 
I saw examples of that. Once I identified this question, it was all over the place. 
I got these hints everywhere. 
And then, in a way, I knew that they had always been there. 
And then writing, that's what happens. I get these hints, these clues, and I realize that they've been obvious, and yet they have not been. 
And what I need, in effect, is a focus. 
And when I have the question, it is a focus. 
And all these things that seem to be flotsam and jetsam in life actually go through that question, and what happens is those particular things become relevant. 
And it seems like it's happening all the time. 
You think there's a sort of coincidence going on, a serendipity, in which you're getting all this help from the universe. 
And it may also be explained that now you have a focus. 
And you are noticing it more often. 
But you apply this. 
You begin to look at things having to do with your tensions. 
Your brother, who's fallen in trouble, do you take care of him? 
Why or why not? 
It may be something that is perhaps more serious -- as I said, human rights in Burma. 
I was thinking that I shouldn't go because somebody said, if I did, it would show that I approved of the military regime there. 
And then, after a while, I had to ask myself, "Why do we take on knowledge, why do we take on assumptions that other people have given us?" 
And it was the same thing that I felt when I was growing up, and was hearing these rules of moral conduct from my father, who was a Baptist minister. 
So I decided that I would go to Burma for my own intentions, and still didn't know that if I went there, what the result of that would be, if I wrote a book -- and I just would have to face that later, when the time came. 
We are all concerned with things that we see in the world that we are aware of. 
We come to this point and say, what do I as an individual do? 
Not all of us can go to Africa, or work at hospitals, so what do we do, if we have this moral response, this feeling? 
Also, I think one of the biggest things we are all looking at, and we talked about today, is genocide. 
This leads to this question. 
When I look at all these things that are morally ambiguous and uncomfortable, and I consider what my intentions should be, I realize it goes back to this identity question that I had when I was a child -- and why am I here, and what is the meaning of my life, and what is my place in the universe? 
It seems so obvious, and yet it is not. 
We all hate moral ambiguity in some sense, and yet it is also absolutely necessary. 
In writing a story, it is the place where I begin. 
Sometimes I get help from the universe, it seems. 
My mother would say it was the ghost of my grandmother from the very first book, because it seemed I knew things I was not supposed to know. 
Instead of writing that the grandmother died accidentally, from an overdose of opium, while having too much of a good time, I actually put down in the story that the woman killed herself, and that actually was the way it happened. 
And my mother decided that that information must have come from my grandmother. 
There are also things, quite uncanny, which bring me information that will help me in the writing of the book. 
In this case, I was writing a story that included some kind of detail, period of history, a certain location. 
And I needed to find something historically that would match that. 
And I took down this book, and I -- first page that I flipped it to was exactly the setting, and the time period, and the kind of character I needed -- was the Taiping rebellion, happening in the area near Guilin, outside of that, and a character who thought he was the son of God. 
You wonder, are these things random chance? 
Well, what is random? What is chance? What is luck? 
What are things that you get from the universe that you can't really explain? 
And that goes into the story, too. 
These are the things I constantly think about from day to day. 
Especially when good things happen, and, in particular, when bad things happen. 
But I do think there's a kind of serendipity, and I do want to know what those elements are, so I can thank them, and also try to find them in my life. 
Because, again, I think that when I am aware of them, more of them happen. 
Another chance encounter is when I went to a place -- I just was with some friends, and we drove randomly to a different place, and we ended up in this non-tourist location, a beautiful village, pristine. 
And we walked three valleys beyond, and the third valley, there was something quite mysterious and ominous, a discomfort I felt. And then I knew that had to be [the] setting of my book. 
And in writing one of the scenes, it happened in that third valley. 
For some reason I wrote about cairns -- stacks of rocks -- that a man was building. 
And I didn't know exactly why I had it, but it was so vivid. 
I got stuck, and a friend, when she asked if I would go for a walk with her dogs, that I said, sure. And about 45 minutes later, walking along the beach, I came across this. 
And it was a man, a Chinese man, and he was stacking these things, not with glue, not with anything. 
And I asked him, "How is it possible to do this?" 
And he said, "Well, I guess with everything in life, there's a place of balance." 
And this was exactly the meaning of my story at that point. 
I had so many examples -- I have so many instances like this, when I'm writing a story, and I cannot explain it. 
Is it because I had the filter that I have such a strong coincidence in writing about these things? 
Or is it a kind of serendipity that we cannot explain, like the cosmological constant? 
A big thing that I also think about is accidents. 
And as I said, my mother did not believe in randomness. 
What is the nature of accidents? 
And how are we going to assign what the responsibility and the causes are, outside of a court of law? 
I was able to see that in a firsthand way, when I went to beautiful Dong village, in Guizhou, the poorest province of China. 
And I saw this beautiful place. I knew I wanted to come back. 
And I had a chance to do that, when National Geographic asked me if I wanted to write anything about China. 
And I said yes, about this village of singing people, singing minority. 
And they agreed, and between the time I saw this place and the next time I went, there was a terrible accident. A man, an old man, fell asleep, and his quilt dropped in a pan of fire that kept him warm. 
60 homes were destroyed, and 40 were damaged. 
Responsibility was assigned to the family. 
The man's sons were banished to live three kilometers away, in a cowshed. 
And, of course, as Westerners, we say, "Well, it was an accident. That's not fair. 
It's the son, not the father." 
When I go on a story, I have to let go of those kinds of beliefs. 
It takes a while, but I have to let go of them and just go there, and be there. 
And so I was there on three occasions, different seasons. 
And I began to sense something different about the history, and what had happened before, and the nature of life in a very poor village, and what you find as your joys, and your rituals, your traditions, your links with other families. And I saw how this had a kind of justice, in its responsibility. 
I was able to find out also about the ceremony that they were using, a ceremony they hadn't used in about 29 years. And it was to send some men -- a Feng Shui master sent men down to the underworld on ghost horses. 
Now you, as Westerners, and I, as Westerners, would say well, that's superstition. But after being there for a while, and seeing the amazing things that happened, you begin to wonder whose beliefs are those that are in operation in the world, determining how things happen. 
So I remained with them, and the more I wrote that story, the more I got into those beliefs, and I think that's important for me -- to take on the beliefs, because that is where the story is real, and that is where I'm gonna find the answers to how I feel about certain questions that I have in life. 
Years go by, of course, and the writing, it doesn't happen instantly, as I'm trying to convey it to you here at TED. 
The book comes and it goes. When it arrives, it is no longer my book. 
It is in the hands of readers, and they interpret it differently. 
But I go back to this question of, how do I create something out of nothing? 
And how do I create my own life? 
And I think it is by questioning, and saying to myself that there are no absolute truths. 
I believe in specifics, the specifics of story, and the past, the specifics of that past, and what is happening in the story at that point. 
I also believe that in thinking about things -- my thinking about luck, and fate, and coincidences and accidents, God's will, and the synchrony of mysterious forces -- I will come to some notion of what that is, how we create. 
I have to think of my role. Where I am in the universe, and did somebody intend for me to be that way, or is it just something I came up with? 
And I also can find that by imagining fully, and becoming what is imagined -- and yet is in that real world, the fictional world. 
And that is how I find particles of truth, not the absolute truth, or the whole truth. 
And they have to be in all possibilities, including those I never considered before. 
So, there are never complete answers. 
Or rather, if there is an answer, it is to remind myself that there is uncertainty in everything, and that is good, because then I will discover something new. 
And if there is a partial answer, a more complete answer from me, it is to simply imagine. 
And to imagine is to put myself in that story, until there was only -- there is a transparency between me and the story that I am creating. 
And that's how I've discovered that if I feel what is in the story -- in one story -- then I come the closest, I think, to knowing what compassion is, to feeling that compassion. 
Because for everything, in that question of how things happen, it has to do with the feeling. 
I have to become the story in order to understand a lot of that. 
We've come to the end of the talk, and I will reveal what is in the bag, and it is the muse, and it is the things that transform in our lives, that are wonderful and stay with us. 
There she is. 
Thank you very much! 
(Applause) 

Well, I'm involved in other things, besides physics. 
In fact, mostly now in other things. 
One thing is distant relationships among human languages. 
And the professional, historical linguists in the U.S. 
and in Western Europe mostly try to stay away from any long-distance relationships, big groupings, groupings that go back a long time, longer than the familiar families. 
They don't like that. They think it's crank. I don't think it's crank. 
And there are some brilliant linguists, mostly Russians, who are working on that, at Santa Fe Institute and in Moscow, and I would love to see where that leads. 
Does it really lead to a single ancestor some 20, 25,000 years ago? 
And what if we go back beyond that single ancestor, when there was presumably a competition among many languages? 
How far back does that go? How far back does modern language go? 
How many tens of thousands of years does it go back? 
Chris Anderson: Do you have a hunch or a hope for what the answer to that is? 
Murray Gell-Mann: Well, I would guess that modern language must be older than the cave paintings and cave engravings and cave sculptures and dance steps in the soft clay in the caves in Western Europe, in the Aurignacian Period some 35,000 years ago, or earlier. 
I can't believe they did all those things and didn't also have a modern language. 
So, I would guess that the actual origin goes back at least that far and maybe further. 
But that doesn't mean that all, or many, or most of today's attested languages couldn't descend perhaps from one that's much younger than that, like say 20,000 years, or something of that kind. It's what we call a bottleneck. 
CA: Well, Philip Anderson may have been right. 
You may just know more about everything than anyone. 
So, it's been an honor. Thank you Murray Gell-Mann. 
(Applause) 

This is a work in process, based on some comments that were made at TED two years ago about the need for the storage of vaccine. 
(Video): [On this planet 1.6 billion people don't have access to electricity refrigeration or stored fuels this is a problem it impacts: the spread of disease the storage of food and medicine and the quality of life. 
So here's the plan ... inexpensive refrigeration that doesn't use electricity, propane, gas, kerosene or consumables time for some thermodynamics And the story of the Intermittent Absorption Refrigerator] Adam Grosser: So 29 years ago, I had this thermo teacher who talked about absorption and refrigeration, one of those things that stuck in my head, a lot like the Stirling engine: it was cool, but you didn't know what to do with it. 
It was invented in 1858, by this guy Ferdinand Carré, but he couldn't actually build anything with it because of the tools at the time. 
This crazy Canadian named Powel Crosley commercialized this thing called the IcyBall, in 1928. 
It was a really neat idea, and I'll get to why it didn't work, but here's how it works. 
There's two spheres and they're separated in distance. 
One has a working fluid, water and ammonia, and the other is a condenser. 
The ammonia evaporates and it recondenses in the other side. 
You let it cool to room temperature, and then, as the ammonia reevaporates and combines with the water back on the erstwhile hot side, it creates a powerful cooling effect. 
So it was a great idea that didn't work at all. 
They blew up. 
(Laughter) Because you're using ammonia, you get hugely high pressures if you heated them wrong; it topped 400 psi. 
The ammonia was toxic, it sprayed everywhere. 
But it was kind of an interesting thought. 
So the great thing about 2006, there's a lot of really great computational work you can do. 
So we got the whole thermodynamics department at Stanford involved -- a lot of computational fluid dynamics. 
We proved that most of the ammonia refrigeration tables are wrong. 
We found some nontoxic refrigerants that worked at very low vapor pressures. 
We brought in a team from the UK -- a lot of great refrigeration people, it turns out, in the UK -- and built a test rig, and proved that, in fact, we could make a low-pressure, nontoxic refrigerator. 
So this is the way it works. 
You put it on a cooking fire. 
Most people have cooking fires in the world, whether it's camel dung or wood. 
It heats up for about 30 minutes, cools for an hour. 
You put it into a container and it will refrigerate for 24 hours. 
It looks like this. 
This is the fifth prototype, it's not quite done. 
It weighs about eight pounds, and this is the way it works. 
You put it into a 15-liter vessel, about three gallons, and it'll cool it down to just above freezing -- three degrees above freezing -- for 24 hours in a 30 degree C environment. 
It's really cheap. 
We think we can build these in high volumes for about 25 dollars, in low volumes for about 40 dollars. 
And we think we can make refrigeration something that everybody can have. 
Thank you. 

The first half of the 20th century was an absolute disaster in human affairs, a cataclysm. 
We had the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War and the rise of the communist nations. 
And each one of these forces split the world, tore the world apart, divided the world. 
And they threw up walls -- political walls, trade walls, transportation walls, communication walls, iron curtains -- which divided peoples and nations. 
It was only in the second half of the 20th century that we slowly began to pull ourselves out of this abyss. 
Trade walls began to come tumbling down. 
Here are some data on tariffs: starting at 40 percent, coming down to less than 5 percent. 
We globalized the world. And what does that mean? 
It means that we extended cooperation across national boundaries; we made the world more cooperative. 
Transportation walls came tumbling down. 
You know in 1950 the typical ship carried 5,000 to 10,000 tons worth of goods. 
Today a container ship can carry 150,000 tons; it can be manned with a smaller crew; and unloaded faster than ever before. 
Communication walls, I don't have to tell you -- the Internet -- have come tumbling down. 
And of course the iron curtains, political walls have come tumbling down. 
Now all of this has been tremendous for the world. 
Trade has increased. 
Here is just a little bit of data. 
In 1990, exports from China to the United States: 15 billion dollars. 
By 2007: over 300 billion dollars. 
And perhaps most remarkably, at the beginning of the 21st century, really for the first time in modern history, growth extended to almost all parts of the world. 
So China, I've already mentioned, beginning around 1978, around the time of the death of Mao, growth -- ten percent a year. 
Year after year after year, absolutely incredible. 
Never before in human history have so many people been raised out of such great poverty as happened in China. 
China is the world's greatest anti-poverty program over the last three decades. 
India, starting a little bit later, but in 1990, begetting tremendous growth. 
Incomes at that time less than $1,000 per year. 
And over the next 18 years have almost tripled. 
Growth of six percent a year. Absolutely incredible. 
Now Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa -- Sub-Saharan Africa has been the area of the world most resistant to growth. 
And we can see the tragedy of Africa in the first few bars here. 
Growth was negative. 
People were actually getting poorer than their parents, and sometimes even poorer than their grandparents had been. 
But at the end of the 20th century, the beginning of the 21st century, we saw growth in Africa. 
And I think, as you'll see, there's reasons for optimism, because I believe that the best is yet to come. 
Now why. 
On the cutting edge today it's new ideas which are driving growth. 
And by that I mean it's products for which the research and development costs are really high, and the manufacturing costs are low. 
More than ever before it is these types of ideas which are driving growth on the cutting edge. 
Now ideas have this amazing property. 
Thomas Jefferson, I think, really expressed this quite well. 
He said, "He who receives an idea from me receives instruction himself, without lessening mine. 
As he who lights his candle at mine receives light without darkening me." 
Or to put it slightly differently: one apple feeds one man, but an idea can feed the world. 
Now this is not new. This is practically not new to TEDsters. 
This is practically the model of TED. 
But what is new is that the greater function of ideas is going to drive growth even more than ever before. 
This provides a reason why trade and globalization are even more important, more powerful than ever before, and are going to increase growth more than ever before. 
And to explain why this is so, I have a question. 
Suppose that there are two diseases: one of them is rare, the other one is common, but if they are not treated they are equally severe. 
If you had to choose, which would you rather have: the common disease or the rare disease? 
Common, the common -- I think that's absolutely right, and why? Because there are more drugs to treat common diseases than there are to treat rare diseases. 
The reason for this is incentives. 
It costs about the same to produce a new drug whether that drug treats 1,000 people, 100,000 people, or a million people. 
But the revenues are much greater if the drug treats a million people. 
So the incentives are much larger to produce drugs which treat more people. 
To put this differently: larger markets save lives. 
In this case misery truly does love company. 
Now think about the following: if China and India were as rich as the United States is today, the market for cancer drugs would be eight times larger than it is now. 
Now we are not there yet, but it is happening. 
As other countries become richer the demand for these pharmaceuticals is going to increase tremendously. 
And that means an increase incentive to do research and development, which benefits everyone in the world. 
Larger markets increase the incentive to produce all kinds of ideas, whether it's software, whether it's a computer chip, whether it's a new design. 
For the Hollywood people in the audience, this even explains why action movies have larger budgets than comedies: it's because action movies translate easier into other languages and other cultures, so the market for those movies is larger. 
People are willing to invest more, and the budgets are larger. 
Alright. Well if larger markets increase the incentive to produce new ideas, how do we maximize that incentive? 
It's by having one world market, by globalizing the world. 
The way I like to put this is: one idea. Ideas are meant to be shared, so one idea can serve one world, one market. 
One idea, one world, one market. 
Well how else can we create new ideas? 
That's one reason. 
Globalize trade. 
How else can we create new ideas? 
Well, more idea creators. 
Now idea creators, they come from all walks of life. 
Artists and innovators -- many of the people you've seen on this stage. 
I'm going to focus on scientists and engineers because I have some data on that, and I'm a data person. 
Now, today, less than one-tenth of one percent of the world's population are scientists and engineers. 
(Laughter) The United States has been an idea leader. 
A large fraction of those people are in the United States. 
But the U.S. is losing its idea leadership. 
And for that I am very grateful. 
That is a good thing. 
It is fortunate that we are becoming less of an idea leader because for too long the United States, and a handful of other developed countries, have shouldered the entire burden of research and development. 
But consider the following: if the world as a whole were as wealthy as the United States is now there would be more than five times as many scientists and engineers contributing to ideas which benefit everyone, which are shared by everyone. 
I think of the great Indian mathematician, Ramanujan. 
How many Ramanujans are there in India today toiling in the fields, barely able to feed themselves, when they could be feeding the world? 
Now we're not there yet. 
But it is going to happen in this century. 
The real tragedy of the last century is this: if you think about the world's population as a giant computer, a massively parallel processor, then the great tragedy has been that billions of our processors have been off line. 
But in this century China is coming on line. 
India is coming on line. 
Africa is coming on line. 
We will see an Einstein in Africa in this century. 
Here is just some data. This is China. 
1996: less than one million new university students in China per year; 2006: over five million. 
Now think what this means. 
This means we all benefit when another country gets rich. 
We should not fear other countries becoming wealthy. 
That is something that we should embrace -- a wealthy China, a wealthy India, a wealthy Africa. 
We need a greater demand for ideas -- those larger markets I was talking about earlier -- and a greater supply of ideas for the world. 
Now you can see some of the reasons why I'm optimistic. 
Globalization is increasing the demand for ideas, the incentive to create new ideas. 
Investments in education are increasing the supply of new ideas. 
In fact if you look at world history you can see some reasons for optimism. 
From about the beginnings of humanity to 1500: zero economic growth, nothing. 
1500 to 1800: maybe a little bit of economic growth, but less in a century than you expect to see in a year today. 
1900s: maybe one percent. 
Twentieth century: a little bit over two percent. 
Twenty-first century could easily be 3.3, even higher percent. 
Even at that rate, by 2100 average GDP per capita in the world will be $200,000. 
That's not U.S. GDP per capita, which will be over a million, but world GDP per capita -- $200,000. 
That's not that far. 
We won't make it. 
But some of our grandchildren probably will. 
And I should say, I think this is a rather modest prediction. 
In Kurzweilian terms this is gloomy. 
In Kurzweilian terms I'm like the Eeyore of economic growth. 
(Laughter) Alright what about problems? 
What about a great depression? 
Well let's take a look. Let's take a look at the Great Depression. 
Here is GDP per capita from 1900 to 1929. 
Now let's imagine that you were an economist in 1929, trying to forecast future growth for the United States, not knowing that the economy was about to go off a cliff, not knowing that we were about to enter the greatest economic disaster certainly in the 20th century. 
What would you have predicted, not knowing this? 
If you had based your prediction, your forecast on 1900 to 1929 you'd have predicted something like this. 
If you'd been a little more optimistic -- say, based upon the Roaring Twenties -- you'd have said this. 
So what actually happened? 
We went off a cliff but we recovered. 
In fact in the second half of the 20th century growth was even higher than anything you would have predicted based upon the first half of the 20th century. 
So growth can wash away even what appears to be a great depression. 
Alright. What else? 
Oil. Oil. This was a big topic. 
When I was writing up my notes oil was $140 per barrel. 
So people were asking a question. They were saying, "Is China drinking our milkshake?" 
(Laughter) And there is some truth to this, in the sense that we have something of a finite resource, and increased growth is going to push up demand for that. 
But I think I don't have to tell this audience that a higher price of oil is not necessarily a bad thing. 
Moreover, as everyone knows, look -- it's energy, not oil, which counts. 
And higher oil prices mean a greater incentive to invest in energy R&D. 
You can see this in the data. 
As oil prices go up, energy patents go up. 
The world is much better equipped to overcome an increase in the price of oil today, than ever in the past, because of what I'm talking about. 
One idea, one world, one market. 
So I'm optimistic so long as we hew to these two ideas: to keep globalizing world markets, keep extending cooperation across national boundaries, and keep investing in education. 
Now the United States has a particularly important role to play in this: to keep our education system globalized, to keep our education system open to students from all over the world, because our education system is the candle that other students come to light their own candles. 
Now remember here what Jefferson said. 
Jefferson said, "When they come and light their candles at ours, they gain light, and we are not darkened." 
But Jefferson wasn't quite right, was he? 
Because the truth is, when they light their candles at ours, there is twice as much light available for everyone. 
So my view is: Be optimistic. 
Spread the ideas. Spread the light. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Forrest North: The beginning of any collaboration starts with a conversation. 
And I would like to share with you some of the bits of the conversation that we started with. 
I grew up in a log cabin in Washington state with too much time on my hands. 
Yves Behar: And in scenic Switzerland for me. 
FN: I always had a passion for alternative vehicles. 
This is a land yacht racing across the desert in Nevada. 
YB: Combination of windsurfing and skiing into this invention there. 
FN: And I also had an interest in dangerous inventions. 
This is a 100,000-volt Tesla coil that I built in my bedroom, much to the dismay of my mother. 
YB: To the dismay of my mother, this is dangerous teenage fashion right there. 
(Laughter) FN: And I brought this all together, this passion with alternative energy and raced a solar car across Australia -- also the U.S. and Japan. 
YB: So, wind power, solar power -- we had a lot to talk about. 
We had a lot that got us excited. 
So we decided to do a special project together. 
To combine engineering and design and ... 
FN: Really make a fully integrated product, something beautiful. 
YB: And we made a baby. 
(Laughter) FN: Can you bring out our baby? 
(Applause) This baby is fully electric. 
It goes 150 miles an hour. 
It's twice the range of any electric motorcycle. 
Really the exciting thing about a motorcycle is just the beautiful integration of engineering and design. 
It's got an amazing user experience. 
It was wonderful working with Yves Behar. 
He came up with our name and logo. We're Mission Motors. 
And we've only got three minutes, but we could talk about it for hours. 
YB: Thank you. 
FN: Thank you TED. And thank you Chris, for having us. 
(Applause) 

Let's talk about manias. 
Let's start with Beatlemania. 
(Recording of crowd roaring) Hysterical teenagers, crying, screaming, pandemonium. 
(Recording of crowd roaring) Sports mania: deafening crowds, all for one idea -- get the ball in the net. 
(Recording) Goal! 
Okay, religious mania: there's rapture, there's weeping, there's visions. 
Manias can be good. 
Manias can be alarming. 
Or manias can be deadly. 
(Recording of crowd cheering) The world has a new mania. 
A mania for learning English. 
Listen as Chinese students practice their English, by screaming it: Teacher: ... change my life! 
Students: I want to change my life! 
T: I don't want to let my parents down! 
S: I don't want to let my parents down! 
T: I don't ever want to let my country down! 
S: I don't ever want to let my country down! 
T: Most importantly... S: Most importantly... 
T: I don't want to let myself down! 
S: I don't want to let myself down! 
How many people are trying to learn English worldwide? 
Two billion of them. 
Students: A t-shirt. A dress. 
Jay Walker: In Latin America, in India, in Southeast Asia, and most of all, in China. 
If you're a Chinese student, you start learning English in the third grade, by law. 
That's why this year, China will become the world's largest English-speaking country. 
(Laughter) Why English? 
Opportunity for a better life, a job, to be able to pay for school, or put better food on the table. 
Imagine a student taking a giant test for three full days. 
Her score on this one test literally determines her future. 
She studies 12 hours a day for three years to prepare. 
Twenty-five percent of her grade is based on English. 
It's called the gaokao, and 80 million high school Chinese students have already taken this grueling test. 
The intensity to learn English is almost unimaginable, unless you witness it. 
Teacher: Perfect! Students: Perfect! 
T: Perfect! S: Perfect! 
T: I want to speak perfect English! 
S: I want to speak perfect English! 
T: I want to speak ... S: I want to speak ... 
T: ... perfect English! S: ... perfect English! 
T (yelling more loudly): I want to change my life! 
S (yelling more loudly): I want to change my life! 
JW: So is English mania good or bad? 
Is English a tsunami, washing away other languages? 
Not likely. 
Your native language is your life. 
But with English you can become part of a wider conversation -- a global conversation about global problems, like climate change or poverty, or hunger or disease. 
The world has other universal languages. 
Mathematics is the language of science. 
Music is the language of emotions. 
And now English is becoming the language of problem-solving. 
Not because America is pushing it, but because the world is pulling it. 
So English mania is a turning point. 
Like the harnessing of electricity in our cities, or the fall of the Berlin Wall, English represents hope for a better future -- a future where the world has a common language to solve its common problems. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Now, if President Obama invited me to be the next Czar of Mathematics, then I would have a suggestion for him that I think would vastly improve the mathematics education in this country. 
And it would be easy to implement and inexpensive. 
The mathematics curriculum that we have is based on a foundation of arithmetic and algebra. 
And everything we learn after that is building up towards one subject. 
And at top of that pyramid, it's calculus. 
And I'm here to say that I think that that is the wrong summit of the pyramid ... 
that the correct summit -- that all of our students, every high school graduate should know -- should be statistics: probability and statistics. 
(Applause) I mean, don't get me wrong. Calculus is an important subject. 
It's one of the great products of the human mind. 
The laws of nature are written in the language of calculus. 
And every student who studies math, science, engineering, economics, they should definitely learn calculus by the end of their freshman year of college. 
But I'm here to say, as a professor of mathematics, that very few people actually use calculus in a conscious, meaningful way, in their day-to-day lives. 
On the other hand, statistics -- that's a subject that you could, and should, use on daily basis. Right? 
It's risk. It's reward. It's randomness. 
It's understanding data. 
I think if our students, if our high school students -- if all of the American citizens -- knew about probability and statistics, we wouldn't be in the economic mess that we're in today. (Laughter) (Applause) Not only -- thank you -- not only that ... 
but if it's taught properly, it can be a lot of fun. 
I mean, probability and statistics, it's the mathematics of games and gambling. 
It's analyzing trends. It's predicting the future. 
Look, the world has changed from analog to digital. 
And it's time for our mathematics curriculum to change from analog to digital, from the more classical, continuous mathematics, to the more modern, discrete mathematics -- the mathematics of uncertainty, of randomness, of data -- that being probability and statistics. 
In summary, instead of our students learning about the techniques of calculus, I think it would be far more significant if all of them knew what two standard deviations from the mean means. And I mean it. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

This is really a two-hour presentation I give to high school students, cut down to three minutes. 
And it all started one day on a plane, on my way to TED, seven years ago. 
And in the seat next to me was a high school student, a teenager, and she came from a really poor family. 
And she wanted to make something of her life, and she asked me a simple little question. 
She said, "What leads to success?" 
And I felt really badly, because I couldn't give her a good answer. 
So I get off the plane, and I come to TED. 
And I think, jeez, I'm in the middle of a room of successful people! 
So why don't I ask them what helped them succeed, and pass it on to kids? 
So here we are, seven years, 500 interviews later, and I'm going to tell you what really leads to success and makes TEDsters tick. 
And the first thing is passion. 
Freeman Thomas says, "I'm driven by my passion." 
TEDsters do it for love; they don't do it for money. 
Carol Coletta says, "I would pay someone to do what I do." 
And the interesting thing is: if you do it for love, the money comes anyway. 
Work! Rupert Murdoch said to me, "It's all hard work. 
Nothing comes easily. But I have a lot of fun." 
Did he say fun? Rupert? Yes! 
(Laughter) TEDsters do have fun working. And they work hard. 
I figured, they're not workaholics. They're workafrolics. 
(Laughter) Good! 
(Applause) Alex Garden says, "To be successful, put your nose down in something and get damn good at it." 
And it's focus. 
Norman Jewison said to me, "I think it all has to do with focusing yourself on one thing." 
And push! 
Physically, mentally, you've got to push, push, push." 
You've got to push through shyness and self-doubt. 
Goldie Hawn says, "I always had self-doubts. 
I wasn't good enough; I wasn't smart enough. 
I didn't think I'd make it." 
Now it's not always easy to push yourself, and that's why they invented mothers. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Frank Gehry said to me, "My mother pushed me." 
(Laughter) Serve! 
A lot of kids want to be millionaires. 
The first thing I say is: "OK, well you can't serve yourself; you've got to serve others something of value. 
Because that's the way people really get rich." 
Ideas! 
TEDster Bill Gates says, "I had an idea: founding the first micro-computer software company." 
I'd say it was a pretty good idea. 
And there's no magic to creativity in coming up with ideas -- it's just doing some very simple things. 
And I give lots of evidence. 
Persist! 
Joe Kraus says, "Persistence is the number one reason for our success." 
You've got to persist through failure. You've got to persist through crap! 
Which of course means "Criticism, Rejection, Assholes and Pressure." 
(Laughter) So, the answer to this question is simple: Pay 4,000 bucks and come to TED. 
(Laughter) Or failing that, do the eight things -- and trust me, these are the big eight things that lead to success. 
Thank you TEDsters for all your interviews! 

In 2008, Cyclone Nargis devastated Myanmar. 
Millions of people were in severe need of help. 
The U.N. wanted to rush people and supplies to the area. 
But there were no maps, no maps of roads, no maps showing hospitals, no way for help to reach the cyclone victims. 
When we look at a map of Los Angeles or London, it is hard to believe that as of 2005, only 15 percent of the world was mapped to a geo-codable level of detail. 
The U.N. ran headfirst into a problem that the majority of the world's populous faces: not having detailed maps. 
But help was coming. 
At Google, 40 volunteers used a new software to map 120,000 kilometers of roads, 3,000 hospitals, logistics and relief points. 
And it took them four days. 
The new software they used? Google Mapmaker. 
Google Mapmaker is a technology that empowers each of us to map what we know locally. 
People have used this software to map everything from roads to rivers, from schools to local businesses, and video stores to the corner store. 
Maps matter. 
Nobel Prize nominee Hernando De Soto recognized that the key to economic liftoff for most developing countries is to tap the vast amounts of uncapitalized land. 
For example, a trillion dollars of real estate remains uncapitalized in India alone. 
In the last year alone, thousands of users in 170 countries have mapped millions of pieces of information, and created a map of a level of detail never thought viable. 
And this was made possible by the power of passionate users everywhere. 
Let's look at some of the maps being created by users right now. 
So, as we speak, people are mapping the world in these 170 countries. 
You can see Bridget in Africa who just mapped a road in Senegal. 
And, closer to home, Chalua, an N.G. road in Bangalore. 
This is the result of computational geometry, gesture recognition, and machine learning. 
This is a victory of thousands of users, in hundreds of cities, one user, one edit at a time. 
This is an invitation to the 70 percent of our unmapped planet. 
Welcome to the new world. 
(Applause) 

So, imagine you're standing on a street anywhere in America and a Japanese man comes up to you and says, "Excuse me, what is the name of this block?" 
And you say, "I'm sorry, well, this is Oak Street, that's Elm Street. 
This is 26th, that's 27th." 
He says, "OK, but what is the name of that block?" 
You say, "Well, blocks don't have names. 
Streets have names; blocks are just the unnamed spaces in between streets." 
He leaves, a little confused and disappointed. 
So, now imagine you're standing on a street, anywhere in Japan, you turn to a person next to you and say, "Excuse me, what is the name of this street?" 
They say, "Oh, well that's Block 17 and this is Block 16." 
And you say, "OK, but what is the name of this street?" 
And they say, "Well, streets don't have names. 
Blocks have names. 
Just look at Google Maps here. There's Block 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19. 
All of these blocks have names, and the streets are just the unnamed spaces in between the blocks. 
And you say then, "OK, then how do you know your home address?" 
He said, "Well, easy, this is District Eight. 
There's Block 17, house number one." 
You say, "OK, but walking around the neighborhood, I noticed that the house numbers don't go in order." 
He says, "Of course they do. They go in the order in which they were built. 
The first house ever built on a block is house number one. 
The second house ever built is house number two. 
Third is house number three. It's easy. It's obvious." 
So, I love that sometimes we need to go to the opposite side of the world to realize assumptions we didn't even know we had, and realize that the opposite of them may also be true. 
So, for example, there are doctors in China who believe that it's their job to keep you healthy. 
So, any month you are healthy you pay them, and when you're sick you don't have to pay them because they failed at their job. They get rich when you're healthy, not sick. 
(Applause) In most music, we think of the "one" as the downbeat, the beginning of the musical phrase: one, two, three, four. 
But in West African music, the "one" is thought of as the end of the phrase, like the period at the end of a sentence. 
So, you can hear it not just in the phrasing, but the way they count off their music: two, three, four, one. 
And this map is also accurate. 
(Laughter) There's a saying that whatever true thing you can say about India, the opposite is also true. 
So, let's never forget, whether at TED, or anywhere else, that whatever brilliant ideas you have or hear, that the opposite may also be true. 
Domo arigato gozaimashita. 

Now, I want to start with a question: When was the last time you were called "childish"? 
For kids like me, being called childish can be a frequent occurrence. 
Every time we make irrational demands, exhibit irresponsible behavior, or display any other signs of being normal American citizens, we are called childish. 
Which really bothers me. 
After all, take a look at these events: Imperialism and colonization, world wars, George W. Bush. 
Ask yourself, who's responsible? Adults. 
Now, what have kids done? 
Well, Anne Frank touched millions with her powerful account of the Holocaust. 
Ruby Bridges helped to end segregation in the United States. 
And, most recently, Charlie Simpson helped to raise 120,000 pounds for Haiti, on his little bike. 
So as you can see evidenced by such examples, age has absolutely nothing to do with it. 
The traits the word "childish" addresses are seen so often in adults, that we should abolish this age-discriminatory word, when it comes to criticizing behavior associated with irresponsibility and irrational thinking. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
Then again, who's to say that certain types of irrational thinking aren't exactly what the world needs? 
Maybe you've had grand plans before, but stopped yourself, thinking, "That's impossible," or "That costs too much," or "That won't benefit me." 
For better or worse, we kids aren't hampered as much when it comes to thinking about reasons why not to do things. 
Kids can be full of inspiring aspirations and hopeful thinking, like my wish that no one went hungry, or that everything were free, a kind of utopia. 
How many of you still dream like that, and believe in the possibilities? 
Sometimes a knowledge of history and the past failures of Utopian ideals can be a burden, because you know that if everything were free, then the food stocks would become depleted and scarce and lead to chaos. 
On the other hand, we kids still dream about perfection. 
And that's a good thing, because in order to make anything a reality, you have to dream about it first. 
In many ways, our audacity to imagine helps push the boundaries of possibility. 
For instance, the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington, my home state -- yoohoo, Washington! 
(Applause) has a program called Kids Design Glass, and kids draw their own ideas for glass art. 
The resident artist said they got some of their best ideas from the program, because kids don't think about the limitations of how hard it can be to blow glass into certain shapes, they just think of good ideas. 
Now, when you think of glass, you might think of colorful Chihuly designs, or maybe Italian vases, but kids challenge glass artists to go beyond that, into the realm of brokenhearted snakes and bacon boys, who you can see has meat vision. 
(Laughter) Now, our inherent wisdom doesn't have to be insider's knowledge. 
Kids already do a lot of learning from adults, and we have a lot to share. 
I think that adults should start learning from kids. 
Now, I do most of my speaking in front of an education crowd -- teachers and students, and I like this analogy: It shouldn't be a teacher at the head of the class, telling students, "Do this, do that." 
The students should teach their teachers. 
Learning between grown-ups and kids should be reciprocal. 
The reality, unfortunately, is a little different, and it has a lot to do with trust, or a lack of it. 
Now, if you don't trust someone, you place restrictions on them, right? 
If I doubt my older sister's ability to pay back the 10 percent interest I established on her last loan, I'm going to withhold her ability to get more money from me, until she pays it back. 
(Laughter) True story, by the way. 
Now, adults seem to have a prevalently restrictive attitude towards kids, from every "Don't do that, don't do this" in the school handbook, to restrictions on school Internet use. 
As history points out, regimes become oppressive when they're fearful about keeping control. 
And although adults may not be quite at the level of totalitarian regimes, kids have no or very little say in making the rules, when really, the attitude should be reciprocal, meaning that the adult population should learn and take into account the wishes of the younger population. 
Now, what's even worse than restriction, is that adults often underestimate kids' abilities. 
We love challenges, but when expectations are low, trust me, we will sink to them. 
My own parents had anything but low expectations for me and my sister. 
Okay, so they didn't tell us to become doctors or lawyers or anything like that, but my dad did read to us about Aristotle and pioneer germ-fighters, when lots of other kids were hearing "The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round." 
Well, we heard that one too, but "Pioneer Germ Fighters" totally rules. 
(Laughter) I loved to write from the age of four, and when I was six, my mom bought me my own laptop equipped with Microsoft Word. 
Thank you, Bill Gates, and thank you, Ma. 
I wrote over 300 short stories on that little laptop, and I wanted to get published. 
Instead of just scoffing at this heresy that a kid wanted to get published, or saying wait until you're older, my parents were really supportive. 
Many publishers were not quite so encouraging. 
One large children's publisher ironically said that they didn't work with children. 
Children's publisher not working with children? 
I don't know, you're kind of alienating a large client there. 
(Laughter) One publisher, Action Publishing, was willing to take that leap and trust me, and to listen to what I had to say. 
They published my first book, "Flying Fingers," you see it here. 
And from there on, it's gone to speaking at hundreds of schools, keynoting to thousands of educators, and finally, today, speaking to you. 
I appreciate your attention today, because to show that you truly care, you listen. 
But there's a problem with this rosy picture of kids being so much better than adults. 
Kids grow up and become adults just like you. 
(Laughter) Or just like you? Really? 
The goal is not to turn kids into your kind of adult, but rather, better adults than you have been, which may be a little challenging, considering your guys' credentials. 
(Laughter) But the way progress happens, is because new generations and new eras grow and develop and become better than the previous ones. 
It's the reason we're not in the Dark Ages anymore. 
No matter your position or place in life, it is imperative to create opportunities for children, so that we can grow up to blow you away. 
(Laughter) Adults and fellow TEDsters, you need to listen and learn from kids, and trust us and expect more from us. 
You must lend an ear today, because we are the leaders of tomorrow, which means we're going to take care of you when you're old and senile. 
No, just kidding. 
(Laughter) No, really, we are going to be the next generation, the ones who will bring this world forward. 
And in case you don't think that this really has meaning for you, remember that cloning is possible, and that involves going through childhood again, in which case you'll want to be heard, just like my generation. 
Now, the world needs opportunities for new leaders and new ideas. 
Kids need opportunities to lead and succeed. 
Are you ready to make the match? 
Because the world's problems shouldn't be the human family's heirloom. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. 

Everyone, please think of your biggest personal goal. 
For real -- you can take a second. You've got to feel this to learn it. 
Take a few seconds and think of your personal biggest goal, okay? 
Imagine deciding right now that you're going to do it. 
Imagine telling someone that you meet today what you're going to do. 
Imagine their congratulations, and their high image of you. 
Doesn't it feel good to say it out loud? 
Don't you feel one step closer already, like it's already becoming part of your identity? 
Well, bad news: you should have kept your mouth shut, because that good feeling now will make you less likely to do it. 
The repeated psychology tests have proven that telling someone your goal makes it less likely to happen. 
Any time you have a goal, there are some steps that need to be done, some work that needs to be done in order to achieve it. 
Ideally you would not be satisfied until you'd actually done the work. 
But when you tell someone your goal and they acknowledge it, psychologists have found that it's called a "social reality." 
The mind is kind of tricked into feeling that it's already done. 
And then because you've felt that satisfaction, you're less motivated to do the actual hard work necessary. 
(Laughter) So this goes against conventional wisdom that we should tell our friends our goals, right? 
So they hold us to it. 
So, let's look at the proof. 
1926: Kurt Lewin, founder of social psychology, called this "substitution." 
1933: Wera Mahler found when it was acknowledged by others, it felt real in the mind. 
1982, Peter Gollwitzer wrote a whole book about this, and in 2009, he did some new tests that were published. 
It goes like this: 163 people across four separate tests. 
Everyone wrote down their personal goal. 
Then half of them announced their commitment to this goal to the room, and half didn't. 
Then everyone was given 45 minutes of work that would directly lead them towards their goal, but they were told that they could stop at any time. 
Now, those who kept their mouths shut worked the entire 45 minutes on average, and when asked afterward, said that they felt that they had a long way to go still to achieve their goal. 
But those who had announced it quit after only 33 minutes, on average, and when asked afterward, said that they felt much closer to achieving their goal. 
So if this is true, what can we do? 
Well, you could resist the temptation to announce your goal. 
You can delay the gratification that the social acknowledgment brings, and you can understand that your mind mistakes the talking for the doing. 
But if you do need to talk about something, you can state it in a way that gives you no satisfaction, such as, "I really want to run this marathon, so I need to train five times a week and kick my ass if I don't, okay?" 
So audience, next time you're tempted to tell someone your goal, what will you say? 
(Silence) Exactly! Well done. 
(Laughter) (Applause)