How can I speak in 10 minutes about the bonds of women over three generations , about how the astonishing strength of those bonds took hold in the life of a four-year-old girl huddled with her young sister , her mother and her grandmother for five days and nights in a small boat in the China Sea more than 30 years ago , bonds that took hold in the life of that small girl and never let go -- that small girl now living in San Francisco and speaking to you today ? This is not a finished story . It is a jigsaw puzzle still being put together . Let me tell you about some of the pieces . Imagine the first piece : a man burning his life 's work . He is a poet , a playwright , a man whose whole life had been balanced on the single hope of his country 's unity and freedom . Imagine him as the communists enter Saigon , confronting the fact that his life had been a complete waste . Words , for so long his friends , now mocked him . He retreated into silence . He died broken by history . He is my grandfather . I never knew him in real life . But our lives are much more than our memories . My grandmother never let me forget his life . My duty was not to allow it to have been in vain , and my lesson was to learn that , yes , history tried to crush us , but we endured . The next piece of the jigsaw is of a boat in the early dawn slipping silently out to sea . My mother , Mai , was 18 when her father died -- already in an arranged marriage , already with two small girls . For her , life had distilled itself into one task : the escape of her family and a new life in Australia . It was inconceivable to her that she would not succeed . So after a four-year saga that defies fiction , a boat slipped out to sea disguised as a fishing vessel . All the adults knew the risks . The greatest fear was of pirates , rape and death . Like most adults on the boat , my mother carried a small bottle of poison . If we were captured , first my sister and I , then she and my grandmother would drink . My first memories are from the boat -- the steady beat of the engine , the bow dipping into each wave , the vast and empty horizon . I don 't remember the pirates who came many times , but were bluffed by the bravado of the men on our boat , or the engine dying and failing to start for six hours . But I do remember the lights on the oil rig off the Malaysian coast and the young man who collapsed and died , the journey 's end too much for him , and the first apple I tasted , given to me by the men on the rig . No apple has ever tasted the same . After three months in a refugee camp , we landed in Melbourne . And the next piece of the jigsaw is about four women across three generations shaping a new life together . We settled in Footscray , a working-class suburb whose demographic is layers of immigrants . Unlike the settled middle-class suburbs , whose existence I was oblivious of , there was no sense of entitlement in Footscray . The smells from shop doors were from the rest of the world . And the snippets of halting English were exchanged between people who had one thing in common , they were starting again . My mother worked on farms , then on a car assembly line , working six days , double shifts . Somehow she found time to study English and gain IT qualifications . We were poor . All the dollars were allocated and extra tuition in English and mathematics was budgeted for regardless of what missed out , which was usually new clothes ; they were always secondhand . Two pairs of stockings for school , each to hide the holes in the other . A school uniform down to the ankles , because it had to last for six years . And there were rare but searing chants of " slit-eye " and the occasional graffiti : " Asian , go home . " Go home to where ? Something stiffened inside me . There was a gathering of resolve and a quiet voice saying , " I will bypass you . " My mother , my sister and I slept in the same bed . My mother was exhausted each night , but we told one another about our day and listened to the movements of my grandmother around the house . My mother suffered from nightmares all about the boat . And my job was to stay awake until her nightmares came so I could wake her . She opened a computer store then studied to be a beautician and opened another business . And the women came with their stories about men who could not make the transition , angry and inflexible , and troubled children caught between two worlds . Grants and sponsors were sought . Centers were established . I lived in parallel worlds . In one , I was the classic Asian student , relentless in the demands that I made on myself . In the other , I was enmeshed in lives that were precarious , tragically scarred by violence , drug abuse and isolation . But so many over the years were helped . And for that work , when I was a final year law student , I was chosen as the young Australian of the year . And I was catapulted from one piece of the jigsaw to another , and their edges didn 't fit . Tan Le , anonymous Footscray resident , was now Tan Le , refugee and social activist , invited to speak in venues she had never heard of and into homes whose existence she could never have imagined . I didn 't know the protocols . I didn 't know how to use the cutlery . I didn 't know how to talk about wine . I didn 't know how to talk about anything . I wanted to retreat to the routines and comfort of life in an unsung suburb -- a grandmother , a mother and two daughters ending each day as they had for almost 20 years , telling one another the story of their day and falling asleep , the three of us still in the same bed . I told my mother I couldn 't do it . She reminded me that I was now the same age she had been when we boarded the boat . No had never been an option . " Just do it , " she said , " and don 't be what you 're not . " So I spoke out on youth unemployment and education and the neglect of the marginalized and the disenfranchised . And the more candidly I spoke , the more I was asked to speak . I met people from all walks of life , so many of them doing the thing they loved , living on the frontiers of possibility . And even though I finished my degree , I realized I could not settle into a career in law . There had to be another piece of the jigsaw . And I realized at the same time that it is okay to be an outsider , a recent arrival , new on the scene -- and not just okay , but something to be thankful for , perhaps a gift from the boat . Because being an insider can so easily mean collapsing the horizons , can so easily mean accepting the presumptions of your province . I have stepped outside my comfort zone enough now to know that , yes , the world does fall apart , but not in the way that you fear . Possibilities that would not have been allowed were outrageously encouraged . There was an energy there , an implacable optimism , a strange mixture of humility and daring . So I followed my hunches . I gathered around me a small team of people for whom the label " It can 't be done " was an irresistible challenge . For a year we were penniless . At the end of each day , I made a huge pot of soup which we all shared . We worked well into each night . Most of our ideas were crazy , but a few were brilliant , and we broke through . I made the decision to move to the U.S. after only one trip . My hunches again . Three months later I had relocated , and the adventure has continued . Before I close though , let me tell you about my grandmother . She grew up at a time when Confucianism was the social norm and the local Mandarin was the person who mattered . Life hadn 't changed for centuries . Her father died soon after she was born . Her mother raised her alone . At 17 she became the second wife of a Mandarin whose mother beat her . With no support from her husband , she caused a sensation by taking him to court and prosecuting her own case , and a far greater sensation when she won . " It can 't be done " was shown to be wrong . I was taking a shower in a hotel room in Sydney the moment she died 600 miles away in Melbourne . I looked through the shower screen and saw her standing on the other side . I knew she had come to say goodbye . My mother phoned minutes later . A few days later , we went to a Buddhist temple in Footscray and sat around her casket . We told her stories and assured her that we were still with her . At midnight the monk came and told us he had to close the casket . My mother asked us to feel her hand . She asked the monk , " Why is it that her hand is so warm and the rest of her is so cold ? " " Because you have been holding it since this morning , " he said . " You have not let it go . " If there is a sinew in our family , it runs through the women . Given who we were and how life had shaped us , we can now see that the men who might have come into our lives would have thwarted us . Defeat would have come too easily . Now I would like to have my own children , and I wonder about the boat . Who could ever wish it on their own ? Yet I am afraid of privilege , of ease , of entitlement . Can I give them a bow in their lives , dipping bravely into each wave , the unperturbed and steady beat of the engine , the vast horizon that guarantees nothing ? I don 't know . But if I could give it and still see them safely through , I would . And also , Tan 's mother is here today in the fourth or fifth row . Well this is a really extraordinary honor for me . I spend most of my time in jails , in prisons , on death row . I spend most of my time in very low-income communities in the projects and places where there 's a great deal of hopelessness . And being here at TED and seeing the stimulation , hearing it , has been very , very energizing to me . And one of the things that 's emerged in my short time here is that TED has an identity . And you can actually say things here that have impacts around the world . And sometimes when it comes through TED , it has meaning and power that it doesn 't have when it doesn 't . And I mention that because I think identity is really important . And we 've had some fantastic presentations . And I think what we 've learned is that , if you 're a teacher your words can be meaningful , but if you 're a compassionate teacher , they can be especially meaningful . If you 're a doctor you can do some good things , but if you 're a caring doctor you can do some other things . And so I want to talk about the power of identity . And I didn 't learn about this actually practicing law and doing the work that I do . I actually learned about this from my grandmother . I grew up in a house that was the traditional African-American home that was dominated by a matriarch , and that matriarch was my grandmother . She was tough , she was strong , she was powerful . She was the end of every argument in our family . She was the beginning of a lot of arguments in our family . She was the daughter of people who were actually enslaved . Her parents were born in slavery in Virginia in the 1840 's . She was born in the 1880 's and the experience of slavery very much shaped the way she saw the world . And my grandmother was tough , but she was also loving . When I would see her as a little boy , she 'd come up to me and she 'd give me these hugs . And she 'd squeeze me so tight I could barely breathe and then she 'd let me go . And an hour or two later , if I saw her , she 'd come over to me and she 'd say , " Bryan , do you still feel me hugging you ? " And if I said , " No , " she 'd assault me again , and if I said , " Yes , " she 'd leave me alone . And she just had this quality that you always wanted to be near her . And the only challenge was that she had 10 children . My mom was the youngest of her 10 kids . And sometimes when I would go and spend time with her , it would be difficult to get her time and attention . My cousins would be running around everywhere . And I remember , when I was about eight or nine years old , waking up one morning , going into the living room , and all of my cousins were running around . And my grandmother was sitting across the room staring at me . And at first I thought we were playing a game . And I would look at her and I 'd smile , but she was very serious . And after about 15 or 20 minutes of this , she got up and she came across the room and she took me by the hand and she said , " Come on , Bryan . You and I are going to have a talk . " And I remember this just like it happened yesterday . I never will forget it . She took me out back and she said , " Bryan , I 'm going to tell you something , but you don 't tell anybody what I tell you . " I said , " Okay , Mama . " She said , " Now you make sure you don 't do that . " I said , " Sure . " Then she sat me down and she looked at me and she said , " I want you to know I 've been watching you . " And she said , " I think you 're special . " She said , " I think you can do anything you want to do . " I will never forget it . And then she said , " I just need you to promise me three things , Bryan . " I said , " Okay , Mama . " She said , " The first thing I want you to promise me is that you 'll always love your mom . " She said , " That 's my baby girl , and you have to promise me now you 'll always take care of her . " Well I adored my mom , so I said , " Yes , Mama . I 'll do that . " Then she said , " The second thing I want you to promise me is that you 'll always do the right thing even when the right thing is the hard thing . " And I thought about it and I said , " Yes , Mama . I 'll do that . " Then finally she said , " The third thing I want you to promise me is that you 'll never drink alcohol . " Well I was nine years old , so I said , " Yes , Mama . I 'll do that . " I grew up in the country in the rural South , and I have a brother a year older than me and a sister a year younger . When I was about 14 or 15 , one day my brother came home and he had this six-pack of beer -- I don 't know where he got it -- and he grabbed me and my sister and we went out in the woods . And we were kind of just out there doing the stuff we crazily did . And he had a sip of this beer and he gave some to my sister and she had some , and they offered it to me . I said , " No , no , no . That 's okay . You all go ahead . I 'm not going to have any beer . " My brother said , " Come on . We 're doing this today ; you always do what we do . I had some , your sister had some . Have some beer . " I said , " No , I don 't feel right about that . Y 'all go ahead . Y 'all go ahead . " And then my brother started staring at me . He said , " What 's wrong with you ? Have some beer . " Then he looked at me real hard and he said , " Oh , I hope you 're not still hung up on that conversation Mama had with you . " I said , " Well , what are you talking about ? " He said , " Oh , Mama tells all the grandkids that they 're special . " I was devastated . And I 'm going to admit something to you . I 'm going to tell you something I probably shouldn 't . I know this might be broadcast broadly . But I 'm 52 years old , and I 'm going to admit to you that I 've never had a drop of alcohol . I don 't say that because I think that 's virtuous ; I say that because there is power in identity . When we create the right kind of identity , we can say things to the world around us that they don 't actually believe makes sense . We can get them to do things that they don 't think they can do . When I thought about my grandmother , of course she would think all her grandkids were special . My grandfather was in prison during prohibition . My male uncles died of alcohol-related diseases . And these were the things she thought we needed to commit to . Well I 've been trying to say something about our criminal justice system . This country is very different today than it was 40 years ago . In 1972 , there were 300,000 people in jails and prisons . Today , there are 2.3 million . The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world . We have seven million people on probation and parole . And mass incarceration , in my judgment , has fundamentally changed our world . In poor communities , in communities of color there is this despair , there is this hopelessness , that is being shaped by these outcomes . One out of three black men between the ages of 18 and 30 is in jail , in prison , on probation or parole . In urban communities across this country -- Los Angeles , Philadelphia , Baltimore , Washington -- 50 to 60 percent of all young men of color are in jail or prison or on probation or parole . Our system isn 't just being shaped in these ways that seem to be distorting around race , they 're also distorted by poverty . We have a system of justice in this country that treats you much better if you 're rich and guilty than if you 're poor and innocent . Wealth , not culpability , shapes outcomes . And yet , we seem to be very comfortable . The politics of fear and anger have made us believe that these are problems that are not our problems . We 've been disconnected . It 's interesting to me . We 're looking at some very interesting developments in our work . My state of Alabama , like a number of states , actually permanently disenfranchises you if you have a criminal conviction . Right now in Alabama 34 percent of the black male population has permanently lost the right to vote . We 're actually projecting in another 10 years the level of disenfranchisement will be as high as it 's been since prior to the passage of the Voting Rights Act . And there is this stunning silence . I represent children . A lot of my clients are very young . The United States is the only country in the world where we sentence 13-year-old children to die in prison . We have life imprisonment without parole for kids in this country . And we 're actually doing some litigation . The only country in the world . I represent people on death row . It 's interesting , this question of the death penalty . In many ways , we 've been taught to think that the real question is , do people deserve to die for the crimes they 've committed ? And that 's a very sensible question . But there 's another way of thinking about where we are in our identity . The other way of thinking about it is not , do people deserve to die for the crimes they commit , but do we deserve to kill ? I mean , it 's fascinating . Death penalty in America is defined by error . For every nine people who have been executed , we 've actually identified one innocent person who 's been exonerated and released from death row . A kind of astonishing error rate -- one out of nine people innocent . I mean , it 's fascinating . In aviation , we would never let people fly on airplanes if for every nine planes that took off one would crash . But somehow we can insulate ourselves from this problem . It 's not our problem . It 's not our burden . It 's not our struggle . I talk a lot about these issues . I talk about race and this question of whether we deserve to kill . And it 's interesting , when I teach my students about African-American history , I tell them about slavery . I tell them about terrorism , the era that began at the end of reconstruction that went on to World War II . We don 't really know very much about it . But for African-Americans in this country , that was an era defined by terror . In many communities , people had to worry about being lynched . They had to worry about being bombed . It was the threat of terror that shaped their lives . And these older people come up to me now and they say , " Mr. Stevenson , you give talks , you make speeches , you tell people to stop saying we 're dealing with terrorism for the first time in our nation 's history after 9 / 11 . " They tell me to say , " No , tell them that we grew up with that . " And that era of terrorism , of course , was followed by segregation and decades of racial subordination and apartheid . And yet , we have in this country this dynamic where we really don 't like to talk about our problems . We don 't like to talk about our history . And because of that , we really haven 't understood what it 's meant to do the things we 've done historically . We 're constantly running into each other . We 're constantly creating tensions and conflicts . We have a hard time talking about race , and I believe it 's because we are unwilling to commit ourselves to a process of truth and reconciliation . In South Africa , people understood that we couldn 't overcome apartheid without a commitment to truth and reconciliation . In Rwanda , even after the genocide , there was this commitment , but in this country we haven 't done that . I was giving some lectures in Germany about the death penalty . It was fascinating because one of the scholars stood up after the presentation and said , " Well you know it 's deeply troubling to hear what you 're talking about . " He said , " We don 't have the death penalty in Germany . And of course , we can never have the death penalty in Germany . " And the room got very quiet , and this woman said , " There 's no way , with our history , we could ever engage in the systematic killing of human beings . It would be unconscionable for us to , in an intentional and deliberate way , set about executing people . " And I thought about that . What would it feel like to be living in a world where the nation state of Germany was executing people , especially if they were disproportionately Jewish ? I couldn 't bear it . It would be unconscionable . And yet , in this country , in the states of the Old South , we execute people -- where you 're 11 times more likely to get the death penalty if the victim is white than if the victim is black , 22 times more likely to get it if the defendant is black and the victim is white -- in the very states where there are buried in the ground the bodies of people who were lynched . And yet , there is this disconnect . Well I believe that our identity is at risk . That when we actually don 't care about these difficult things , the positive and wonderful things are nonetheless implicated . We love innovation . We love technology . We love creativity . We love entertainment . But ultimately , those realities are shadowed by suffering , abuse , degradation , marginalization . And for me , it becomes necessary to integrate the two . Because ultimately we are talking about a need to be more hopeful , more committed , more dedicated to the basic challenges of living in a complex world . And for me that means spending time thinking and talking about the poor , the disadvantaged , those who will never get to TED . But thinking about them in a way that is integrated in our own lives . You know ultimately , we all have to believe things we haven 't seen . We do . As rational as we are , as committed to intellect as we are . Innovation , creativity , development comes not from the ideas in our mind alone . They come from the ideas in our mind that are also fueled by some conviction in our heart . And it 's that mind-heart connection that I believe compels us to not just be attentive to all the bright and dazzly things , but also the dark and difficult things . Vaclav Havel , the great Czech leader , talked about this . He said , " When we were in Eastern Europe and dealing with oppression , we wanted all kinds of things , but mostly what we needed was hope , an orientation of the spirit , a willingness to sometimes be in hopeless places and be a witness . " Well that orientation of the spirit is very much at the core of what I believe even TED communities have to be engaged in . There is no disconnect around technology and design that will allow us to be fully human until we pay attention to suffering , to poverty , to exclusion , to unfairness , to injustice . Now I will warn you that this kind of identity is a much more challenging identity than ones that don 't pay attention to this . It will get to you . I had the great privilege , when I was a young lawyer , of meeting Rosa Parks . And Ms. Parks used to come back to Montgomery every now and then , and she would get together with two of her dearest friends , these older women , Johnnie Carr who was the organizer of the Montgomery bus boycott -- amazing African-American woman -- and Virginia Durr , a white woman , whose husband , Clifford Durr , represented Dr. King . And these women would get together and just talk . And every now and then Ms. Carr would call me , and she 'd say , " Bryan , Ms. Parks is coming to town . We 're going to get together and talk . Do you want to come over and listen ? " And I 'd say , " Yes , Ma 'am , I do . " And she 'd say , " Well what are you going to do when you get here ? " I said , " I 'm going to listen . " And I 'd go over there and I would , I would just listen . It would be so energizing and so empowering . And one time I was over there listening to these women talk , and after a couple of hours Ms. Parks turned to me and she said , " Now Bryan , tell me what the Equal Justice Initiative is . Tell me what you 're trying to do . " And I began giving her my rap . I said , " Well we 're trying to challenge injustice . We 're trying to help people who have been wrongly convicted . We 're trying to confront bias and discrimination in the administration of criminal justice . We 're trying to end life without parole sentences for children . We 're trying to do something about the death penalty . We 're trying to reduce the prison population . We 're trying to end mass incarceration . " I gave her my whole rap , and when I finished she looked at me and she said , " Mmm mmm mmm . " She said , " That 's going to make you tired , tired , tired . " And that 's when Ms. Carr leaned forward , she put her finger in my face , she said , " That 's why you 've got to be brave , brave , brave . " And I actually believe that the TED community needs to be more courageous . We need to find ways to embrace these challenges , these problems , the suffering . Because ultimately , our humanity depends on everyone 's humanity . I 've learned very simple things doing the work that I do . It 's just taught me very simple things . I 've come to understand and to believe that each of us is more than the worst thing we 've ever done . I believe that for every person on the planet . I think if somebody tells a lie , they 're not just a liar . I think if somebody takes something that doesn 't belong to them , they 're not just a thief . I think even if you kill someone , you 're not just a killer . And because of that there 's this basic human dignity that must be respected by law . I also believe that in many parts of this country , and certainly in many parts of this globe , that the opposite of poverty is not wealth . I don 't believe that . I actually think , in too many places , the opposite of poverty is justice . And finally , I believe that , despite the fact that it is so dramatic and so beautiful and so inspiring and so stimulating , we will ultimately not be judged by our technology , we won 't be judged by our design , we won 't be judged by our intellect and reason . Ultimately , you judge the character of a society , not by how they treat their rich and the powerful and the privileged , but by how they treat the poor , the condemned , the incarcerated . Because it 's in that nexus that we actually begin to understand truly profound things about who we are . I sometimes get out of balance . I 'll end with this story . I sometimes push too hard . I do get tired , as we all do . Sometimes those ideas get ahead of our thinking in ways that are important . And I 've been representing these kids who have been sentenced to do these very harsh sentences . And I go to the jail and I see my client who 's 13 and 14 , and he 's been certified to stand trial as an adult . I start thinking , well , how did that happen ? How can a judge turn you into something that you 're not ? And the judge has certified him as an adult , but I see this kid . And I was up too late one night and I starting thinking , well gosh , if the judge can turn you into something that you 're not , the judge must have magic power . Yeah , Bryan , the judge has some magic power . You should ask for some of that . And because I was up too late , wasn 't thinking real straight , I started working on a motion . And I had a client who was 14 years old , a young , poor black kid . And I started working on this motion , and the head of the motion was : " Motion to try my poor , 14-year-old black male client like a privileged , white 75-year-old corporate executive . " And I put in my motion that there was prosecutorial misconduct and police misconduct and judicial misconduct . There was a crazy line in there about how there 's no conduct in this county , it 's all misconduct . And the next morning , I woke up and I thought , now did I dream that crazy motion , or did I actually write it ? And to my horror , not only had I written it , but I had sent it to court . A couple months went by , and I had just forgotten all about it . And I finally decided , oh gosh , I 've got to go to the court and do this crazy case . And I got into my car and I was feeling really overwhelmed -- overwhelmed . And I got in my car and I went to this courthouse . And I was thinking , this is going to be so difficult , so painful . And I finally got out of the car and I started walking up to the courthouse . And as I was walking up the steps of this courthouse , there was an older black man who was the janitor in this courthouse . When this man saw me , he came over to me and he said , " Who are you ? " I said , " I 'm a lawyer . " He said , " You 're a lawyer ? " I said , " Yes , sir . " And this man came over to me and he hugged me . And he whispered in my ear . He said , " I 'm so proud of you . " And I have to tell you , it was energizing . It connected deeply with something in me about identity , about the capacity of every person to contribute to a community , to a perspective that is hopeful . Well I went into the courtroom . And as soon as I walked inside , the judge saw me coming in . He said , " Mr. Stevenson , did you write this crazy motion ? " I said , " Yes , sir . I did . " And we started arguing . And people started coming in because they were just outraged . I had written these crazy things . and assistant prosecutors and clerk workers . And before I knew it , the courtroom was filled with people angry that we were talking about race , that we were talking about poverty , that we were talking about inequality . And out of the corner of my eye , I could see this janitor pacing back and forth . And he kept looking through the window , and he could hear all of this holler . He kept pacing back and forth . came into the courtroom and sat down behind me , almost at counsel table . About 10 minutes later the judge said we would take a break . And during the break there was a deputy sheriff who was offended that the janitor had come into court . And this deputy jumped up and he ran over to this older black man . He said , " Jimmy , what are you doing in this courtroom ? " And this older black man stood up and he looked at that deputy and he looked at me and he said , " I came into this courtroom to tell this young man , keep your eyes on the prize , hold on . " I 've come to TED because I believe that many of you understand that the moral arc of the universe is long , but it bends toward justice . That we cannot be full evolved human beings until we care about human rights and basic dignity . That all of our survival is tied to the survival of everyone . That our visions of technology and design and entertainment and creativity have to be married with visions of humanity , compassion and justice . And more than anything , for those of you who share that , I 've simply come to tell you to keep your eyes on the prize , hold on . Thank you very much . So you heard and saw an obvious desire by this audience , this community , to help you on your way and to do something on this issue . Other than writing a check , what could we do ? Well there are opportunities all around us . If you live in the state of California , for example , there 's a referendum coming up this spring where actually there 's going to be an effort to redirect some of the money we spend on the politics of punishment . For example , here in California we 're going to spend one billion dollars on the death penalty in the next five years -- one billion dollars . And yet , 46 percent of all homicide cases don 't result in arrest . 56 percent of all rape cases don 't result . So there 's an opportunity to change that . And this referendum would propose having those dollars go to law enforcement and safety . And I think that opportunity exists all around us . There 's been this huge decline in crime in America over the last three decades . And part of the narrative of that is sometimes that it 's about increased incarceration rates . What would you say to someone who believed that ? Well actually the violent crime rate has remained relatively stable . The great increase in mass incarceration in this country wasn 't really in violent crime categories . It was this misguided war on drugs . That 's where the dramatic increases have come in our prison population . And we got carried away with the rhetoric of punishment . And so we have three strikes laws that put people in prison forever for stealing a bicycle , for low-level property crimes , rather than making them give those resources back to the people who they victimized . I believe we need to do more to help people who are victimized by crime , not do less . And I think our current punishment philosophy does nothing for no one . And I think that 's the orientation that we have to change . Bryan , you 've struck a massive chord here . You 're an inspiring person . Thank you so much for coming to TED . Thank you . I 'm going to speak about a tiny , little idea . And this is about shifting baseline . And because the idea can be explained in one minute , I will tell you three stories before to fill in the time . And the first story is about Charles Darwin , one of my heroes . And he was here , as you well know , in ' 35 . And you 'd think he was chasing finches , but he wasn 't . He was actually collecting fish . And he described one of them as very " common . " This was the sailfin grouper . A big fishery was run on it until the ' 80s . Now the fish is on the IUCN Red List . Now this story , we have heard it lots of times on Galapagos and other places , so there is nothing particular about it . But the point is , we still come to Galapagos . We still think it is pristine . The brochures still say it is untouched . So what happens here ? The second story , also to illustrate another concept , is called shifting waistline . Because I was there in ' 71 , studying a lagoon in West Africa . I was there because I grew up in Europe and I wanted later to work in Africa . And I thought I could blend in . And I got a big sunburn , and I was convinced that I was really not from there . This was my first sunburn . And the lagoon was surrounded by palm trees , as you can see , and a few mangrove . And it had tilapia about 20 centimeters , a species of tilapia called blackchin tilapia . And the fisheries for this tilapia sustained lots of fish and they had a good time and they earned more than average in Ghana . When I went there 27 years later , the fish had shrunk to half of their size . They were maturing at five centimeters . They had been pushed genetically . There were still fishes . They were still kind of happy . And the fish also were happy to be there . So nothing has changed , but everything has changed . My third little story is that I was an accomplice in the introduction of trawling in Southeast Asia . In the ' 70s -- well , beginning in the ' 60s -- Europe did lots of development projects . Fish development meant imposing on countries that had already 100,000 fishers to impose on them industrial fishing . And this boat , quite ugly , is called the Mutiara 4 . And I went sailing on it , and we did surveys throughout the southern South China sea and especially the Java Sea . And what we caught , we didn 't have words for it . What we caught , I know now , is the bottom of the sea . And 90 percent of our catch were sponges , other animals that are fixed on the bottom . And actually most of the fish , they are a little spot on the debris , the piles of debris , were coral reef fish . Essentially the bottom of the sea came onto the deck and then was thrown down . And these pictures are extraordinary because this transition is very rapid . Within a year , you do a survey and then commercial fishing begins . The bottom is transformed from , in this case , a hard bottom or soft coral into a muddy mess . This is a dead turtle . They were not eaten , they were thrown away because they were dead . And one time we caught a live one . It was not drowned yet . And then they wanted to kill it because it was good to eat . This mountain of debris is actually collected by fishers every time they go into an area that 's never been fished . But it 's not documented . We transform the world , but we don 't remember it . We adjust our baseline to the new level , and we don 't recall what was there . If you generalize this , something like this happens . You have on the y axis some good thing : biodiversity , numbers of orca , the greenness of your country , the water supply . And over time it changes -- it changes because people do things , or naturally . Every generation will use the images that they got at the beginning of their conscious lives as a standard and will extrapolate forward . And the difference then , they perceive as a loss . But they don 't perceive what happened before as a loss . You can have a succession of changes . At the end you want to sustain miserable leftovers . And that , to a large extent , is what we want to do now . We want to sustain things that are gone or things that are not the way they were . Now one should think this problem affected people certainly when in predatory societies , they killed animals and they didn 't know they had done so after a few generations . Because , obviously , an animal that is very abundant , before it gets extinct , it becomes rare . So you don 't lose abundant animals . You always lose rare animals . And therefore they 're not perceived as a big loss . Over time , we concentrate on large animals , and in a sea that means the big fish . They become rarer because we fish them . Over time we have a few fish left and we think this is the baseline . And the question is , why do people accept this ? Well because they don 't know that it was different . And in fact , lots of people , scientists , will contest that it was really different . And they will contest this because the evidence presented in an earlier mode is not in the way they would like the evidence presented . For example , the anecdote that some present , as Captain so-and-so observed lots of fish in this area cannot be used or is usually not utilized by fishery scientists , because it 's not " scientific . " So you have a situation where people don 't know the past , even though we live in literate societies , because they don 't trust the sources of the past . And hence , the enormous role that a marine protected area can play . Because with marine protected areas , we actually recreate the past . We recreate the past that people cannot conceive because the baseline has shifted and is extremely low . That is for people who can see a marine protected area and who can benefit from the insight that it provides , which enables them to reset their baseline . How about the people who can 't do that because they have no access -- the people in the Midwest for example ? There I think that the arts and film can perhaps fill the gap , and simulation . This is a simulation of Chesapeake Bay . There were gray whales in Chesapeake Bay a long time ago -- 500 years ago . And you will have noticed that the hues and tones are like " Avatar . " And if you think about " Avatar , " if you think of why people were so touched by it -- never mind the Pocahontas story -- why so touched by the imagery ? Because it evokes something that in a sense has been lost . And so my recommendation , it 's the only one I will provide , is for Cameron to do " Avatar II " underwater . Thank you very much . Do you know how many choices you make in a typical day ? Do you know how many choices you make in typical week ? I recently did a survey with over 2,000 Americans , and the average number of choices that the typical American reports making is about 70 in a typical day . There was also recently a study done with CEOs in which they followed CEOs around for a whole week . And these scientists simply documented all the various tasks that these CEOs engaged in and how much time they spent engaging in making decisions related to these tasks . And they found that the average CEO engaged in about 139 tasks in a week . Each task was made up of many , many , many sub-choices of course . 50 percent of their decisions were made in nine minutes or less . Only about 12 percent of the decisions did they make an hour or more of their time . Think about your own choices . Do you know how many choices make it into your nine minute category versus your one hour category ? How well do you think you 're doing at managing those choices ? Today I want to talk about one of the biggest modern day choosing problems that we have , which is the choice overload problem . I want to talk about the problem and some potential solutions . Now as I talk about this problem , I 'm going to have some questions for you and I 'm going to want to know your answers . So when I ask you a question , since I 'm blind , only raise your hand if you want to burn off some calories . Otherwise , when I ask you a question , and if your answer is yes , I 'd like you to clap your hands . So for my first question for you today : Are you guys ready to hear about the choice overload problem ? Thank you . So when I was a graduate student at Stanford University , I used to go to this very , very upscale grocery store ; at least at that time it was truly upscale . It was a store called Draeger 's . Now this store , it was almost like going to an amusement park . They had 250 different kinds of mustards and vinegars and over 500 different kinds of fruits and vegetables and more than two dozen different kinds of bottled water -- and this was during a time when we actually used to drink tap water . I used to love going to this store , but on one occasion I asked myself , well how come you never buy anything ? Here 's their olive oil aisle . They had over 75 different kinds of olive oil , including those that were in a locked case that came from thousand-year-old olive trees . So I one day decided to pay a visit to the manager , and I asked the manager , " Is this model of offering people all this choice really working ? " And he pointed to the busloads of tourists that would show up everyday , with cameras ready usually . We decided to do a little experiment , and we picked jam for our experiment . Here 's their jam aisle . They had 348 different kinds of jam . We set up a little tasting booth right near the entrance of the store . We there put out six different flavors of jam or 24 different flavors of jam , and we looked at two things : First , in which case were people more likely to stop , sample some jam ? More people stopped when there were 24 , about 60 percent , than when there were six , about 40 percent . The next thing we looked at is in which case were people more likely to buy a jar of jam . Now we see the opposite effect . Of the people who stopped when there were 24 , only three percent of them actually bought a jar of jam . Of the people who stopped when there were six , well now we saw that 30 percent of them actually bought a jar of jam . Now if you do the math , people were at least six times more likely to buy a jar of jam if they encountered six than if they encountered 24 . Now choosing not to buy a jar of jam is probably good for us -- at least it 's good for our waistlines -- but it turns out that this choice overload problem affects us even in very consequential decisions . We choose not to choose , even when it goes against our best self-interests . So now for the topic of today : financial savings . Now I 'm going to describe to you a study I did with Gur Huberman , Emir Kamenica , Wei Jang where we looked at the retirement savings decisions of nearly a million Americans from about 650 plans all in the U.S. And what we looked at was whether the number of fund offerings available in a retirement savings plan , the 401 plan , does that affect people 's likelihood to save more for tomorrow . And what we found was that indeed there was a correlation . So in these plans , we had about 657 plans that ranged from offering people anywhere from two to 59 different fund offerings . And what we found was that , the more funds offered , indeed , there was less participation rate . So if you look at the extremes , those plans that offered you two funds , participation rates were around in the mid-70s -- still not as high as we want it to be . In those plans that offered nearly 60 funds , participation rates have now dropped to about the 60th percentile . Now it turns out that even if you do choose to participate when there are more choices present , even then , it has negative consequences . So for those people who did choose to participate , the more choices available , the more likely people were to completely avoid stocks or equity funds . The more choices available , the more likely they were to put all their money in pure money market accounts . Now neither of these extreme decisions are the kinds of decisions that any of us would recommend for people when you 're considering their future financial well-being . Well , over the past decade , we have observed three main negative consequences to offering people more and more choices . They 're more likely to delay choosing -- procrastinate even when it goes against their best self-interest . They 're more likely to make worse choices -- worse financial choices , medical choices . They 're more likely to choose things that make them less satisfied , even when they do objectively better . The main reason for this is because , we might enjoy gazing at those giant walls of mayonnaises , mustards , vinegars , jams , but we can 't actually do the math of comparing and contrasting and actually picking from that stunning display . So what I want to propose to you today are four simple techniques -- techniques that we have tested in one way or another in different research venues -- that you can easily apply in your businesses . The first : Cut . You 've heard it said before , but it 's never been more true than today , that less is more . People are always upset when I say , " Cut . " They 're always worried they 're going to lose shelf space . But in fact , what we 're seeing more and more is that if you are willing to cut , get rid of those extraneous redundant options , well there 's an increase in sales , there 's a lowering of costs , there is an improvement of the choosing experience . When Proctor & amp ; Gamble went from 26 different kinds of Head & amp ; Shoulders to 15 , they saw an increase in sales by 10 percent . When the Golden Cat Corporation got rid of their 10 worst-selling cat litter products , they saw an increase in profits by 87 percent -- a function of both increase in sales and lowering of costs . You know , the average grocery store today offers you 45,000 products . The typical Walmart today offers you 100,000 products . But the ninth largest retailer , the ninth biggest retailer in the world today is Aldi , and it offers you only 1,400 products -- one kind of canned tomato sauce . Now in the financial savings world , I think one of the best examples that has recently come out on how to best manage the choice offerings has actually been something that David Laibson was heavily involved in designing , which was the program that they have at Harvard . Every single Harvard employee is now automatically enrolled in a lifecycle fund . For those people who actually want to choose , they 're given 20 funds , not 300 or more funds . You know , often , people say , " I don 't know how to cut . They 're all important choices . " And the first thing I do is I ask the employees , " Tell me how these choices are different from one another . And if your employees can 't tell them apart , neither can your consumers . " Now before we started our session this afternoon , I had a chat with Gary . And Gary said that he would be willing to offer people in this audience an all-expenses-paid free vacation to the most beautiful road in the world . Here 's a description of the road . And I 'd like you to read it . And now I 'll give you a few seconds to read it and then I want you to clap your hands if you 're ready to take Gary up on his offer . Okay . Anybody who 's ready to take him up on his offer . Is that all ? All right , let me show you some more about this . You guys knew there was a trick , didn 't you . Now who 's ready to go on this trip . I think I might have actually heard more hands . All right . Now in fact , you had objectively more information the first time around than the second time around , but I would venture to guess that you felt that it was more real the second time around . Because the pictures made it feel more real to you . Which brings me to the second technique for handling the choice overload problem , which is concretization . That in order for people to understand the differences between the choices , they have to be able to understand the consequences associated with each choice , and that the consequences need to be felt in a vivid sort of way , in a very concrete way . Why do people spend an average of 15 to 30 percent more when they use an ATM card or a credit card as opposed to cash ? Because it doesn 't feel like real money . And it turns out that making it feel more concrete can actually be a very positive tool to use in getting people to save more . So a study that I did with Shlomo Benartzi and Alessandro Previtero , we did a study with people at ING -- employees that are all working at ING -- and now these people were all in a session where they 're doing enrollment for their 401 plan . And during that session , we kept the session exactly the way it used to be , but we added one little thing . The one little thing we added was we asked people to just think about all the positive things that would happen in your life if you saved more . By doing that simple thing , there was an increase in enrollment by 20 percent and there was an increase in the amount of people willing to save or the amount that they were willing to put down into their savings account by four percent . The third technique : Categorization . We can handle more categories than we can handle choices . So for example , here 's a study we did in a magazine aisle . It turns out that in Wegmans grocery stores up and down the northeast corridor , the magazine aisles range anywhere from 331 different kinds of magazines all the way up to 664 . But you know what ? If I show you 600 magazines and I divide them up into 10 categories , versus I show you 400 magazines and divide them up into 20 categories , you believe that I have given you more choice and a better choosing experience if I gave you the 400 than if I gave you the 600 . Because the categories tell me how to tell them apart . Here are two different jewelry displays . One is called " Jazz " and the other one is called " Swing . " If you think the display on the left is Swing and the display on the right is Jazz , clap your hands . Okay , there 's some . If you think the one on the left is Jazz and the one on the right is Swing , clap your hands . Okay , a bit more . Now it turns out you 're right . The one on the left is Jazz and the one on the right is Swing , but you know what ? This is a highly useless categorization scheme . The categories need to say something to the chooser , not the choice-maker . And you often see that problem when it comes down to those long lists of all these funds . Who are they actually supposed to be informing ? My fourth technique : Condition for complexity . It turns out we can actually handle a lot more information than we think we can , we 've just got to take it a little easier . We have to gradually increase the complexity . I 'm going to show you one example of what I 'm talking about . Let 's take a very , very complicated decision : buying a car . Here 's a German car manufacturer that gives you the opportunity to completely custom make your car . You 've got to make 60 different decisions , completely make up your car . Now these decisions vary in the number of choices that they offer per decision . Car colors , exterior car colors -- I 've got 56 choices . Engines , gearshift -- four choices . So now what I 'm going to do is I 'm going to vary the order in which these decisions appear . So half of the customers are going to go from high choice , 56 car colors , to low choice , four gearshifts . The other half of the customers are going to go from low choice , four gearshifts , to 56 car colors , high choice . What am I going to look at ? How engaged you are . If you keep hitting the default button per decision , that means you 're getting overwhelmed , that means I 'm losing you . What you find is the people who go from high choice to low choice , they 're hitting that default button over and over and over again . We 're losing them . They go from low choice to high choice , they 're hanging in there . It 's the same information . It 's the same number of choices . The only thing that I have done is I have varied the order in which that information is presented . If I start you off easy , I learn how to choose . Even though choosing gearshift doesn 't tell me anything about my preferences for interior decor , it still prepares me for how to choose . It also gets me excited about this big product that I 'm putting together , so I 'm more willing to be motivated to be engaged . So let me recap . I have talked about four techniques for mitigating the problem of choice overload -- cut -- get rid of the extraneous alternatives ; concretize -- make it real ; categorize -- we can handle more categories , less choices ; condition for complexity . All of these techniques that I 'm describing to you today are designed to help you manage your choices -- better for you , you can use them on yourself , better for the people that you are serving . Because I believe that the key to getting the most from choice is to be choosy about choosing . And the more we 're able to be choosy about choosing the better we will be able to practice the art of choosing . Thank you very much . I think we have to do something about a piece of the culture of medicine that has to change . And I think it starts with one physician , and that 's me . And maybe I 've been around long enough that I can afford to give away some of my false prestige to be able to do that . Before I actually begin the meat of my talk , let 's begin with a bit of baseball . Hey , why not ? We 're near the end , we 're getting close to the World Series . We all love baseball , don 't we ? Baseball is filled with some amazing statistics . And there 's hundreds of them . " Moneyball " is about to come out , and it 's all about statistics and using statistics to build a great baseball team . I 'm going to focus on one stat that I hope a lot of you have heard of . It 's called batting average . So we talk about a 300 , a batter who bats 300 . That means that ballplayer batted safely , hit safely three times out of 10 at bats . That means hit the ball into the outfield , it dropped , it didn 't get caught , and whoever tried to throw it to first base didn 't get there in time and the runner was safe . Three times out of 10 . Do you know what they call a 300 hitter in Major League Baseball ? Good , really good , maybe an all-star . Do you know what they call a 400 baseball hitter ? That 's somebody who hit , by the way , four times safely out of every 10 . Legendary -- as in Ted Williams legendary -- the last Major League Baseball player to hit over 400 during a regular season . Now let 's take this back into my world of medicine where I 'm a lot more comfortable , or perhaps a bit less comfortable after what I 'm going to talk to you about . Suppose you have appendicitis and you 're referred to a surgeon who 's batting 400 on appendectomies . Somehow this isn 't working out , is it ? Now suppose you live in a certain part of a certain remote place and you have a loved one who has blockages in two coronary arteries and your family doctor refers that loved one to a cardiologist who 's batting 200 on angioplasties . But , but , you know what ? She 's doing a lot better this year . She 's on the comeback trail . And she 's hitting a 257 . Somehow this isn 't working . But I 'm going to ask you a question . What do you think a batting average for a cardiac surgeon or a nurse practitioner or an orthopedic surgeon , an OBGYN , a paramedic is supposed to be ? 1,000 , very good . Now truth of the matter is , nobody knows in all of medicine what a good surgeon or physician or paramedic is supposed to bat . What we do though is we send each one of them , including myself , out into the world with the admonition , be perfect . Never ever , ever make a mistake , but you worry about the details , about how that 's going to happen . And that was the message that I absorbed when I was in med school . I was an obsessive compulsive student . In high school , a classmate once said that Brian Goldman would study for a blood test . And so I did . And I studied in my little garret at the nurses ' residence at Toronto General Hospital , not far from here . And I memorized everything . I memorized in my anatomy class the origins and exertions of every muscle , every branch of every artery that came off the aorta , differential diagnoses obscure and common . I even knew the differential diagnosis in how to classify renal tubular acidosis . And all the while , I was amassing more and more knowledge . And I did well , I graduated with honors , cum laude . And I came out of medical school with the impression that if I memorized everything and knew everything , or as much as possible , as close to everything as possible , that it would immunize me against making mistakes . And it worked for a while , until I met Mrs. Drucker . I was a resident at a teaching hospital here in Toronto when Mrs. Drucker was brought to the emergency department of the hospital where I was working . At the time I was assigned to the cardiology service on a cardiology rotation . And it was my job , when the emergency staff called for a cardiology consult , to see that patient in emerg . and to report back to my attending . And I saw Mrs. Drucker , and she was breathless . And when I listened to her , she was making a wheezy sound . And when I listened to her chest with a stethoscope , I could hear crackly sounds on both sides that told me that she was in congestive heart failure . This is a condition in which the heart fails , and instead of being able to pump all the blood forward , some of the blood backs up into the lung , the lungs fill up with blood , and that 's why you have shortness of breath . And that wasn 't a difficult diagnosis to make . I made it and I set to work treating her . I gave her aspirin . I gave her medications to relieve the strain on her heart . I gave her medications that we call diuretics , water pills , to get her to pee out the access fluid . And over the course of the next hour and a half or two , she started to feel better . And I felt really good . And that 's when I made my first mistake ; I sent her home . Actually , I made two more mistakes . I sent her home without speaking to my attending . I didn 't pick up the phone and do what I was supposed to do , which was call my attending and run the story by him so he would have a chance to see her for himself . And he knew her , he would have been able to furnish additional information about her . Maybe I did it for a good reason . Maybe I didn 't want to be a high-maintenance resident . Maybe I wanted to be so successful and so able to take responsibility that I would do so and I would be able to take care of my attending 's patients without even having to contact him . The second mistake that I made was worse . In sending her home , I disregarded a little voice deep down inside that was trying to tell me , " Goldman , not a good idea . Don 't do this . " In fact , so lacking in confidence was I that I actually asked the nurse who was looking after Mrs. Drucker , " Do you think it 's okay if she goes home ? " And the nurse thought about it and said very matter-of-factly , " Yeah , I think she 'll do okay . " I can remember that like it was yesterday . So I signed the discharge papers , and an ambulance came , paramedics came to take her home . And I went back to my work on the wards . All the rest of that day , that afternoon , I had this kind of gnawing feeling inside my stomach . But I carried on with my work . And at the end of the day , I packed up to leave the hospital and walked to the parking lot to take my car and drive home when I did something that I don 't usually do . I walked through the emergency department on my way home . And it was there that another nurse , not the nurse who was looking after Mrs. Drucker before , but another nurse , said three words to me that are the three words that most emergency physicians I know dread . Others in medicine dread them as well , but there 's something particular about emergency medicine because we see patients so fleetingly . The three words are : Do you remember ? " Do you remember that patient you sent home ? " the other nurse asked matter-of-factly . " Well she 's back , " in just that tone of voice . Well she was back all right . She was back and near death . About an hour after she had arrived home , after I 'd sent her home , she collapsed and her family called 911 and the paramedics brought her back to the emergency department where she had a blood pressure of 50 , which is in severe shock . And she was barely breathing and she was blue . And the emerg. staff pulled out all the stops . They gave her medications to raise her blood pressure . They put her on a ventilator . And I was shocked and shaken to the core . And I went through this roller coaster , because after they stabilized her , she went to the intensive care unit , and I hoped against hope that she would recover . And over the next two or three days , it was clear that she was never going to wake up . She had irreversible brain damage . And the family gathered . And over the course of the next eight or nine days , they resigned themselves to what was happening . And at about the nine day mark , they let her go -- Mrs. Drucker , a wife , a mother and a grandmother . They say you never forget the names of those who die . And that was my first time to be acquainted with that . Over the next few weeks , I beat myself up and I experienced for the first time the unhealthy shame that exists in our culture of medicine -- where I felt alone , isolated , not feeling the healthy kind of shame that you feel , because you can 't talk about it with your colleagues . You know that healthy kind , when you betray a secret that a best friend made you promise never to reveal and then you get busted and then your best friend confronts you and you have terrible discussions , but at the end of it all that sick feeling guides you and you say , I 'll never make that mistake again . And you make amends and you never make that mistake again . That 's the kind of shame that is a teacher . The unhealthy shame I 'm talking about is the one that makes you so sick inside . It 's the one that says , not that what you did was bad , but that you are bad . And it was what I was feeling . And it wasn 't because of my attending ; he was a doll . He talked to the family , and I 'm quite sure that he smoothed things over and made sure that I didn 't get sued . And I kept asking myself these questions . Why didn 't I ask my attending ? Why did I send her home ? And then at my worst moments : Why did I make such a stupid mistake ? Why did I go into medicine ? Slowly but surely , it lifted . I began to feel a bit better . And on a cloudy day , there was a crack in the clouds and the sun started to come out and I wondered , maybe I could feel better again . And I made myself a bargain that if only I redouble my efforts to be perfect and never make another mistake again , please make the voices stop . And they did . And I went back to work . And then it happened again . Two years later I was an attending in the emergency department at a community hospital just north of Toronto , and I saw a 25 year-old man with a sore throat . It was busy , I was in a bit of a hurry . He kept pointing here . I looked at his throat , it was a little bit pink . And I gave him a prescription for penicillin and sent him on his way . And even as he was walking out the door , he was still sort of pointing to his throat . And two days later I came to do my next emergency shift , and that 's when my chief asked to speak to me quietly in her office . And she said the three words : Do you remember ? " Do you remember that patient you saw with the sore throat ? " Well it turns out , he didn 't have a strep throat . He had a potentially life-threatening condition called epiglottitis . You can Google it , but it 's an infection , not of the throat , but of the upper airway , and it can actually cause the airway to close . And fortunately he didn 't die . He was placed on intravenous antibiotics and he recovered after a few days . And I went through the same period of shame and recriminations and felt cleansed and went back to work , until it happened again and again and again . Twice in one emergency shift , I missed appendicitis . Now that takes some doing , especially when you work in a hospital that at the time saw but 14 people a night . Now in both cases , I didn 't send them home and I don 't think there was any gap in their care . One I thought had a kidney stone . I ordered a kidney X-ray . When it turned out to be normal , my colleague who was doing a reassessment of the patient noticed some tenderness in the right lower quadrant and called the surgeons . The other one had a lot of diarrhea . I ordered some fluids to rehydrate him and asked my colleague to reassess him . And he did and when he noticed some tenderness in the right lower quadrant , called the surgeons . In both cases , they had their operations and they did okay . But each time , they were gnawing at me , eating at me . And I 'd like to be able to say to you that my worst mistakes only happened in the first five years of practice as many of my colleagues say , which is total B.S. Some of my doozies have been in the last five years . Alone , ashamed and unsupported . Here 's the problem : If I can 't come clean and talk about my mistakes , if I can 't find the still-small voice that tells me what really happened , how can I share it with my colleagues ? How can I teach them about what I did so that they don 't do the same thing ? If I were to walk into a room -- like right now , I have no idea what you think of me . When was the last time you heard somebody talk about failure after failure after failure ? Oh yeah , you go to a cocktail party and you might hear about some other doctor , but you 're not going to hear somebody talking about their own mistakes . If I were to walk into a room filled with my colleages and ask for their support right now and start to tell what I 've just told you right now , I probably wouldn 't get through two of those stories before they would start to get really uncomfortable , somebody would crack a joke , they 'd change the subject and we would move on . And in fact , if I knew and my colleagues knew that one of my orthopedic colleagues took off the wrong leg in my hospital , believe me , I 'd have trouble making eye contact with that person . That 's the system that we have . It 's a complete denial of mistakes . It 's a system in which there are two kinds of physicians -- those who make mistakes and those who don 't , those who can 't handle sleep deprivation and those who can , those who have lousy outcomes and those who have great outcomes . And it 's almost like an ideological reaction , like the antibodies begin to attack that person . And we have this idea that if we drive the people who make mistakes out of medicine , what will we be left with , but a safe system . But there are two problems with that . In my 20 years or so of medical broadcasting and journalism , I 've made a personal study of medical malpractice and medical errors to learn everything I can , from one of the first articles I wrote for the Toronto Star to my show " White Coat , Black Art . " And what I 've learned is that errors are absolutely ubiquitous . We work in a system where errors happen every day , where one in 10 medications are either the wrong medication given in hospital or at the wrong dosage , where hospital-acquired infections are getting more and more numerous , causing havoc and death . In this country , as many as 24,000 Canadians die of preventable medical errors . In the United States , the Institute of Medicine pegged it at 100,000 . In both cases , these are gross underestimates , because we really aren 't ferreting out the problem as we should . And here 's the thing . In a hospital system where medical knowledge is doubling every two or three years , we can 't keep up with it . Sleep deprivation is absolutely pervasive . We can 't get rid of it . We have our cognitive biases , so that I can take a perfect history on a patient with chest pain . Now take the same patient with chest pain , make them moist and garrulous and put a little bit of alcohol on their breath , and suddenly my history is laced with contempt . I don 't take the same history . I 'm not a robot ; I don 't do things the same way each time . And my patients aren 't cars ; they don 't tell me their symptoms in the same way each time . Given all of that , mistakes are inevitable . So if you take the system , as I was taught , and weed out all the error-prone health professionals , well there won 't be anybody left . And you know that business about people not wanting to talk about their worst cases ? On my show , on " White Coat , Black Art , " I made it a habit of saying , " Here 's my worst mistake , " I would say to everybody from paramedics to the chief of cardiac surgery , " Here 's my worst mistake , " blah , blah , blah , blah , blah , " What about yours ? " and I would point the microphone towards them . And their pupils would dilate , they would recoil , then they would look down and swallow hard and start to tell me their stories . They want to tell their stories . They want to share their stories . They want to be able to say , " Look , don 't make the same mistake I did . " What they need is an environment to be able to do that . What they need is a redefined medical culture . And it starts with one physician at a time . The redefined physician is human , knows she 's human , accepts it , isn 't proud of making mistakes , but strives to learn one thing from what happened that she can teach to somebody else . She shares her experience with others . She 's supportive when other people talk about their mistakes . And she points out other people 's mistakes , not in a gotcha way , but in a loving , supportive way so that everybody can benefit . And she works in a culture of medicine that acknowledges that human beings run the system , and when human beings run the system , they will make mistakes from time to time . So the system is evolving to create backups that make it easier to detect those mistakes that humans inevitably make and also fosters in a loving , supportive way places where everybody who is observing in the health care system can actually point out things that could be potential mistakes and is rewarded for doing so , and especially people like me , when we do make mistakes , we 're rewarded for coming clean . My name is Brian Goldman . I am a redefined physician . I 'm human . I make mistakes . I 'm sorry about that , but I strive to learn one thing that I can pass on to other people . I still don 't know what you think of me , but I can live with that . And let me close with three words of my own : I do remember . Hi . I 'm Kevin Allocca , I 'm the trends manager at YouTube , and I professionally watch YouTube videos . It 's true . So we 're going to talk a little bit today about how videos go viral and then why that even matters . We all want to be stars -- celebrities , singers , comedians -- and when I was younger , that seemed so very , very hard to do . But now Web video has made it so that any of us or any of the creative things that we do can become completely famous in a part of our world 's culture . Any one of you could be famous on the Internet by next Saturday . But there are over 48 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute . And of that , only a tiny percentage ever goes viral and gets tons of views and becomes a cultural moment . So how does it happen ? Three things : tastemakers , communities of participation and unexpectedness . All right , let 's go . Oh , my God . Oh , my God . Oh , my God ! Wooo ! Ohhhhh , wowwww ! Last year , Bear Vasquez posted this video that he had shot outside his home in Yosemite National Park . In 2010 , it was viewed 23 million times . This is a chart of what it looked like when it first became popular last summer . But he didn 't actually set out to make a viral video , Bear . He just wanted to share a rainbow . Because that 's what you do when your name is Yosemite Mountain Bear . And he had posted lots of nature videos in fact . And this video had actually been posted all the way back in January . So what happened here ? Jimmy Kimmel actually . Jimmy Kimmel posted this tweet that would eventually propel the video to be as popular as it would become . Because tastemakers like Jimmy Kimmel introduce us to new and interesting things and bring them to a larger audience . It 's Friday , Friday . Gotta get down on Friday . Everybody 's looking forward to the weekend , weekend . Friday , Friday . Gettin ' down on Friday . So you didn 't think that we could actually have this conversation without talking about this video I hope . Rebecca Black 's " Friday " is one of the most popular videos of the year . It 's been seen nearly 200 million times this year . This is a chart of what it looked like . And similar to " Double Rainbow , " it seems to have just sprouted up out of nowhere . So what happened on this day ? Well it was a Friday , this is true . And if you 're wondering about those other spikes , those are also Fridays . But what about this day , this one particular Friday ? Well Tosh.0 picked it up , a lot of blogs starting writing about . Michael J. Nelson from Mystery Science Theater was one of the first people to post a joke about the video on Twitter . But what 's important is that an individual or a group of tastemakers took a point of view and they shared that with a larger audience , accelerating the process . And so then this community formed of people who shared this big inside joke and they started talking about it and doing things with it . And now there are 10,000 parodies of " Friday " on YouTube . Even in the first seven days , there was one parody for every other day of the week . Unlike the one-way entertainment of the 20th century , this community participation is how we become a part of the phenomenon -- either by spreading it or by doing something new with it . So " Nyan Cat " is a looped animation with looped music . It 's this , just like this . It 's been viewed nearly 50 million times this year . And if you think that that is weird , you should know that there is a three-hour version of this that 's been viewed four million times . Even cats were watching this video . Cats were watching other cats watch this video . But what 's important here is the creativity that it inspired amongst this techie , geeky Internet culture . There were remixes . Someone made an old timey version . And then it went international . An entire remix community sprouted up that brought it from being just a stupid joke to something that we can all actually be a part of . Because we don 't just enjoy now , we participate . And who could have predicted any of this ? Who could have predicted " Double Rainbow " or Rebecca Black or " Nyan Cat ? " What scripts could you have written that would have contained this in it ? In a world where over two days of video get uploaded every minute , only that which is truly unique and unexpected can stand out in the way that these things have . When a friend of mine told me that I needed to see this great video about a guy protesting bicycle fines in New York City , I admit I wasn 't very interested . So I got a ticket for not riding in the bike lane , but often there are obstructions that keep you from properly riding in the bike lane . By being totally surprising and humorous , Casey Niestat got his funny idea and point seen five million times . And so this approach holds for anything new that we do creatively . And so it all brings us to one big question ... What does this mean ? Ohhhh . What does it mean ? Tastemakers , creative participating communities , complete unexpectedness , these are characteristics of a new kind of media and a new kind of culture where anyone has access and the audience defines the popularity . I mean , as mentioned earlier , one of the biggest stars in the world right now , Justin Bieber , got his start on YouTube . No one has to green-light your idea . And we all now feel some ownership in our own pop culture . And these are not characteristics of old media , and they 're barely true of the media of today , but they will define the entertainment of the future . Thank you . Today I 'm going to talk about unexpected discoveries . Now I work in the solar technology industry . And my small startup is looking to force ourselves into the environment by paying attention to ... ... paying attention to crowd-sourcing . It 's just a quick video of what we do . Huh . Hang on a moment . It might take a moment to load . We 'll just -- we can just skip -- I 'll just skip through the video instead ... No . This is not ... Okay . Solar technology is ... Oh , that 's all my time ? Okay . Thank you very much . My story begins right here actually in Rajasthan about two years ago . I was in the desert , under the starry skies with the Sufi singer Mukhtiar Ali . And we were in conversation about how nothing had changed since the time of the ancient Indian epic " The Mahabharata . " So back in the day , when us Indians wanted to travel we 'd jump into a chariot and we 'd zoom across the sky . Now we do the same with airplanes . Back then , when Arjuna , the great Indian warrior prince , when he was thirsty , he 'd take out a bow , he 'd shoot it into the ground and water would come out . Now we do the same with drills and machines . The conclusion that we came to was that magic had been replaced by machinery . And this made me really sad . I found myself becoming a little bit of a technophobe . I was terrified by this idea that I would lose the ability to enjoy and appreciate the sunset without having my camera on me , without tweeting it to my friends . And it felt like technology should enable magic , not kill it . When I was a little girl , my grandfather gave me his little silver pocket watch . And this piece of 50-year-old technology became the most magical thing to me . It became a gilded gateway into a world full of pirates and shipwrecks and images in my imagination . So I felt like our cellphones and our fancy watches and our cameras had stopped us from dreaming . They stopped us from being inspired . And so I jumped in , I jumped into this world of technology , to see how I could use it to enable magic as opposed to kill it . I 've been illustrating books since I was 16 . And so when I saw the iPad , I saw it as a storytelling device that could connect readers all over the world . It can know how we 're holding it . It can know where we are . It brings together image and text and animation and sound and touch . Storytelling is becoming more and more multi-sensorial . But what are we doing with it ? So I 'm actually just going to go in and launch Khoya , an interactive app for the iPad . So it says , " Place your fingers upon each light . " And so -- It says , " This box belongs to ... " And so I type in my name . And actually I become a character in the book . At various points , a little letter drops down to me -- and the iPad knows where you live because of GPS -- which is actually addressed to me . The child in me is really excited by these kinds of possibilities . Now I 've been talking a lot about magic . And I don 't mean wizards and dragons , I mean the kind of childhood magic , those ideas that we all harbored as children . This idea of fireflies in a jar , for some reason , was always really exciting to me . And so over here you need to tilt your iPad , take the fireflies out . And they actually illuminate your way through the rest of the book . Another idea that really fascinated me as a child was that an entire galaxy could be contained within a single marble . And so over here , each book and each world becomes a little marble that I drag in to this magical device within the device . And it opens up a map . All along , all fantasy books have always had maps , but these maps have been static . This is a map that grows and glows and becomes your navigation for the rest of the book . It reveals itself to you at certain points in the book as well . So I 'm just going to enter in . Another thing that 's actually really important to me is creating content that is Indian and yet very contemporary . Over here , these are the Apsaras . So we 've all heard about fairies and we 've all heard about nymphs , but how many people outside of India know about their Indian counterparts , the Apsaras ? These poor Apsaras have been trapped inside Indra 's chambers for thousands of years in an old and musty book . And so we 're bringing them back in a contemporary story for children . And a story that actually deals with new issues like the environmental crisis . Speaking of the environmental crisis , I think a big problem has been in the last 10 years is that children have been locked inside their rooms , glued to their PCs , they haven 't been able to get out . But now with mobile technology , we can actually take our children outside into the natural world with their technology . One of the interactions in the book is that you 're sent off on this quest where you need to go outside , take out your camera on the iPad and collect pictures of different natural objects . When I was a child , I had multiple collections of sticks and stones and pebbles and shells . And somehow kids don 't do that anymore . So in bringing back this childhood ritual , you need to go out and , in one chapter , take a picture of a flower and then tag it . In another chapter , you need to take a picture of a piece of bark and then tag that . And what happens is that you actually create a digital collection of photographs that you can then put up online . A child in London puts up a picture of a fox and says , " Oh , I saw a fox today . " A child in India says , " I saw a monkey today . " And it creates this kind of social network around a collection of digital photographs that you 've actually taken . In the possibilities of linking together magic , the earth and technology , there are multiple possibilities . In the next book , we plan on having an interaction where you take your iPad out with the video on and through augmented reality , you see this layer of animated pixies appear on a houseplant that 's outside your house . At one point , your screen is filled up with leaves . And so you need to make the sound of wind and blow them away and read the rest of the book . We 're moving , we 're all moving here , to a world where the forces of nature come closer together to technology , and magic and technology can come closer together . We 're harnessing energy from the sun . We 're bringing our children and ourselves closer to the natural world and that magic and joy and childhood love that we had through the simple medium of a story . Thank you . Because I usually take the role of trying to explain to people how wonderful the new technologies that are coming along are going to be , and I thought that , since I was among friends here , I would tell you what I really think and try to look back and try to understand what is really going on here with these amazing jumps in technology that seem so fast that we can barely keep on top of it . So I 'm going to start out by showing just one very boring technology slide . And then , so if you can just turn on the slide that 's on . This is just a random slide that I picked out of my file . What I want to show you is not so much the details of the slide , but the general form of it . This happens to be a slide of some analysis that we were doing about the power of RISC microprocessors versus the power of local area networks . And the interesting thing about it is that this slide , like so many technology slides that we 're used to , is a sort of a straight line on a semi-log curve . In other words , every step here represents an order of magnitude in performance scale . And this is a new thing that we talk about technology on semi-log curves . Something really weird is going on here . And that 's basically what I 'm going to be talking about . So , if you could bring up the lights . If you could bring up the lights higher , because I 'm just going to use a piece of paper here . Now why do we draw technology curves in semi-log curves ? Well the answer is , if I drew it on a normal curve where , let 's say , this is years , this is time of some sort , and this is whatever measure of the technology that I 'm trying to graph , the graphs look sort of silly . They sort of go like this . And they don 't tell us much . Now if I graph , for instance , some other technology , say transportation technology , on a semi-log curve , it would look very stupid , it would look like a flat line . But when something like this happens , things are qualitatively changing . So if transportation technology was moving along as fast as microprocessor technology , then the day after tomorrow , I would be able to get in a taxi cab and be in Tokyo in 30 seconds . It 's not moving like that . And there 's nothing precedented in the history of technology development of this kind of self-feeding growth where you go by orders of magnitude every few years . Now the question that I 'd like to ask is , if you look at these exponential curves , they don 't go on forever . Things just can 't possibly keep changing as fast as they are . One of two things is going to happen . Either it 's going to turn into a sort of classical S-curve like this , until something totally different comes along , or maybe it 's going to do this . That 's about all it can do . Now I 'm an optimist , so I sort of think it 's probably going to do something like that . If so , that means that what we 're in the middle of right now is a transition . We 're sort of on this line in a transition from the way the world used to be to some new way that the world is . And so what I 'm trying to ask , what I 've been asking myself , is what 's this new way that the world is ? What 's that new state that the world is heading toward ? Because the transition seems very , very confusing when we 're right in the middle of it . Now when I was a kid growing up , the future was kind of the year 2000 , and people used to talk about what would happen in the year 2000 . Now here 's a conference in which people talk about the future , and you notice that the future is still at about the year 2000 . It 's about as far as we go out . So in other words , the future has kind of been shrinking one year per year for my whole lifetime . Now I think that the reason is because we all feel that something 's happening there . That transition is happening . We can all sense it . And we know that it just doesn 't make too much sense to think out 30 , 50 years because everything 's going to be so different that a simple extrapolation of what we 're doing just doesn 't make any sense at all . So what I would like to talk about is what that could be , what that transition could be that we 're going through . Now in order to do that I 'm going to have to talk about a bunch of stuff that really has nothing to do with technology and computers . Because I think the only way to understand this is to really step back and take a long time scale look at things . So the time scale that I would like to look at this on is the time scale of life on Earth . So I think this picture makes sense if you look at it a few billion years at a time . So if you go back about two and a half billion years , the Earth was this big , sterile hunk of rock with a lot of chemicals floating around on it . And if you look at the way that the chemicals got organized , we begin to get a pretty good idea of how they do it . And I think that there 's theories that are beginning to understand about how it started with RNA , but I 'm going to tell a sort of simple story of it , which is that , at that time , there were little drops of oil floating around with all kinds of different recipes of chemicals in them . And some of those drops of oil had a particular combination of chemicals in them which caused them to incorporate chemicals from the outside and grow the drops of oil . And those that were like that started to split and divide . And those were the most primitive forms of cells in a sense , those little drops of oil . But now those drops of oil weren 't really alive , as we say it now , because every one of them was a little random recipe of chemicals . And every time it divided , they got sort of unequal division of the chemicals within them . And so every drop was a little bit different . In fact , the drops that were different in a way that caused them to be better at incorporating chemicals around them , grew more and incorporated more chemicals and divided more . So those tended to live longer , get expressed more . Now that 's sort of just a very simple chemical form of life , but when things got interesting was when these drops learned a trick about abstraction . Somehow by ways that we don 't quite understand , these little drops learned to write down information . They learned to record the information that was the recipe of the cell onto a particular kind of chemical called DNA . So in other words , they worked out , in this mindless sort of evolutionary way , a form of writing that let them write down what they were , so that that way of writing it down could get copied . The amazing thing is that that way of writing seems to have stayed steady since it evolved two and a half billion years ago . In fact the recipe for us , our genes , is exactly that same code and that same way of writing . In fact , every living creature is written in exactly the same set of letters and the same code . In fact , one of the things that I did just for amusement purposes is we can now write things in this code . And I 've got here a little 100 micrograms of white powder , which I try not to let the security people see at airports . But this has in it -- what I did is I took this code -- the code has standard letters that we use for symbolizing it -- and I wrote my business card onto a piece of DNA and amplified it 10 to the 22 times . So if anyone would like a hundred million copies of my business card , I have plenty for everyone in the room , and , in fact , everyone in the world , and it 's right here . If I had really been a egotist , I would have put it into a virus and released it in the room . So what was the next step ? Writing down the DNA was an interesting step . And that caused these cells -- that kept them happy for another billion years . But then there was another really interesting step where things became completely different , which is these cells started exchanging and communicating information , so that they began to get communities of cells . I don 't know if you know this , but bacteria can actually exchange DNA . Now that 's why , for instance , antibiotic resistance has evolved . Some bacteria figured out how to stay away from penicillin , and it went around sort of creating its little DNA information with other bacteria , and now we have a lot of bacteria that are resistant to penicillin , because bacteria communicate . Now what this communication allowed was communities to form that , in some sense , were in the same boat together ; they were synergistic . So they survived or they failed together , which means that if a community was very successful , all the individuals in that community were repeated more and they were favored by evolution . Now the transition point happened when these communities got so close that , in fact , they got together and decided to write down the whole recipe for the community together on one string of DNA . And so the next stage that 's interesting in life took about another billion years . And at that stage , we have multi-cellular communities , communities of lots of different types of cells , working together as a single organism . And in fact , we 're such a multi-cellular community . We have lots of cells that are not out for themselves anymore . Your skin cell is really useless without a heart cell , muscle cell , a brain cell and so on . So these communities began to evolve so that the interesting level on which evolution was taking place was no longer a cell , but a community which we call an organism . Now the next step that happened is within these communities . These communities of cells , again , began to abstract information . And they began building very special structures that did nothing but process information within the community . And those are the neural structures . So neurons are the information processing apparatus that those communities of cells built up . And in fact , they began to get specialists in the community and special structures that were responsible for recording , understanding , learning information . And that was the brains and the nervous system of those communities . And that gave them an evolutionary advantage . Because at that point , an individual -- learning could happen within the time span of a single organism , instead of over this evolutionary time span . So an organism could , for instance , learn not to eat a certain kind of fruit because it tasted bad and it got sick last time it ate it . That could happen within the lifetime of a single organism , whereas before they 'd built these special information processing structures , that would have had to be learned evolutionarily over hundreds of thousands of years by the individuals dying off that ate that kind of fruit . So that nervous system , the fact that they built these special information structures , tremendously sped up the whole process of evolution . Because evolution could now happen within an individual . It could happen in learning time scales . But then what happened was the individuals worked out , of course , tricks of communicating . And for example , the most sophisticated version that we 're aware of is human language . It 's really a pretty amazing invention if you think about it . Here I have a very complicated , messy , confused idea in my head . I 'm sitting here making grunting sounds basically , and hopefully constructing a similar messy , confused idea in your head that bears some analogy to it . But we 're taking something very complicated , turning it into sound , sequences of sounds , and producing something very complicated in your brain . So this allows us now to begin to start functioning as a single organism . And so , in fact , what we 've done is we , humanity , have started abstracting out . We 're going through the same levels that multi-cellular organisms have gone through -- abstracting out our methods of recording , presenting , processing information . So for example , the invention of language was a tiny step in that direction . Telephony , computers , videotapes , CD-ROMs and so on are all our specialized mechanisms that we 've now built within our society for handling that information . And it all connects us together into something that is much bigger and much faster and able to evolve than what we were before . So now , evolution can take place on a scale of microseconds . And you saw Ty 's little evolutionary example where he sort of did a little bit of evolution on the Convolution program right before your eyes . So now we 've speeded up the time scales once again . So the first steps of the story that I told you about took a billion years a piece . And the next steps , like nervous systems and brains , took a few hundred million years . Then the next steps , like language and so on , took less than a million years . And these next steps , like electronics , seem to be taking only a few decades . The process is feeding on itself and becoming , I guess , autocatalytic is the word for it -- when something reinforces its rate of change . The more it changes , the faster it changes . And I think that that 's what we 're seeing here in this explosion of curve . We 're seeing this process feeding back on itself . Now I design computers for a living , and I know that the mechanisms that I use to design computers would be impossible without recent advances in computers . So right now , what I do is I design objects at such complexity that it 's really impossible for me to design them in the traditional sense . I don 't know what every transistor in the connection machine does . There are billions of them . Instead , what I do and what the designers at Thinking Machines do is we think at some level of abstraction and then we hand it to the machine and the machine takes it beyond what we could ever do , much farther and faster than we could ever do . And in fact , sometimes it takes it by methods that we don 't quite even understand . One method that 's particularly interesting that I 've been using a lot lately is evolution itself . So what we do is we put inside the machine a process of evolution that takes place on the microsecond time scale . So for example , in the most extreme cases , we can actually evolve a program by starting out with random sequences of instructions . Say , " Computer , would you please make a hundred million random sequences of instructions . Now would you please run all of those random sequences of instructions , run all of those programs , and pick out the ones that came closest to doing what I wanted . " So in other words , I define what I wanted . Let 's say I want to sort numbers , as a simple example I 've done it with . So find the programs that come closest to sorting numbers . So of course , random sequences of instructions are very unlikely to sort numbers , so none of them will really do it . But one of them , by luck , may put two numbers in the right order . And I say , " Computer , would you please now take the 10 percent of those random sequences that did the best job . Save those . Kill off the rest . And now let 's reproduce the ones that sorted numbers the best . And let 's reproduce them by a process of recombination analogous to sex . " Take two programs and they produce children by exchanging their subroutines , and the children inherit the traits of the subroutines of the two programs . So I 've got now a new generation of programs that are produced by combinations of the programs that did a little bit better job . Say , " Please repeat that process . " Score them again . Introduce some mutations perhaps . And try that again and do that for another generation . Well every one of those generations just takes a few milliseconds . So I can do the equivalent of millions of years of evolution on that within the computer in a few minutes , or in the complicated cases , in a few hours . At the end of that , I end up with programs that are absolutely perfect at sorting numbers . In fact , they are programs that are much more efficient than programs I could have ever written by hand . Now if I look at those programs , I can 't tell you how they work . I 've tried looking at them and telling you how they work . They 're obscure , weird programs . But they do the job . And in fact , I know , I 'm very confident that they do the job because they come from a line of hundreds of thousands of programs that did the job . In fact , their life depended on doing the job . I was riding in a 747 with Marvin Minsky once , and he pulls out this card and says , " Oh look . Look at this . It says , ' This plane has hundreds of thousands of tiny parts working together to make you a safe flight . ' Doesn 't that make you feel confident ? " In fact , we know that the engineering process doesn 't work very well when it gets complicated . So we 're beginning to depend on computers to do a process that 's very different than engineering . And it lets us produce things of much more complexity than normal engineering lets us produce . And yet , we don 't quite understand the options of it . So in a sense , it 's getting ahead of us . We 're now using those programs to make much faster computers so that we 'll be able to run this process much faster . So it 's feeding back on itself . The thing is becoming faster and that 's why I think it seems so confusing . Because all of these technologies are feeding back on themselves . We 're taking off . And what we are is we 're at a point in time which is analogous to when single-celled organisms were turning into multi-celled organisms . So we 're the amoebas and we can 't quite figure out what the hell this thing is we 're creating . We 're right at that point of transition . But I think that there really is something coming along after us . I think it 's very haughty of us to think that we 're the end product of evolution . And I think all of us here are a part of producing whatever that next thing is . So lunch is coming along , and I think I will stop at that point , before I get selected out . So a couple of years ago I started a program to try to get the rockstar tech and design people to take a year off and work in the one environment that represents pretty much everything they 're supposed to hate ; we have them work in government . The program is called Code for America , and it 's a little bit like a Peace Corps for geeks . We select a few fellows every year and we have them work with city governments . Instead of sending them off into the Third World , we send them into the wilds of City Hall . And there they make great apps , they work with city staffers . But really what they 're doing is they 're showing what 's possible with technology today . So meet Al . Al is a fire hydrant in the city of Boston . Here it kind of looks like he 's looking for a date , but what he 's really looking for is for someone to shovel him out when he gets snowed in , because he knows he 's not very good at fighting fires when he 's covered in four feet of snow . Now how did he come to be looking for help in this very unique manner ? We had a team of fellows in Boston last year through the Code for America program . They were there in February , and it snowed a lot in February last year . And they noticed that the city never gets to digging out these fire hydrants . But one fellow in particular , a guy named Erik Michaels-Ober , noticed something else , and that 's that citizens are shoveling out sidewalks right in front of these things . So he did what any good developer would do , he wrote an app . It 's a cute little app where you can adopt a fire hydrant . So you agree to dig it out when it snows . If you do , you get to name it , and he called the first one Al . And if you don 't , someone can steal it from you . So it 's got cute little game dynamics on it . This is a modest little app . It 's probably the smallest of the 21 apps that the fellows wrote last year . But it 's doing something that no other government technology does . It 's spreading virally . There 's a guy in the I.T. department of the City of Honolulu who saw this app and realized that he could use it , not for snow , but to get citizens to adopt tsunami sirens . It 's very important that these tsunami sirens work , but people steal the batteries out of them . So he 's getting citizens to check on them . And then Seattle decided to use it to get citizens to clear out clogged storm drains . And Chicago just rolled it out to get people to sign up to shovel sidewalks when it snows . So we now know of nine cities that are planning to use this . And this has spread just frictionlessly , organically , naturally . If you know anything about government technology , you know that this isn 't how it normally goes . Procuring software usually takes a couple of years . We had a team that worked on a project in Boston last year that took three people about two and a half months . It was a way that parents could figure out which were the right public schools for their kids . We were told afterward that if that had gone through normal channels , it would have taken at least two years and it would have cost about two million dollars . And that 's nothing . There is one project in the California court system right now that so far cost taxpayers two billion dollars , and it doesn 't work . And there are projects like this at every level of government . So an app that takes a couple of days to write and then spreads virally , that 's sort of a shot across the bow to the institution of government . It suggests how government could work better -- not more like a private company , as many people think it should . And not even like a tech company , but more like the Internet itself . And that means permissionless , it means open , it means generative . And that 's important . But what 's more important about this app is that it represents how a new generation is tackling the problem of government -- not as the problem of an ossified institution , but as a problem of collective action . And that 's great news , because , it turns out , we 're very good at collective action with digital technology . Now there 's a very large community of people that are building the tools that we need to do things together effectively . It 's not just Code for America fellows , there are hundreds of people all over the country that are standing and writing civic apps every day in their own communities . They haven 't given up on government . They are frustrated as hell with it , but they 're not complaining about it , they 're fixing it . And these folks know something that we 've lost sight of . And that 's that when you strip away all your feelings about politics and the line at the DMV and all those other things that we 're really mad about , government is , at its core , in the words of Tim O 'Reilly , " What we do together that we can 't do alone . " Now a lot of people have given up on government . And if you 're one of those people , I would ask that you reconsider , because things are changing . Politics is not changing ; government is changing . And because government ultimately derives its power from us -- remember " We the people ? " -- how we think about it is going to effect how that change happens . Now I didn 't know very much about government when I started this program . And like a lot of people , I thought government was basically about getting people elected to office . Well after two years , I 've come to the conclusion that , especially local government , is about opossums . This is the call center for the services and information line . It 's generally where you will get if you call 311 in your city . If you should ever have the chance to staff your city 's call center , as our fellow Scott Silverman did as part of the program -- in fact , they all do that -- you will find that people call government with a very wide range of issues , including having an opossum stuck in your house . So Scott gets this call . He types " Opossum " into this official knowledge base . He doesn 't really come up with anything . He starts with animal control . And finally , he says , " Look , can you just open all the doors to your house and play music really loud and see if the thing leaves ? " So that worked . So booya for Scott . But that wasn 't the end of the opossums . Boston doesn 't just have a call center . It has an app , a Web and mobile app , called Citizens Connect . Now we didn 't write this app . This is the work of the very smart people at the Office of New Urban Mechanics in Boston . So one day -- this is an actual report -- this came in : " Opossum in my trashcan . Can 't tell if it 's dead . How do I get this removed ? " But what happens with Citizens Connect is different . So Scott was speaking person-to-person . But on Citizens Connect everything is public , so everybody can see this . And in this case , a neighbor saw it . And the next report we got said , " I walked over to this location , found the trashcan behind the house . Opossum ? Check . Living ? Yep . Turned trashcan on its side . Walked home . Goodnight sweet opossum . " Pretty simple . So this is great . This is the digital meeting the physical . And it 's also a great example of government getting in on the crowd-sourcing game . But it 's also a great example of government as a platform . And I don 't mean necessarily a technological definition of platform here . I 'm just talking about a platform for people to help themselves and to help others . So one citizen helped another citizen , but government played a key role here . It connected those two people . And it could have connected them with government services if they 'd been needed , but a neighbor is a far better and cheaper alternative to government services . When one neighbor helps another , we strengthen our communities . We call animal control , it just costs a lot of money . Now one of the important things we need to think about government is that it 's not the same thing as politics . And most people get that , but they think that one is the input to the other . That our input to the system of government is voting . Now how many times have we elected a political leader -- and sometimes we spend a lot of energy getting a new political leader elected -- and then we sit back and we expect government to reflect our values and meet our needs , and then not that much changes ? That 's because government is like a vast ocean and politics is the six-inch layer on top . And what 's under that is what we call bureaucracy . And we say that word with such contempt . But it 's that contempt that keeps this thing that we own and we pay for as something that 's working against us , this other thing , and then we 're disempowering ourselves . People seem to think politics is sexy . If we want this institution to work for us , we 're going to have to make bureaucracy sexy . Because that 's where the real work of government happens . We have to engage with the machinery of government . So that 's OccupytheSEC movement has done . Have you seen these guys ? It 's a group of concerned citizens that have written a very detailed 325-page report that 's a response to the SEC 's request for comment on the Financial Reform Bill . That 's not being politically active , that 's being bureaucratically active . Now for those of us who 've given up on government , it 's time that we asked ourselves about the world that we want to leave for our children . You have to see the enormous challenges that they 're going to face . Do we really think we 're going to get where we need to go without fixing the one institution that can act on behalf of all of us ? We can 't do without government , but we do need it to be more effective . The good news is that technology is making it possible to fundamentally reframe the function of government in a way that can actually scale by strengthening civil society . And there 's a generation out there that 's grown up on the Internet , and they know that it 's not that hard to do things together , you just have to architect the systems the right way . Now the average age of our fellows is 28 , so I am , begrudgingly , almost a generation older than most of them . This is a generation that 's grown up taking their voices pretty much for granted . They 're not fighting that battle that we 're all fighting about who gets to speak ; they all get to speak . They can express their opinion on any channel at any time , and they do . So when they 're faced with the problem of government , they don 't care as much about using their voices . They 're using their hands . They 're using their hands to write applications that make government work better . And those applications let us use our hands to make our communities better . That could be shoveling out a hydrant , pulling a weed , turning over a garbage can with an opossum in it . And certainly , we could have been shoveling out those fire hydrants all along , and many people do . But these apps are like little digital reminders that we 're not just consumers , and we 're not just consumers of government , putting in our taxes and getting back services . We 're more than that , we 're citizens . And we 're not going to fix government until we fix citizenship . So the question I have for all of you here : When it comes to the big , important things that we need to do together , all of us together , are we just going to be a crowd of voices , or are we also going to be a crowd of hands ? Thank you . I would like to talk to you about why many e-health projects fail . And I really think that the most important thing of it is that we stopped listening to patients . And one of the things we did at Radboud University is we appointed a chief listening officer . Not in a very scientific way -- she puts up a little cup of coffee or cup of tea and asks patients , family , relatives , " What 's up ? How could we help you ? " And we think , we like to think , that this is one of the major problems why all -- maybe not all -- but most of the e-health projects fail , since we stopped listening . This is my WiFi scale . It 's a very simple thing . It 's got one knob , on / off . And every morning I hop on it . And yes , I 've got a challenge , as you might see . And I put my challenge on 95 kg . But the thing is that it 's made this simple that whenever I hop on , it sends my data through Google Health as well . And it 's collected by my general practitioner as well , so he can see what 's my problem in weight , not on the very moment that I need cardiologic support or something like it , but also looking backward . But there 's another thing . As some of you might know , I 've got more than 4,000 followers on Twitter . So every morning I hop on my WiFi scale and before I 'm in my car , people start talking to me , " I think you need a light lunch today , Lucien . " But that 's the nicest thing that could happen , since this is peer pressure , peer pressure used to help patients -- since this could be used for obesity , it could be used to stop smoking in patients . But on the other hand , it also could be used to get people from out of their chairs and try to work together in some kind of gaming activity to get more control of their health . As of next week , it will soon be available . There will be this little blood pressure meter connected to an iPhone or something or other . And people will be able , from their homes , to take their blood pressure , send it into their doctor and eventually share it with others , for instance , for over a hundred dollars . And this is the point where patients get into position and can collect , not only their own control again , be captain of their own ship , but also can help us in health care due to the challenges that we face , like health care cost explosion , doubled demand and things like that . Make techniques that are easy to use and start with this to embrace patients in the team . And you can do this with techniques like this , but also by crowd-sourcing . And one of the things we did I would like to share with you introduced by a little video . We 've all got navigation controls in our car . We maybe even [ have ] it in our cellphone . We know perfectly where all the ATMs are about the city of Maastricht . The other thing is we know where all the gas stations are . And sure , we could find fast food chains . But where would be the nearest AED to help this patient ? We asked around and nobody knew . Nobody knew where the nearest life-saving AED was to be obtained right now . So what we did , we crowdsourced The Netherlands . We set up a website and asked the crowd , " If you see an AED , please submit it , tell us where it is , tell us when it 's open , " since sometimes in office hours sometimes it 's closed , of course . And over 10,000 AEDs already in The Netherlands already have been submitted . The next step we took was to find the applications for it . And we built an iPad application . We made an application for Layar , augmented reality , to find these AEDs . And whenever you are in a city like Maastricht and somebody collapses , you can use your iPhone , and within the next weeks also run your Microsoft cellphone , to find the nearest AED which can save lives . And as of today , we would like to introduce this , not only as AED4EU , which is what the product is called , but also AED4US . And we would like to start this on a worldwide level . And [ we 're ] asking all of our colleagues in the rest of the world , colleague universities , to help us to find and work and act like a hub to crowd-source all these AEDs all around the world . That whenever you 're on holiday and somebody collapses , might it be your own relative or someone just in front of you , you can find this . The other thing we would like to ask is of companies also all over the world that will be able to help us validate these AEDs . These might be courier services or cable guys for instance , just to see whether the AED that 's submitted still is in place . So please help us on this one and try to make not only health a little bit better , but take control of it . Thank you . I 'm here to share my photography . Or is it photography ? Because , of course , this is a photograph that you can 't take with your camera . Yet , my interest in photography started as I got my first digital camera at the age of 15 . It mixed with my earlier passion for drawing , but it was a bit different , because using the camera , the process was in the planning instead . And when you take a photograph with a camera , the process ends when you press the trigger . So to me it felt like photography was more about being at the right place and the right time . I felt like anyone could do that . So I wanted to create something different , something where the process starts when you press the trigger . Photos like this : construction going on along a busy road . But it has an unexpected twist . And despite that , it retains a level of realism . Or photos like these -- both dark and colorful , but all with a common goal of retaining the level of realism . When I say realism , I mean photo-realism . Because , of course , it 's not something you can capture really , but I always want it to look like it could have been captured somehow as a photograph . Photos where you will need a brief moment to think to figure out the trick . So it 's more about capturing an idea than about capturing a moment really . But what 's the trick that makes it look realistic ? Is it something about the details or the colors ? Is it something about the light ? What creates the illusion ? Sometimes the perspective is the illusion . But in the end , it comes down to how we interpret the world and how it can be realized on a two-dimensional surface . It 's not really what is realistic , it 's what we think looks realistic really . So I think the basics are quite simple . I just see it as a puzzle of reality where you can take different pieces of reality and put it together to create alternate reality . And let me show you a simple example . Here we have three perfectly imaginable physical objects , something we all can relate to living in a three-dimensional world . But combined in a certain way , they can create something that still looks three-dimensional , like it could exist . But at the same time , we know it can 't . So we trick our brains , because our brain simply doesn 't accept the fact that it doesn 't really make sense . And I see the same process with combining photographs . It 's just really about combining different realities . So the things that make a photograph look realistic , I think it 's the things that we don 't even think about , the things all around us in our daily lives . But when combining photographs , this is really important to consider , because otherwise it just looks wrong somehow . So I would like to say that there are three simple rules to follow to achieve a realistic result . As you can see , these images aren 't really special . But combined , they can create something like this . So the first rule is that photos combined should have the same perspective . Secondly , photos combined should have the same type of light . And these two images both fulfill these two requirements -- shot at the same height and in the same type of light . The third one is about making it impossible to distinguish where the different images begin and end by making it seamless . Make it impossible to say how the image actually was composed . So by matching color , contrast and brightness in the borders between the different images , adding photographic defects like depth of field , desaturated colors and noise , we erase the borders between the different images and make it look like one single image , despite the fact that one image can contain hundreds of layers basically . So here 's another example . One might think that this is just an image of a landscape and the lower part is what 's manipulated . But this image is actually entirely composed of photographs from different locations . I personally think that it 's easier to actually create a place than to find a place , because then you don 't need to compromise with the ideas in your head . But it does require a lot of planning . And getting this idea during winter , I knew that I had several months to plan it , to find the different locations for the pieces of the puzzle basically . So for example , the fish was captured on a fishing trip . The shores are from a different location . The underwater part was captured in a stone pit . And yeah , I even turned the house on top of the island red to make it look more Swedish . So to achieve a realistic result , I think it comes down to planning . It always starts with a sketch , an idea . Then it 's about combining the different photographs . And here every piece is very well planned . And if you do a good job capturing the photos , the result can be quite beautiful and also quite realistic . So all the tools are out there , and the only thing that limits us is our imagination . Thank you . This may sound strange , but I 'm a big fan of the concrete block . The first concrete blocks were manufactured in 1868 with a very simple idea : modules made of cement of a fixed measurement that fit together . Very quickly concrete blocks became the most-used construction unit in the world . They enabled us to to build things that were larger than us , buildings , bridges , one brick at a time . Essentially concrete blocks had become the building block of our time . Almost a hundred years later in 1947 , LEGO came up with this . It was called the Automatic Binding Brick . And in a few short years , LEGO bricks took place in every household . It 's estimated that over 400 billion bricks have been produced -- or 75 bricks for every person on the planet . You don 't have to be an engineer to make beautiful houses , beautiful bridges , beautiful buildings . LEGO made it accessible . LEGO has essentially taken the concrete block , the building block of the world , and made it into the building block of our imagination . Meanwhile the exact same year , at Bell Labs the next revolution was about to be announced , the next building block . The transistor was a small plastic unit that would take us from a world of static bricks piled on top of each other to a world where everything was interactive . Like the concrete block , the transistor allows you to build much larger , more complex circuits , one brick at a time . But there 's a main difference : The transistor was only for experts . I personally don 't accept this , that the building block of our time is reserved for experts , so I decided to change that . Eight years ago when I was at the Media Lab , I started exploring this idea of how to put the power of engineers in the hands of artists and designers . A few years ago I started developing littleBits . Let me show you how they work . LittleBits are electronic modules with each one specific function . They 're pre-engineered to be light , sound , motors and sensors . And the best part about it is they snap together with magnets . So you can 't put them the wrong way . The bricks are color-coded . Green is output , blue is power , pink is input and orange is wire . So all you need to do is snap a blue to a green and very quickly you can start making larger circuits . You put a blue to a green , you can make light . You can put a knob in between and now you 've made a little dimmer . Switch out the knob for a pulse module , which is here , and now you 've made a little blinker . Add this buzzer for some extra punch and you 've created a noise machine . I 'm going to stop that . So beyond simple play , littleBits are actually pretty powerful . Instead of having to program , to wire , to solder , littleBits allow you to program using very simple intuitive gestures . So to make this blink faster or slower , you would just turn this knob and basically make it pulse faster or slower . The idea behind littleBits is that it 's a growing library . We want to make every single interaction in the world into a ready-to-use brick . Lights , sounds , solar panels , motors -- everything should be accessible . We 've been giving littleBits to kids and seeing them play with them . And it 's been an incredible experience . The nicest thing is how they start to understand the electronics around them from everyday that they don 't learn at schools . For example , how a nightlight works , or why an elevator door stays open , or how an iPod responds to touch . We 've also been taking littleBits to design schools . So for example , we 've had designers with no experience with electronics whatsoever start to play with littleBits as a material . Here you see , with felt and paper water bottles , we have Geordie making ... A few weeks ago we took littleBits to RISD and gave them to some designers with no experience in engineering whatsoever -- just cardboard , wood and paper -- and told them " Make something . " Here 's an example of a project they made , a motion-activated confetti canon ball . But wait , this is actually my favorite project . It 's a lobster made of playdough that 's afraid of the dark . To these non-engineers , littleBits became another material , electronics became just another material . And we want to make this material accessible to everyone . So littleBits is open-source . You can go on the website , download all the design files , make them yourself . We want to encourage a world of creators , of inventors , of contributors , because this world that we live in , this interactive world , is ours . So go ahead and start inventing . Thank you . In the 1980s in the communist Eastern Germany , if you owned a typewriter , you had to register it with the government . You had to register a sample sheet of text out of the typewriter . And this was done so the government could track where text was coming from . If they found a paper which had the wrong kind of thought , they could track down who created that thought . And we in the West couldn 't understand how anybody could do this , how much this would restrict freedom of speech . We would never do that in our own countries . But today in 2011 , if you go and buy a color laser printer from any major laser printer manufacturer and print a page , that page will end up having slight yellow dots printed on every single page in a pattern which makes the page unique to you and to your printer . This is happening to us today . And nobody seems to be making a fuss about it . And this is an example of the ways that our own governments are using technology against us , the citizens . And this is one of the main three sources of online problems today . If we take a look at what 's really happening in the online world , we can group the attacks based on the attackers . We have three main groups . We have online criminals . Like here , we have Mr. Dimitry Golubov from the city of Kiev in Ukraine . And the motives of online criminals are very easy to understand . These guys make money . They use online attacks to make lots of money , and lots and lots of it . We actually have several cases of millionaires online , multimillionaires , who made money with their attacks . Here 's Vladimir Tsastsin form Tartu in Estonia . This is Alfred Gonzalez . This is Stephen Watt . This is Bjorn Sundin . This is Matthew Anderson , Tariq Al-Daour and so on and so on . These guys make their fortunes online , but they make it through the illegal means of using things like banking trojans to steal money from our bank accounts while we do online banking , or with keyloggers to collect our credit card information while we are doing online shopping from an infected computer . The U.S. Secret Service , two months ago , froze the Swiss bank account of Mr. Sam Jain right here , and that bank account had 14.9 million U.S. dollars on it when it was frozen . Mr. Jain himself is on the loose ; nobody knows where he is . And I claim it 's already today that it 's more likely for any of us to become the victim of a crime online than here in the real world . And it 's very obvious that this is only going to get worse . In the future , the majority of crime will be happening online . The second major group of attackers that we are watching today are not motivated by money . They 're motivated by something else -- motivated by protests , motivated by an opinion , motivated by the laughs . Groups like Anonymous have risen up over the last 12 months and have become a major player in the field of online attacks . So those are the three main attackers : criminals who do it for the money , hacktivists like Anonymous doing it for the protest , but then the last group are nation states , governments doing the attacks . And then we look at cases like what happened in DigiNotar . This is a prime example of what happens when governments attack against their own citizens . DigiNotar is a Certificate Authority from The Netherlands -- or actually , it was . It was running into bankruptcy last fall because they were hacked into . Somebody broke in and they hacked it thoroughly . And I asked last week in a meeting with Dutch government representatives , I asked one of the leaders of the team whether he found plausible that people died because of the DigiNotar hack . And his answer was yes . So how do people die as the result of a hack like this ? Well DigiNotar is a C.A. They sell certificates . What do you do with certificates ? Well you need a certificate if you have a website that has https , SSL encrypted services , services like Gmail . Now we all , or a big part of us , use Gmail or one of their competitors , but these services are especially popular in totalitarian states like Iran , where dissidents use foreign services like Gmail because they know they are more trustworthy than the local services and they are encrypted over SSL connections , so the local government can 't snoop on their discussions . Except they can if they hack into a foreign C.A. and issue rogue certificates . And this is exactly what happened with the case of DigiNotar . What about Arab Spring and things that have been happening , for example , in Egypt ? Well in Egypt , the rioters looted the headquarters of the Egyptian secret police in April 2011 , and when they were looting the building they found lots of papers . Among those papers , was this binder entitled " FINFISHER . " And within that binder were notes from a company based in Germany which had sold the Egyptian government a set of tools for intercepting -- and in very large scale -- all the communication of the citizens of the country . They had sold this tool for 280,000 Euros to the Egyptian government . The company headquarters are right here . So Western governments are providing totalitarian governments with tools to do this against their own citizens . But Western governments are doing it to themselves as well . For example , in Germany , just a couple of weeks ago the so-called State Trojan was found , which was a trojan used by German government officials to investigate their own citizens . If you are a suspect in a criminal case , well it 's pretty obvious , your phone will be tapped . But today , it goes beyond that . They will tap your Internet connection . They will even use tools like State Trojan to infect your computer with a trojan , which enables them to watch all your communication , to listen to your online discussions , to collect your passwords . Now when we think deeper about things like these , the obvious response from people should be that , " Okay , that sounds bad , but that doesn 't really affect me because I 'm a legal citizen . Why should I worry ? Because I have nothing to hide . " And this is an argument , which doesn 't make sense . Privacy is implied . Privacy is not up for discussion . This is not a question between privacy against security . It 's a question of freedom against control . And while we might trust our governments right now , right here in 2011 , any right we give away will be given away for good . And do we trust , do we blindly trust , any future government , a government we might have 50 years from now ? And these are the questions that we have to worry about for the next 50 years .