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We’ve transcribed Jose Antonio Abreu’s TED Prize wish to use music to transform kids’ lives and posted the full text below the fold. Here’s a snippet:

The idea is that the families join with pride and joy in the activities of the orchestras and the choirs their children belong to. The huge spiritual world that music produces in itself, which also lies within itself, ends up overcoming material poverty. From the minute a child is taught how to play an instrument, he’s no longer poor. He becomes a child in progress heading for a professional level, who’ll later become a full citizen.

Read the full transcript of Jose Antonio Abreu’s TED Prize wish to use music to transform kids’ lives >>

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Jose Antonio Abreu’s TED Prize wish (2/1/09) transcript:

Chris Anderson: Let’s now see the extraordinary speech that we captured a couple weeks ago.

(Music)

Jose Antonio Abreu: My dear friends, ladies and gentlemen, I am overjoyed today at being awarded the TED Prize on behalf of all the distinguished music teachers, artists and educators from Venezuela who have selflessly and loyally accompanied me for 35 years in founding, growing and developing in Venezuela the National System of Youth and Children’s Orchestras and Choirs.

Since I was a boy, in my early childhood, I always wanted to be a musician, and, thank God, I made it. From my teachers, my family and my community, I had all the necessary support to become a musician. All my life I’ve dreamed that all Venezuelan children have the same opportunity that I had. From that desire and from my heart stemmed the idea to make music a deep and global reality for my country.

From the very first rehearsal, I saw the bright future ahead. because the rehearsal meant a great challenge to me. I had received a donation of 50 music stands to be used by 100 boys in that rehearsal. When I arrived at the rehearsal, only 11 kids had shown up, and I said to myself, “Do I close the program or multiply these kids?” I decided to face the challenge, and on that same night, I promised those 11 children I’d turn our orchestra into one of the leading orchestras in the world. Two months ago, I remembered that promise I made, when a distinguished English critic published an article in the London Times, asking who could be the winner of the Orchestra World Cup. He mentioned four great world orchestras, and the fifth one was Venezuela’s Youth Symphony Orchestra. Today we can say that art in Latin America is no longer a monopoly of elites and that it has become a social right, a right for all the people.

Child: There is no difference here between classes, nor white or black, if you have money or not. Simply, if you are talented, if you have the vocation and the will to be here you get in, you share with us and make music.

JA: During the recent tour by the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela of U.S. and Europe we saw how our music moved young audiences to the bottom of their souls, how children and adolescents rushed up to the stage to receive the jackets from our musicians, how the standing ovations, sometimes 30 minutes long, seemed to last forever, and how the public, after the concert was over, went out into the street to greet our young people in triumph. This meant not only an artistic triumph, but also a profound emotional sympathy between the public of the most advanced nations of the world and the musical youth of Latin America, as seen in Venezuela, giving these audiences a message of music, vitality, energy, enthusiasm and strength.

In its essence, the orchestra and the choir are much more than artistic structures. They are examples and schools of social life, because to sing and to play together means to intimately coexist toward perfection and excellence, following a strict discipline of organization and coordination in order to seek the harmonic interdependence of voices and instruments. That’s how they build a spirit of solidarity and fraternity among them, develop their self-esteem and foster the ethical and aesthetical values related to the music in all its senses. This is why music is immensely important in the awakening of sensibility, in the forging of values and in the training of youngsters to teach other kids.

Child: After all this time here, music is life. Nothing else. Music is life.

JA: Each teenager and child in El Sistema has his own story, and they are all important and of great significance to me. Let me mention the case of Edicson Ruiz. He is a boy from a parish in Caracas who passionately attended to his double bass lessons at the San Agustin’s Junior Orchestra. With his effort, and the support of his mother, his family and his community, he became a principal member in the double bass segment of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. We have another well-known case — Gustavo Dudamel. He started as a boy member of the children’s orchestra in his hometown, Barquisimeto. There, he grew as a violinist and as a conductor. He became the conductor of Venezuela’s junior orchestras, and today conducts the world’s greatest orchestras. He is the musical director of Los Angeles Philharmonic, and is still the overall leader of Venezuela’s junior orchestras. He was the conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, and he’s an unbeatable example for young musicians in Latin America and the world.

The structure of El Sistema is based on a new and flexible managing style adapted to the features of each community and region, and today attends to 300,000 children of the lower and middle class all over Venezuela. It’s a program of social rescue and deep cultural transformation designed to the whole Venezuelan society with absolutely no distinctions whatsoever, but emphasizing on the vulnerable and endangered social groups.

The effect of El Sistema is felt in three fundamental circles — in the personal/social circle, in the family circle and in the community. In the personal/social circle, the children in the orchestras and choirs develop their intellectual and emotional side. The music becomes a source for developing the dimensions of the human being, thus elevating the spirit and leading man to a full development of his personality. So, the emotional and intellectual profits are huge — the acquisition of leadership, teaching and training principles, the sense of commitment, responsibility, generosity and dedication to others, and the individual contribution to achieve great collective goals. All this leads to the development of self-esteem and confidence.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta insisted on something that always impressed me — the most miserable and tragic thing about poverty is not the lack of bread or roof, but the feeling of being no-one, the feeling of not being anyone, the lack of identification, the lack of public esteem. That’s why the child’s development in the orchestra and the choir provides him with a noble identity and makes him a role model for his family and community. It makes him a better student at school because it inspires in him a sense of responsibility, perseverance and punctuality that will greatly help him at school.

Within the family, the parents’ support is unconditional. The child becomes a role model for both his parents, and this is very important for a poor child. Once the child discovers he is important for his family, he begins to seek new ways of improving himself and hopes better for himself and his community. Also, he hopes for social and economic improvements for his own family. All this makes up a constructive and ascending social dynamic. The large majority of our children belong, as I already mentioned, to the most vulnerable strata of the Venezuelan population. That encourages them to embrace new dreams, new goals, and progress in the various opportunities that music has to offer.

Finally, in the circle of the community, the orchestras prove to be the creative spaces of culture and sources of exchange and new meanings. The spontaneity music has excludes it as a luxury item and makes it a patrimony of society. It’s what makes a child play a violin at home, while his father works in his carpentry. It’s what makes a little girl play the clarinet at home, while her mother does the housework. The idea is that the families join with pride and joy in the activities of the orchestras and the choirs their children belong to. The huge spiritual world that music produces in itself, which also lies within itself, ends up overcoming material poverty. From the minute a child’s taught how to play an instrument, he’s no longer poor. He becomes a child in progress heading for a professional level, who’ll later become a full citizen. Needless to say that music is the number one prevention against prostitution, violence, bad habits, and everything degrading in the life of a child.

A few years ago, historian Arnold Toynbee said that the world was suffering a huge spiritual crisis. Not an economic or social crisis, but a spiritual one. I believe that to confront such a crisis, only art and religion can give proper answers to humanity, to mankind’s deepest aspirations, and to the historic demands of our times. Education being the synthesis of wisdom and knowledge, it’s the means to strive for a more perfect, more aware more noble and more just society.

With passion and enthusiasm we pay profound respects to TED for its outstanding humanism, the scope of its principles, for its open and generous promotion of young values. We hope that TED can contribute in a full and fundamental way to the building of this new era in the teaching of music, in which the social, communal, spiritual and vindicatory aims of the child and the adolescent become a beacon and a goal for a vast social mission. No longer putting society at the service of art, and much less at the services of monopolies of the elite, but instead art at the service of society, at the service of the weakest, at the service of the children, at the service of the sick, at the service of the vulnerable, and at the service of all those who cry for vindication through the spirit of their human condition and the raising up of their dignity.

(Music)

(Applause)

CA: We are going live now to Caracas. We are going live to Caracas to hear Maestro Abreu’s TED Prize wish.

JA: Here is my TED Prize wish — I wish that you help to create and document a special training program for 50 gifted young musicians passionate about their art and social justice and dedicated to bringing El Sistema to the United States and other countries. Thank you very much.

Credit: TED.com
Watch Jose Antonio Abreu’s talk on TED.com >>

We’ve transcribed Bill Gates’ talk on mosquitoes, malaria and education and posted the full text below the fold. Here’s a snippet:

But we have to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If you go into a country with the right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And the world has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.

Read the full transcript of Bill Gates’ 2009 TEDTalk on mosquitoes, malaria and education >>

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Bill Gates unplugged (02/04/09) transcript:

I wrote a letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people in to work on those problems, because I think there are some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make as much progress as we need to.

So this morning I’m going to share two of these problems and talk about where they stand. But before I dive into those I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part of the reason I feel that way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died before the age of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters a lot.

And the key reason we were able to it was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: Vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.

So that brings us to the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitoes?

Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it was mosquitoes. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitoes with DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate did come down.

Now, ironically, what happened was, it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s just around the equator.

And so this leads to the paradox that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has been set.

But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the economies in these areas going because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitoes. I brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitoes are not infected.

So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What it means is the mother and child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitoes that bite late at night can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number of countries. It’s great to see.

But we have to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If you go into a country with the right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And the world has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.

Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should save over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have these new tools.

But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria.

Now let me turn to a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.

In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, if you measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.

Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. Not only has that been weak; it’s getting weaker. And if you look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And we have to change this. We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.

When I first learned the statistics I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that had been covered up for a long time because they always took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.

So, how do you make education better?

Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has invested in this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone in the world away.

So, it’s simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We should retain those people. We should find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.

What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.

Now, the way the pay system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some people who are very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage the people with it to stay in the system.

You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.

Now, there are a few places — very few — where great teachers are being made. A good example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.

When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.

How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school teachers aren’t told how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but you need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a good job in that one brief moment.”

Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some clear things we can do.

First of all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work together on those problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.

You can take those great courses and make them available so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only be available just on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can do it much better.

Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)

Now, we put a lot of money into education, and I really think that education is the most important thing to get right for the country to have as strong a future as it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in it for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there are people who are threatened by these things.

But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.

So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that will come out of it.

Thank you. (Applause)

Credit: TED.com
Watch Bill Gates’ talk at the 2009 TED Conference

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I love a challenge, and saving the earth is probably a good one. We all know the earth is in trouble. We have now entered in the 6X — The sixth major extinction on this planet. I often wondered if there was a United Organization of Organisms — otherwise known as U-O (pronounces it “uh-oh”), (laughter) — and every organism had a right to vote, would we be voted on the planet or off the planet? I think that vote is occurring right now.

I want to present to you a suite of 6 mycological solutions using fungi, and these solutions are based on mycelium.

(graphic of Earth from space, growing a halo of mycelium; then photo of someone holding up a strand of mycelium pulled from the soil; then photo of mycelium growing on wood)

The mycelium infuses all landscapes, it holds soils together, it’s extremely tenacious — this holds up to 30 thousand times its mass. They’re the grand molecular disassemblers of nature, the soil magicians. They generate the humus soils across the land masses of Earth. We have now discovered that there is a multi-directional transfer of nutrients between plants, mitigated by the mycelium –

(drawing of trees with soil cross section, showing mycelium connections)

so the mycelium is the mother that is giving nutrients from alder and birch trees, to hemlocks, cedars, and Douglas firs.

(photo of Dusty Yao walking through northwestern rainforest)

Dusty and I, we like to say, on Sunday this is where we go to church. I’m in love with the old growth forest, and I’m a patriotic American because we have those.

(photo of giant mushroom silhouetted against the sky)

Most of you are familiar with portobello mushrooms. And frankly, I face a big obstacle when I mention mushrooms to somebody. They immediately think portobellos or magic mushrooms, their eyes glaze over, and they think I’m a little crazy. So I hope to pierce that prejudice forever with this group. We call it mycophobia, the irrational fear of the unknown when it comes to fungi.

(series of shots of mushrooms growing on a hunk of organic medium)

Mushrooms are very fast in their growth. (series of cuts illustrating speed of growth, ending with shot of mature mushrooms) Day 21, day 23, day 25.

Mushrooms produce strong antibiotics.

(shot of big mushrooms rotting in the wild)

In fact, we’re more closely related to fungi than we are to any other kingdom. A group of 20 eukaryotic microbiologists published a paper two years ago erecting Opisthokonta — a super-kingdom that joins Animalia and fungi together. We share in common the same pathogens. Fungi don’t like to rot from bacteria, and so our best antibiotics come from fungi. But here (refers back to photo) is a mushroom that’s past its prime. After they sporulate, they do rot. But I propose to you that the sequence of microbes that occur on rotting mushrooms are essential for the health of the forest. They give rise to the trees, they create the debris fields that fuel the mycelium.

(photo of yellow mushroom on the floor of the forest, exuding spores)

And so we see a mushroom here sporulating. And the spores are germinating,

(photo of a patch of mycelium on the forest floor, dissolving into the undergrowth, with Stamets’ foot in photo to show scale)

-and the mycelium forms and goes underground. In a single cubic inch of soil, there can be 8 miles of these cells. My foot is covering approximately 300 miles of mycelium.

(microscopic movie of mycelium growing, branching out and thickening)

This is photo-micrographs from Nick Read and Patrick Hickey. And notice that as the mycelium grows, it conquers territory, and then it begins the net.

(final microscopic shot of fully netted mass of mycelia)

I’ve been a scanning electron microscopist for many years, I’ve thousands of electron micrographs, and when I’m staring at the mycelium I realize that they are microfiltration membranes. We exhale carbon dioxide, so does mycelium. It inhales oxygen, just like we do. But these are essentially externalized stomachs and lungs. And I present to you a concept, that these are extended neurological membranes.

(close up of one of the mycelium nets)

And in these cavities, these microcavities form, and as they fuse soils, they absorb water. These are little wells. And inside these wells, then microbal communities begin to form. And so the spongy soil not only resists erosion, but sets up a microbial universe –

(shot of starscape with mycelium superimposed on it — “The Opte Project”)

-that gives rise to a plurality of other organisms.

I first proposed, in the early 1990s, that mycelium is Earth’s natural internet. When you look at the mycelium, they’re highly branched. And if there’s one branch that is broken, then very quickly, because of the nodes of crossing — internet engineers maybe call them “hot points” — There’s alternative pathways for channeling nutrients and information. The mycelium is sentient. It knows that you are there. When you walk across landscapes, it leaps up in the aftermath of your footsteps trying to grab debris.

So, I believe, the invention of the computer internet is an inevitable consequence of a previously proven biologically successful model. The earth invented the computer internet for its own benefit, and we, now, being the top organism on this planet, is trying to allocate resources in order to protect the biosphere.

(article on dark matter with rendering of “Cobweb of dark matter”)

Going way out, dark matter conforms to the same mycelial archetype. I believe matter begets life, life becomes single cells, single cells become strings, strings become chains, chains network. And this is the paradigm that we see throughout the universe.

(photo of Earth from space)

Most of you may not know that fungi were the first organisms to come to land. They came to land 1.3 billion years ago, and plants followed several hundred million years later. How is that possible?

(electron micrograph of mycelium holding mineral crystals)

It’s possible because the mycelium produces oxalic acids, and many other acids and enzymes, pockmarking rock and grabbing calcium and other minerals, and forming calcium oxalates. Makes the rocks crumble, and the first step in the generation of soil.

(slide of chemical models of oxalic acid (C2H2O4; HOOCCOOH) and calcium oxalate (CaC2O4))

Oxalic acid is two carbon dioxide molecules joined together. So fungi and mycelium sequester carbon dioxide in the form of calcium oxalates. And all sorts of other oxalates are also sequestering carbon dioxide through the minerals that are being formed and taken out of the rock matrix.

(photo of geologist in the field, examining a large fossil of Prototaxites)

This was first discovered in 1859, this is the photograph by Franz Hueber, this photograph’s taken 1950s in Saudi Arabia. 420 million years ago, this organism existed. It was called Prototaxites. Prototaxites, laying down, was about 3 feet tall. The tallest plants on Earth, at that time, were less than two feet. Dr. Boyce, at the University of Chicago, published an article in the Journal of Geology this past year determining that Prototaxites was a giant fungus. A giant mushroom.

(Artist’s rendering of Devonian landscape with towering Prototaxites)

Across the landscapes of Earth were dotted these giant mushrooms. All across most land masses. And these existed for tens of millions of years.

Now we’ve had several extinction events, and as we march forward, 65 million years ago — most of you know about it — we had an asteroid impact. The earth was struck by an asteroid, a huge amount of debris was jettisoned into the atmosphere. Sunlight was cut off, and fungi inherited the earth.

Those organisms that paired with fungi were rewarded, ’cause fungi do not need light. More recently, at Einstein University, they just determined that fungi use radiation as a source of energy, much like plants use light. So the prospect of fungi existing on other planets elsewhere, I think, is a foregone conclusion. At least in my own mind.

(satellite photo of the Pacific Northwest)

The largest organism in the world is in eastern Oregon. I couldn’t miss it, it was 22 hundred acres in size. 22 hundred acres in size, 2,000 years old.

(overhead shot of forest landscape in eastern Oregon)

The largest organism on the planet is a mycelial mat, one cell wall thick. How is it that this organism can be so large, and yet be one cell wall thick, whereas we have 5 or 6 skin layers that protect us?

(electron micrograph of mycelium mass)

The mycelium, in the right conditions, produces a mushroom,

(photo of mushroom poking through a parking lot)

– it bursts through with such ferocity it can break asphalt.

We were involved with several experiments. I’m going to show you 6, if I can, solutions for helping to save the world.

(photo of scientists working on experiment described below)

Battelle Laboratories and I joined up, in Bellingham, Washington, there were 4 piles saturated with diesel and other petroleum waste. One was a control pile, one pile was treated with enzymes, one pile was treated with a bacteria, and our pile we inoculated with mushroom mycelium.

(photo of oil getting captured by mycelium ring)

The mycelium absorbs the oil. The mycelium is producing enzymes — peroxydases — that break carbon-hydrogen bonds. These’re the same bonds that hold hydrocarbons together. So the mycelium become saturated with the oil, and then, when we returned 6 weeks later, all the tarps were removed, all the other piles were dead, dark, and stinky. We came back to our pile, it was covered with hundreds of pounds of oyster mushrooms –

(photo of their pile, covered in mushrooms)

– and the color changed to a light form. The enzymes re-manufactured the hydrocarbons into carbohydrates — fungal sugars.

(photo of giant & healthy mushroom on the pile)

Some of these mushrooms are very happy mushrooms. They’re very large. They’re showing how much nutrition that they could’ve obtained.

But something else happened, which was an epiphany in my life. They sporulated, the spores attract insects, the insects laid eggs, eggs became larvae. Birds then came, bringing in seeds, and our pile became an oasis of life.

(shot of their pile with grass growing on it)

Whereas the other 3 piles were dead, dark, and stinky, and the PAH’s — the aromatic hydrocarbons — went from 10 thousand parts per million to less than 200 in 8 weeks. The last image we don’t have — the entire pile was a green berm of life. These are gateway species. Vanguard species that open the door for other biological communities.

(photo of man holding burlap sack full of mycelium)

So I invented burlap sacks — “bunker spawn” — and putting the mycelium, using storm blown debris,

(diagram of how to bury sacks for waste cleanup)

– you can take these burlap sacks and put ‘em downstream from a farm that’s producing E. coli, or other wastes, or a factory with chemical toxins, and it leads to habitat restoration.

(photo of woman and other workers laying down burlap sacks in a field)

So we set up a site in Mason County, Washington, and we’ve seen a dramatic decrease in the amount of coliforms, and I’ll show you a graph here-

(somewhat illegible graph showing results described below)

-this is a logarithmic scale, 10 to the 8th power, there’s more than a 100 million colonies per gram, and 10 to 3rd power is about a thousand. In 48 hours to 72 hours, these 3 mushroom species reduced the amount of coliform bacteria 10,000 times. Think of the implications. This is a space conservative method that uses storm debris — and we can be guaranteed that we will have storms every year.

(Dusty Yao, posing with mushroom)

So this one mushroom, in particular, has drawn our interest over time. This is my wife Dusty with a mushroom called Fomitopsis officinalis — Agaricon. It’s a mushroom exclusive to the old growth forest, that Dioscorides first described in 65 A.D. as a treatment against consumption. This mushroom grows in Washington state, Oregon, northern California, British Columbia, now thought to be extinct in Europe. May not seem that large — let’s get closer.

(Stamets holding Agaricon, it’s as large as his torso)

This is extremely rare fungus. Our team, and we have a team of experts that go out — We went out 20 times in the old growth forest last year, we found one sample to be able to get into culture.

Preserving the genome of these fungi in the old growth forest, I think, is absolutely critical for human health.

(series of micrographs of mushroom spores)

I’ve been involved with the U.S. Defense Department BioShield program. We submitted over 300 samples of mushrooms that were boiled in hot water, and mycelium harvesting is (sic) extracellular metabolites — And a few years ago, we received these results.

(table showing activity of mushroom strains against pox virus)

We have three different strains of Agaricon mushrooms that were highly active against pox viruses. Dr. Earl Kern, who’s a smallpox expert of the U.S. Defense Department, states that any compounds that have a Selectivity Index of 2 or more are active, 10 or greater is considered to be very active. Our mushroom strains were in the highly active range. There’s a vetted press release that you can read — it’s vetted by DOD, if you Google “Stamets” and “smallpox” — or you can go to npr.org and listen to a live interview.

So, encouraged by this, naturally we went to flu viruses.

(table of “Highly Active Mushroom Strains Against Flu Viruses” showing reactivity of various species)

And so, for the first time I am showing this. We have 3 different strains of Agaricon mushrooms highly active against flu viruses. Here’s the Selectivity Index numbers — against pox, you saw 10s and 20s — now against flu viruses, compared to the ribavirin controls, we have an extraordinarily high activity. And we’re using a natural extract within the same dosage window as a pure pharmaceutical. We tried it against flu A viruses — H1N1, H3N2 — as well as flu B viruses. So then we tried a blend, and in a blend combination we tried it against H5N1, and we got greater than a thousand Selectivity Index. (applause) I then — I then think that we can make the argument that we should save the old growth forest as a matter of national defense. (applause)

(photo of array of Petri dishes containing spores)

I became interested in entomopathogenic fungi — Fungi that kill insects. Our house is being destroyed by carpenter ants. I went to the EPA homepage, and they were recommending studies with metarhizium species of a group of fungi that kill carpenter ants, as well as termites. I did something that nobody else had done. I actually chase the mycelium when it stopped producing spores. These are spores — this is in their spores. I was able to morph the culture into a non-sporulating form.

(two Petri dishes with new cultures)

And so the industry has spent over a 100 million dollars specifically on bait stations to prevent termites from eating your house. But the insects aren’t stupid, and they would avoid the spores when they came close, and so I morphed the cultures into a non-sporulating form –

(photo of dish sitting beside a wall, holding new mushroom culture)

– and I got my daughter’s Barbie doll dish, I put it right where a bunch of carpenter ants were making debris fields, every day, in my house,

(photo of ants devouring mycelium)

— and the ants were attracted to the mycelium, because there’s no spores. They gave it to the queen. One week later, I had no sawdust piles whatsoever.

And then, a delicate dance between dinner and death –

(dead ant covered in mycelium)

– the mycelium is consumed by the ants, they become mummified, and boing –

(ant with a mushroom growing out of it)

– a mushroom pops out of their head. (laughter and moans of disgust) Now after sporulation, the spores repel. So the house is no longer suitable for invasion. So you have a near-permanent solution for re-invasion of termites.

(shot of exterior of house w/ construction equipment, followed by shot of patent form)

And so my house came down, I received my first patent against carpenter ants, termites, and fire ants,

(photo of more Petri dishes and spore prints, followed by another patent form)

-then we tried extracts, and lo and behold, we can steer insects to different directions. This has huge implications. I then received my second patent — and this is a big one. It’s been called an “Alexander Graham Bell” patent — It covers over 200 thousand species.

This is the most disruptive technology, I’ve been told by executives of the pesticide industry, that they have ever witnessed. This could totally revamp the pesticide industries throughout the world. You could fly a hundred PhD students under the umbrella of this concept, because my supposition is that entomopathogenic fungi, prior to sporulation, attract the very insects that are otherwise repelled by those spores.

(photo of “Life Box,” “The Way to Re-Green the Planet”, then photo of someone opening one)

And so I came up with a Life Box. ‘Cause I needed a delivery system. The Life Box — you’re gonna be getting a DVD of the TED conference,

(photo of empty cardboard box in a dish being sprinkled with soil, then being watered, finally shot of spores growing on cardboard)

– you add soil, you add water, you have mycorrhizal and endophytic fungi as well as spores, like of the Agaricon mushroom. The seeds, then, are mothered by this mycelium.

(photo of mycelium rich soil in box with trees sprouting in it)

And then you put tree seeds in here, and then you end up growing — potentially — an old growth forest from a cardboard box.

(photo of path in a forest)

I want to re-invent the delivery system, and the use of cardboard around the world, so they become ecological footprints. If there’s a YouTube-like site that you could put up, you could make an interactive Zip Code specific — where people could join together, and through satellite imaging systems, through Virtual Earth or Google Earth, you could confirm carbon credits are being sequestered by the trees that are coming through Life Boxes.

(shot of UPS guy handing a box of shoes to girl)

You could take a cardboard box delivering shoes, you could add water — I developed this for the refugee community –

(shot of someone watering soil filled box, which then fills with plants)

corns beans and squash and onions — I took several containers, my wife said if I could do this, anybody could.

(shot of back porch garden, before and after planting)

And I ended up growing a seed garden. Then you harvest the seeds — and thank you, Eric Rasmussen, for your help on this –

(graphic — “Harvesting the seed garden” — photo of two girls harvesting garden — “Time from germination to seed harvest: approximately 4-5 months”, then photo of Dusty Yao harvesting the corn)

And then you’re harvesting the seed garden,

(photo of kernels encased in mycelium, about to be wrapped around cobs)

Then you can harvest the kernels, and then you just need a few kernels, I add mycelium to it,

(photo of wrapped/inoculated cobs, one side beginning to grow mushrooms, the other side starting off empty)

and then I inoculate the corn cobs. Now, three corn cobs, no other grain — lots of mushrooms begin to form — too many withdrawals from the carbon bank. And so, this population will be shut down. But watch what happens here.

(points to formerly empty side — series of shots showing the mushrooms growing on the cobs)

The mushrooms then are harvested — but, very importantly — the mycelium has converted the cellulose into fungal sugars. And so I thought, how could we address the energy crisis in this country? And we came up with Econol.

(photo of vial of “Econol” with burning wick)

Generating ethanol from cellulose using mycelium as an intermediary — and you gain all the benefits that I’ve described to you already. But to go from cellulose to ethanol is ecologically unintelligent, and I think that we need to be econologically intelligent about the generation of fuels so we build the carbon banks on the planet, renew the soils — these are a species that we need to join with. I think engaging mycelium can help save the world. Thank you very much.

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This is the Large Hadron Collider. It’s 27 kilometers in circumference, it’s the biggest scientific experiment ever attempted. Over 10,000 physicists and engineers from 85 countries around the world have come together over several decades to build this machine. What we do is we accelerate protons, so hydrogen nuclei, around 99.999999% the speed of light. Right? At that speed, we go around that 27 kilometers 11,000 times a second. And we collide them with another beam of protons going in the opposite direction. We collide them inside giant detectors. They’re essentially digital cameras.

(slide of diagram of collider)

And this is the one that I work on, Atlas. You get some sense of the size, you can just see these EU standard — size people underneath — then you get some sense of the size. 44 meters wide, 22 meters in diameter, 7,000 tons. And we re-create the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the universe began — up to 600 million times a second inside that detector. There’re immense numbers. And if you see those metal bits there — those are huge magnets that bend electrically charged particles so it can measure how fast they’re traveling.

(picture of interior of collider detector)

This is a picture about a year ago. Those magnets are in there, and again, an EU standard-size real person, so you get some sense of the scale. And it’s in there those mini big bangs’ll be created, sometime in the summer this year. And actually, this morning I got an email saying that we’ve just finished, today, building the last piece of Atlas. So as of today, it’s finished. I’d like to say that I planned that, for TED, but I didn’t. So it’s been completed as of today. (applause) Yeah, it’s a wonderful achievement.

So, you might be asking why. Why create the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the universe began? Well, particle physicists are nothing if not ambitious. And the aim of particle physics is to understand what everything’s made of, and how everything sticks together. And by everything, I mean, of course, me, and you, the earth, the sun — the hundred billion suns in our galaxy-

(photo of galaxies)

and the hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. Absolutely everything.

Now you might say, well OK, but why not just look at it? You know? If you want to know what I’m made of, let’s look at me. Well, we found that as you look back in time, the universe gets hotter and hotter, denser and denser, and simpler and simpler. Now there’s no real reason I’m aware of for that, but that seems to be the case. So, way back in the early times of the universe, we believe it was very simple, and understandable. All this complexity, all the way to these wonderful things human brains, are a property of an old and cold and complicated universe. Back at the start, in the first billionth of a second, we believe, or we’ve observed, it was very simple. It’s almost like — imagine a snowflake in your hand, and you look at it, and it’s an incredibly complicated, beautiful object. But as you heat it up, it’ll melt into a pool of water, and you would be able to see that actually it was just made of H2O, water.

It’s in that same sense that we look back in time to understand what the universe is made of. And as of today, it’s made of these things.

(chart of elementary particles: (6 kinds of quarks, 6 kinds of leptons) and 4 force carriers)

Just 12 particles of matter, stuck together by four forces of nature. The quarks, these pink things, are the things that make up protons and neutrons that make up the atomic nuclei in your body. The electron thing that goes around the atomic nucleus — held around in orbit, by the way, by the electromagnetic force, that’s carried by this thing, the photon. The quarks are stuck together by other things called gluons. And these guys, here, they’re the weak nuclear force, probably the least familiar. But without it, the sun wouldn’t shine. And when the sun shines, you get copious quantities of these things, called neutrinos, pouring out. Actually, if you just look at your thumbnail — about a square centimeter — there are something like 60 billion neutrinos per second from the sun, passing through every square centimeter of your body. But you don’t feel them, because the weak force is correctly named. Very short range and very weak, so they just fly through you.

And these particles have been discovered over the last century, pretty much. The first one, the electron, was discovered in 1897, and the last one, this thing called the Tau neutrino, in the year 2000, actually just — I was gonna say just up the road, in Chicago. I know it’s a big country, America, isn’t it. (laughter) Just up the road. Relative to the universe, it’s just up the road. (laughter and scattered applause) So this thing was discovered in the year 2000, so it’s a relatively recent picture.

One of the wonderful things, actually, I find, is that we’ve discovered any of them, when you realize how tiny they are. You know, they’re a step in size from the entire visible universe. So 100 billion galaxies, 13.7 billion light years away — a step in size from that to Monterey, actually, is about the same as from Monterey to these things. Absolutely exquisitely minute, and yet we’ve discovered pretty much the full set.

So one of my most illustrious forebears at Manchester University, Ernest Rutherford, discoverer of the atomic nucleus, once said all science is either physics or stamp collecting. Now I don’t think he meant to insult the rest of science, although he was from New Zealand, so it’s possible. (laughter) But what he meant was that what we’ve done, really, stamp collect there — OK, we’ve discovered the particles, but unless you understand the underlying reason for that pattern — you know, why it’s built the way it is — really you’ve done stamp collecting, you haven’t done science.

Fortunately, we have probably one of the greatest scientific achievements of the 20th century that underpins that pattern. It’s the Newton’s laws, if you want, of particle physics. It’s called the standard model, beautifully simple mathematical equation. You could stick it on the front of a t-shirt, which is always the sign of elegance. This is it-

(long equation, t-shirt size)

I’ve been a little disingenuous, ’cause I’ve expanded it out in all it’s gory detail. This equation, though, allows you to calculate everything, other than gravity, that happens in the universe. So you want to know why the sky is blue, why atomic nuclei stick together — in principle, you got a big enough computer, why DNA is the shape it is. In principle, you should be able to calculate it from that equation.

But, there’s a problem. (raises hand) Can anyone see what it is? A bottle of champagne for anyone that tells me. I’ll make it easier, actually, by blowing one of the lines up.

(blows up line of equation)

Basically, each of these terms refer to some of the particles. Those Ws there refers to the Ws, and how they stick together, these carriers of the weak force, the Zeds, the same, but there’s an extra symbol in this equation — H. Right, H. H stands for Higgs particle. Higgs particles have not been discovered. But they’re necessary — they’re necessary to make that mathematics work. So all the exquisitely detailed calculations we can do with that wonderful equation wouldn’t be possible without an extra bit — so it’s a prediction. A prediction of a new particle.

What does it do?

(cartoon of crowd at cocktail party)

Well, we had a long time to come up with good analogies, and back in the 1980s, when we wanted the money for the LHC from the UK government, Margaret Thatcher, at the time, said “if you guys can explain, in language a politician can understand, what the hell it is that you’re doing, you can have the money. I want to know what this Higgs particle does.” And we came up with this analogy, it seemed to work. Well, the Higgs does, is it gives mass to the fundamental particles. And the picture is that the whole universe, and that doesn’t mean just space, it means me as well, and inside you — the whole universe is full of something called a Higgs field. Higgs particles, if you will.

The analogy is that these people in a room are the Higgs particles. Now when a particle moves through the universe, it can interact with these Higgs particles. But imagine someone who’s not very popular moves through the room, then everyone ignores them. They can just pass through the room very quickly, essentially the speed of light. They’re massless. And imagine someone incredibly important, and popular, and intelligent –

(same party with Thatcher-like woman moving through room, mobbed by Higgs particles)

– walks into the room, they’re surrounded by people. And their passage through the room is impeded, it’s almost like they get heavy, they get massive.

And that’s exactly the way the Higgs mechanism works. The picture is that the electrons, and the quarks, in your body, and in the universe that we see around us, are heavy, in a sense, and massive because they’re surrounded by Higgs particles, they’re interacting with the Higgs field. If that picture’s true, then we have to discover those Higgs particles at the LHC. If it’s not true, because it’s quite a convoluted mechanism, although it’s the simplest we’ve been able to think of, then whatever does the job of the Higgs particles we know have to turn up at the LHC. So that’s one of the prime reasons we built this giant machine.

I’m glad you recognize Margaret Thatcher, actually. I thought about making it more culturally relevant, but — (laughter) — anyway. So that’s one thing. That’s essentially a guarantee that what the LHC’ll find. There are many other things.

You’ve heard many of the big problems in particle physics. One of them you heard about — dark matter — dark energy. There’s another issue, which is that the forces in nature, it’s quite beautiful, actually — seem, as you go back in time, they seem to change in strength. Well, they do change in strength. So the electromagnetic force, the force that holds us together, gets stronger as you go to higher temperatures. The strong force, the strong nuclear force — sticks nuclei together — gets weaker. And what you see in the standard model, you can calculate how these change — is the forces — the three forces, other than gravity — almost seem to come together at one point.

(diagram of standard particles, and Higgs particle, and one showing how forces diverge as plotted against time)

It’s almost as if there was one beautiful kind of super-force, back at the beginning of time. But they just miss. Now there’s a theory called supersymmetry,

(same diagram paired with one of SUSY particles, diagram showing force vectors meeting)

which doubles the number of particles in the standard model. Which, at first sight, doesn’t sound like a simplification. But actually, with this theory, we find that the forces of nature do seem to unify together, back at the big bang. Absolutely beautiful prophecy. The model wasn’t built to do that, but it seems to do it. Also, those supersymmetric particles are very strong candidates for the dark matter. So a very compelling theory. That’s really mainstream physics. And if I was to put money on it, I would put money on — in a very unscientific way — that these things would also crop up at the LHC.

Many other things that the LHC could discover. But in the last few minutes, I just want to give you a different perspective of what I think what particle physics really means to me. Particle physics and cosmology. And that’s that I think it’s given us a wonderful narrative — almost a creation story, if you’d like — about the universe. From modern science, over the last few decades. And I’d say that it deserves, in the spirit of Wade Davis’ talk, to be at least put up there with these wonderful creation stories of the peoples of high Andes and the frozen north. This is a creation story, I think, equally as wonderful.

The story goes like this. We know that the universe began 13.7 billion years ago,

(map of the lifespan of the universe)

in an immensely hot, dense state, much smaller than a single atom. It began to expand about a million billion billion billion billionth of a second — I think I got that right — after the big bang. Gravity separated away from the other forces. The universe then underwent an exponential expansion called inflation. In about the first billionth of a second or so, the Higgs field kicked in, and the quarks, and the gluons, and the electrons that make us up got mass. The universe continued to expand and cool. After about a few minutes, there was hydrogen and helium in the universe. That’s all. The universe was about 75% hydrogen, 25% helium. It still is today. It continued to expand about 300 million years, then light began to travel through the universe. It was big enough to be transparent to light, and that’s what we see in the cosmic microwave background George Smoot described as looking at the face of God.

After about 400 million years, the first stars formed, and that hydrogen, that helium, then began to cook into the heavier elements. So the elements of life — carbon, and oxygen, and iron, all the elements that we need to make us up were cooked in those first generations of stars, which then run out of fuel, exploded, threw those elements back into the universe. They then recollapsed into another generation of stars and planets, and on some of those planets-

(photo of earth from space)

the oxygen which had been created in that first generation of stars could fuse with hydrogen to form water. Liquid water on the surface. On at least one, and on maybe only one of those planets, primitive life evolved, which evolved over millions of years into things that walked upright, and left footprints about 3 and a half million years ago in the mud flats of Tanzania, and eventually, left a footprint on another world.

(photos of mud flat footprint fossils and lunar footprint)

And, built this civilization, this wonderful picture, that turned the darkness into night, and you can see the civilization from space. (in background — space photo of lit continents)

As one of my great heroes, Carl Sagan, said, these are the things — and actually, not only these, but I was looking around (wanders around stage to look at various displays of the artifacts of civilization) — these are the things, like Saturn V rockets, and Sputnik, and DNA, and literature, and science — these are the things that hydrogen atoms do when given 13.7 billion years. Absolutely remarkable. And, the laws of physics. Right? So, the right laws of physics. They’re beautifully balanced. If the weak force had been a little bit different, then carbon and oxygen wouldn’t be stable inside the hearts of stars, and there would be none of that in the universe.

And I think that’s a wonderful and significant story. 50 years ago I couldn’t have told that story, because we didn’t know it. It makes me really feel that that civilization-

(cut to night space photo of continents)

which, as I say, is, if you believe the scientific creation story, has emerged purely as a result of the laws of physics and a few hydrogen atoms. Then I think, to me anyway, it makes me feel incredibly valuable.

(ariel photo of accelerator again)

So that’s the LHC. The LHC is certainly, when it turns on in summer, gonna write the next chapter of that book. And I’m certainly looking forward with immense excitement to it being turned on. Thanks.

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The value of nothing- Out of nothing comes something. That was an essay I wrote when I was 11 years old, and I got a B+. (laughter)

(slide of hand holding a brain, with caption “how do we create”)

What I’m going to talk about, nothing out of something, and how we create. And I’m going to try and do that within the 18 minute time span that we were told to stay within, and to follow the TED commandments:

(slide, the TED commandments: “REHEARSE but ACT SPONTANEOUS!!!
-provide REVELATIONS!!!
-show VULNERABILITY!!!!
-is AL GORE in audience???
-DON’T be tedious!!!
-CHANGE the world!!!
-DON’T use bullet points!!!”
-displayed for a few moments, then bursts into flame graphics)

That is, actually, something that creates a near-death experience, but near-death is good for creativity. (laughter) OK.

So, I also want to explain, because Dave Eggers said he was gonna heckle me if I said anything that was a lie, or not true to universal creativity.

(slide: “how do we create?
parameters of discussion
if
we= W
you= U
me= I
then
W={I, -U}”)

And I’ve done it this way for half the audience who is scientific. When I say we, I don’t mean you, necessarily, I mean me, and my right brain, my left brain, and the one that’s in between that is the sensor and tells me what I’m saying is wrong.

(slide of inverted yellow triangle)

And I’m going to do that also by looking at what I think is part of my creative process, which includes a number of things that happened, actually — the nothing started even earlier than the moment in which I’m creating something new. And that includes nature, and nurture, and what I refer to as nightmares.

(words “nature”, “nurture”, and “nightmares” added to each corner of triangle graphic)

Now in the nature area,

(slide: picture of man, captioned “creativity — born with the muse chromosome?”, graphic of human genome map)

we look at whether or not we are innately equipped with something, perhaps in our brains, some abnormal chromosome that causes this muse-like effect.

(photo of Tan in purple gown with hennaed palm, captioned “cosmically enlightened?”)

And some people would say that we’re born with it in some other means,

(photos of Tan in Chinese peasant, Barbie, bondage, and Simpsons drag — “Daisy Tan theory: lots of material from past lives”)

and others, like my mother, would say that I get my material from past lives.

(photo of Tan in weird theatrical makeup: “psychotic muse theory a.k.a. VanGogh syndrome
Depression works, too: Proust, Plath, Poe, Styron…”)

Some people would also say that creativity may be a function of some other neurological quirk — Van Gogh syndrome — that you have a little bit of, you know, psychosis, or depression. I do have to say, somebody — I read recently that Van Gogh wasn’t really necessarily psychotic, that he might have had temporal lobe seizures, and that might have caused his spurt of creativity, and I don’t — I suppose it does something in some part of your brain. And I will mention that I actually developed temporal lobe seizures a number of years ago, but it was during the time I was writing my last book, and some people say that book is quite different.

(slide of Tan’s grade school yearbook, her photo highlighted with yellow arrow that says “I’m Chinese!!!” “wrongful birth principle:” you were not born who thought you would be (sic)”)

I think that part of it also begins with the sense of identity crisis, you know, who am I, why am I this particular person, why am I not black like everybody else,

(slide of old drawing of dogs, “innate artistic skill is not necessarily artistic creativity (not bad for age 9)”)

and sometimes you’re equipped with skills, but they may not be the kind of skills that enable creativity. I used to draw, I thought I would be an artist. And I had a miniature poodle. And it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t really creative. ‘Cause all I could really do was represent in a very one-on-one way. And I have a sense that I probably copied this from a book.

(photo of hand pointing to old school papers, graded “B-” and “B”-”there may be false evidence of a muse deficit (not predictive at age 10)”)

And then I also wasn’t really shining in a certain area that I wanted to be, and you know, you look at those scores, and it wasn’t bad, but it was not certainly predictive that I would one day make my living out of the artful arrangement of words.

(childhood photo of Tan: “nurture principle: childhood trauma can be real good material”)

Also one of the principles of creativity is to have a little childhood trauma. And I had the usual kind that I think a lot of people had, and that is that, you know,

(photo of clear plastic “Invisible Woman” anatomical model, with Chinese speech bubble, “translation: ‘IQ test say you become brain surgeon! So study lots.’” – “mild trauma”)

I had expectations placed on me. That figure right there, by the way — figure right there was a toy given to me when I was but 9 years old, and it was to help me become a doctor from a very early age.

(photo of Tan, as child, at piano, Chinese caption, “translation: ‘If only you play like Ting-Ting, you be on Ed Sullivan Show, too.’” “moderate and memorable trauma”)

I have some ones that were long lasting, from the age of 5 to 15, this was supposed to be my side occupation, and it led to a sense of failure.

But actually there was something quite real in my life, that happened when I was about 14. And it was discovered that my brother, in 1967 — and then my father, six months later — had brain tumors. And my mother believed that something had gone wrong, and she was gonna find out what it was. And she was gonna fix it. My father was a Baptist minister, and he believed in miracles, and that God’s will would take care of that. But of course, they ended up dying, six months apart.

(photos of father, brother, other relatives, arrows labelled “death” pointing in to photo of mother, big caption “why?” “‘God’s will, bad fate, curses, karmic law and poisoned earth, bad luck, terrible coincidence, bad feng shui’”)

And after that, my mother believed that it was fate, or curses — she went looking through all the reasons in the universe why this would have happened. Everything except randomness. She did not believe in randomness. There was a reason for everything. And one of the reasons, she thought, was that her mother, who had died when she was very young, was angry at her. And so I had this notion of death all around me, because my mother also believed that I would be next, and she would be next. And when you are faced with the prospect of death very soon, you begin to think very much about everything, you become very creative, in a survival sense.

And this, then, led to my big questions. And they’re the same ones that I have today. And they are: Why do things happen, and how do things happen? And, the one my mother asked: How do I make things happen?

It’s a wonderful way to look at these questions, when you write a story. Because, after all, in that framework, between page 1 and 300, you have to answer this question of why things happen, how things happen, in what order they happen. What are the influences? How do I, as the narrator, as the writer, also influence that? And it’s also one that I think many of our scientists have been asking. It’s a kind of cosmology, and I have to develop a cosmology of my own universe, as the creator of that universe.

(shot of manuscript, lots of corrections: “the nature of the narrative world”)

And you see, there’s a lot of back and forth in trying to make that happen, trying to figure it out, years and years, oftentimes. So, when I look at creativity, I also think that it is this sense, or this inability to repress my looking at associations in practically anything in life. And I got a lot of them during what’s been going on throughout this conference, almost everything that’s been going on.

(slide in background- “creativity: the quantum mechanics of metaphor”)

And so I’m going to use, as the metaphor, this association — quantum mechanics, which I really don’t understand, but I’m still gonna use it as the process for explaining how it is the metaphor. So, in quantum mechanics, of course, you have dark energy and dark matter. And it’s the same thing in looking at these questions of how things happen. There’s a lot of unknown, and you often don’t know what it is except by its absence.

(photo of four rubber ducks, arrow associating them with Warhol-esque 4 panel portrait of Tan- “the metaphorical universe: synenergy (sic) and what matters”)

But when you make those associations, you want them to come together in a kind of synergy in the story, and what you’re finding is what matters. The meaning. And that’s what I look for in my work, a personal meaning.

(photo of Tan pondering, surrounded by speech bubbles: “I am not original anymore.” “I am a fraud.” “If I write that, people will think it’s me”. above: “the uncertainty principle also applies”)

There is also the uncertainty principle, which is part of quantum mechanics, as I understand it. (laughter) And this happens constantly in the writing.

(Tan studying mask: “and there is also the dreaded observer effect”)

And there’s the terrible and dreaded observer effect, in which you’re looking for something, and you know, things are happening simultaneously, and you’re looking at it in different way, and you’re trying to really look for the about-ness. Or what is this story about. And if you try too hard, then you will only write the about.

(slide switches: “when you say what a story is about, it is only ‘about’”: photo of Tan putting on mask)

You won’t discover anything.

(switches to photo of just the mask. “what you were supposed to find is no longer there”)

And, what you were supposed to find, what you hoped to find, in some serendipitous way, is no longer there.

(photo of hand holding brain again, arrows cross-relating it to a ball of yarn. “string theory of creativity”-”a creative person is multi-dimensional”)

Now, I don’t wanna ignore the other side of what happens in our universe, like many of our scientists have. And so I am gonna just throw in string theory here, and just say that creative people are multi-dimensional, and there are eleven levels, I think, of anxiety.

(photo of piles of anti-anxiety pills- “at least eleven levels of anxiety”)

(laughter) And they all operate at the same time.

There is also a big question of ambiguity. And I would link that to something called the cosmological constant. You don’t know what is operating, but something is operating there. And ambiguity, to me, is very uncomfortable in my life, and I have it. Moral ambiguity. It is constantly there. And just as an example, this is one that recently came to me. It was something I read in an editorial by a woman who was talking about the war in Iraq.

(slide of below quote)

And she said, “Save a man from drowning, you are responsible to him for life.” A very famous Chinese saying, she said. And that means because we went into Iraq, we should stay there until things were solved. You know, maybe even 100 years. So there was another one that I came across, and it’s “saving fish from drowning.” And it’s what Buddhist fishermen say, because they’re not supposed to kill anything. And they also have to make a living, and people need to be fed. So their way of rationalizing that, is they are saving the fish from drowning, and unfortunately in the process the fish die.

Now what’s encapsulated in both these drowning metaphors — actually, one of them is my mother’s interpretation, and it is a famous Chinese saying, because she said it to me — “Save a man from drowning, you are responsible to him for life,” and it was a warning: Don’t get involved in other people’s business, or you’re gonna get stuck. OK. I think if somebody really was drowning, she’d save them.

But both of these sayings, saving a fish from drowning, or saving a man from drowning, to me they had to do with intentions. And all of us in life, when we see a situation, we have a response. And then we have intentions. There’s an ambiguity of what that should be that we should do, and then we do something. And the results of that may not match what our intentions had be (sic). Maybe things go wrong. And so, after that, what are our responsibilities? What are we supposed to do? Do we stay in for life, or do we do something else and justify and say, well, my intentions were good, and therefore I cannot be held responsible for all of it. That is the ambiguity in my life that really disturbed me and led me to write a book called Saving Fish From Drowning.

I saw examples of that, once I identified this question, it was all over the place.

(“you notice disturbing hints from the universe”-”they were always there”)

I got these hints everywhere. And then, in a way, I knew that they had always been there. And then writing, that’s what happens. I get these hints, these clues, and I realize that they’ve been obvious, and yet they have not been. And what I need, in effect, is a focus. And when I have the question, it is a focus. And all these things that seem to be flotsam and jetsam in life actually go through that question, and what happens is those particular things become relevant. And it seems like it’s happening all the time. You think there’s a sort of coincidence going on, a serendipity, in which you’re getting all this help from the universe. And it may also be explained that now you have a focus. And you are noticing it more often.

But you apply this, you begin to look at things having to do with your tensions, your brother, who’s fallen in trouble, do you take care of him, why, or why not. It may be something that is, perhaps, more serious, as I said, human rights in Burma. I was thinking that I shouldn’t go, because somebody said if I did, it would show that I approved of the military regime there. And then after a while, I had to ask myself — Why do we take on knowledge, why do we take on assumptions that other people have given us. And it was the same thing that I felt when I was growing up, and was hearing these rules of moral conduct from my father, who was a Baptist minister. So I decided that I would go to Burma for my own intentions, and still didn’t know that if I went there, what the result of that would be if I wrote a book — and I just would have to face that later, when the time came.

(slide: “torture”)

We are all concerned with things that we see in the world that we are aware of. We come to this point and say, what do I as an individual do? Not all of us can go to Africa, or work at hospitals, so what do we do if we have this moral response, this feeling?

(slide, word forming out of fire: “genocide”)

Also, I think one of the biggest things we are all looking at, and we talked about today, is genocide.

(“why am I here?”)

This leads to this question, when I look at all these things that are morally ambiguous and uncomfortable, and I consider what my intentions should be, I realize it goes back to this identity question that I had when I was a child — and why am I here, and what is the meaning of my life, and what is my place in the universe?

(“It’s obvious and not”)

It seems so obvious, and yet it is not.

(photo of Tan with mask again- “we hate moral ambiguity” … “and we need it”)

We all hate moral ambiguity in some sense, and yet it is also absolutely necessary. In writing a story, it is the place where I begin.

(“ghost of my grandmother”)

Sometimes I get help from the universe, it seems. My mother would say it was the ghost of my grandmother from the very first book, because it seemed I knew things I was not supposed to know. Instead of writing that the grandmother died accidentally, from an overdose of opium while having too much of a good time, I actually put down in the story that the woman killed herself, and that actually was the way it happened. And my mother decided that that information must have come from my grandmother.

(“the arrival of luck
ghost of my grandmother”-
picture of cover of Jonathan D. Spence’s The Search for Modern China)

There are also things, quite uncanny, which bring me information that will help me in the writing of the book — in this case, I was writing a story that included some kind of detail, period of history, a certain location — and I needed to find something historically that would match that. And I took down this book, and I — first page that I flipped it to was exactly the setting, and the time period, and the kind of character I needed was the Taiping rebellion, happening in the area near Qualin, outside of that, and a character who thought he was the son of God.

(previous slide, with “random chance?” added)

You wonder, are these things random chance? Well, what is random? What is chance, what is luck? What are things that you get from the universe that you can’t really explain? And that goes into the story too. These are the things I constantly think about from day to day. Especially when good things happen, and in particular, when bad things happen.

(previous slide, with “serendipity?” added)

But I do think there’s a kind of serendipity, and I do want to know what those elements are, so I can thank them, and also try to find them in my life. Because, again, I think that when I am aware of them, more of them happen.

(slide of mountain scene in China, captioned “chance”)

Another chance encounter is when I went to a place — I just was with some friends, and we drove randomly to a different place, and we ended up in this non-tourist location, a beautiful village, pristine — and we walked three valleys beyond, and the third valley there was something quite mysterious and ominous, a discomfort I felt. And then I knew that had to be setting of my book. And in writing one of the scenes, it happened in that third valley– for some reason I wrote about cairns — stacks of rocks — that a man was building. And I didn’t know exactly why I had it, but it was so vivid. I got stuck, and a friend, when she asked if I would go for a walk, with her dogs, that I said sure. And about 45 minutes later, walking along the beach, I came across this –

(photo of rock stacks on a beach, seemingly impossibly balanced)

And it was a man, a Chinese man, and he was stacking these things, not with glue, not with anything. And I asked him how is it possible to do this? And he said, well, I guess with everything in life, there’s a place of balance. And this was exactly the meaning of my story at that point. I had so many examples — I have so many instances like this when I’m writing a story, and I cannot explain it. Is it because I had the filter that I have such a strong coincidence in writing about these things? Or is it a kind of serendipity that we cannot explain, like the cosmological constant?

A big thing that I also think about is accidents. And as I said, my mother did not believe in randomness. What is the nature of accidents?

(slide of word “accidents” arranged in a triangle)

And how are we going to assign what the responsibility and the causes are, outside of a court of law?

(photo of village described below)

I was able to see that in a first hand way, when I went to beautiful Dong village, in Guizhou, the poorest province of China. And I saw this beautiful place, I knew I wanted to come back. And I had a chance to do that when National Geographic asked me if I wanted to write anything about China. And I said yes, about this village of Singing people, Singing minority. And they agreed, and between the time I saw this place and the next time I went, there was a terrible accident.

(photo of fire devastation in same village)

A man — an old man — fell asleep and his quilt dropped in a pan of fire that kept him warm, 60 homes were destroyed, and 40 were damaged. Responsibility was assigned to the family, the man’s sons were banished to live 3 kilometers away, in a cow shed. And of course, as Westerners, we say, well, it was an accident. That’s not fair, it’s the son, not the father. And when I go on a story, I have to let go of those kinds of beliefs. It takes a while, but I have to let go of them and just go there, and be there. And so I was there on three occasions, different seasons. And I began to sense something different about the history and what had happened before, and the nature of life in a very poor village, and what you find as your joys, and your rituals, your traditions, your links with other families. And I saw how this had a kind of justice in its responsibility. I was also able to find out also about the ceremony that they were using- a ceremony they hadn’t used in about 29 years — and it was to send some men — a Feng Shui master sent men down to the underworld on ghost horses. Now you, as Westerners, and I, as Westerners, would say well, that’s superstition. But after being there for a while, and seeing the amazing things that happened, you begin to wonder whose beliefs are those that are in operation, in the world, determining how things happen.

(photo of villagers- “the narrative world of their beliefs”)

So I remained with them, and the more I wrote that story, the more I got in to those beliefs, and I think that’s important for me — to take on the beliefs, because that is where the story is real, and that is where I’m gonna find the answers to how I feel about certain questions that I have in life.

Years go by, of course, and the writing, it doesn’t happen instantly, as I’m trying to convey it to you here at TED. The book comes and it goes. When it arrives, it is no longer my book, it is in the hands of readers, and they interpret it differently.

But I go back to this question of how do I create something out of nothing? And how do I create my own life? And I think it is by questioning, and saying to myself that there are no absolute truths. I believe in specifics, the specifics of story, and the past, the specifics of that past, and what is happening in the story at that point.

(“by thinking about luck and fate, coincidences and accidents, God’s will, the synchrony of mysterious forces”)

I also believe that, in thinking about things, my thinking about luck, and fate, and coincidences and accidents, God’s will, and the synchrony of mysterious forces, I will come to some notion of what that is, how we create.

(same slide, adding “by thinking about my role in all of it, what to think, do, and feel.”)

I have to think of my role. Where I am in the universe, and did somebody intend for me to be that way, or is it just something I came up with? And I also can find that, by imagining fully, and becoming what is imagined, and yet is in that real world, the fictional world. And that is how I find particles of truth, not the absolute truth, or the whole truth. And they have to be in all possibilities, including those I never considered before.

(“not complete answers”)

So there are never complete answers.

(“uncertainty is a good thing”)

Or, rather, if there is an answer, it is to remind myself that there is uncertainty in everything, and that is good, because then I will discover something new. And if there is a partial answer, a more complete answer from me, it is to simply imagine. And to imagine is to put myself in that story, until there was only — there is a transparency between me and the story I am creating.

(“and feel what is in one story”)

And that’s how I’ve discovered that if I feel what is in the story — in one story — then I come the closest, I think, to knowing what compassion is, to feeling that compassion. Because for everything, in that question of how things happen, it has to do with the feeling. I have to become the story in order to understand a lot of that.

We’ve come to the end of the talk, and I will reveal what is in the bag (referring to leather duffel at her feet), and it is the muse, and it is the things that transform in our lives, that are wonderful and stay with us. (bends to bag, opens it, and a small dog runs out) There she is. Thank you very much!

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One of the problems of writing, and working, and looking at the internet is that it’s very hard to separate fashion from deep change. And so, to start helping that, I want to take us back to 1835. In 1835, James Gordon Bennett founded the first mass circulation newspaper in New York City. And it cost about 500 dollars to start it, which was about the equivalent of 10 thousand dollars of today. By 15 years later, by 1850, doing the same thing, starting what was experienced as a mass circulation daily paper would come to cost 2 and a half million dollars. 10 thousand, 2 and a half million, 15 years. That’s the critical change that is being inverted by the net. And that’s what I want to talk about today, and how that relates to the emergence of social production.

Starting with newspapers, what we saw was high cost as an initial requirement for making information, knowledge, and culture, which led to a stark bifurcation between producers, who had to be able to raise financial capital, just like any other industrial organization; and passive consumers that could choose from a certain set of things that this industrial model could produce.

Now, the term “information society,” “information economy,” for a very long time, has been used as “the thing that comes after” the Industrial Revolution. But in fact, for purposes of understanding what’s happening today, that’s wrong. Because for 150 years, we’ve had an information economy. It’s just been industrial. Which means those who were producing had to have a way of raising money to pay those 2 and a half million dollars, and later more for the telegraph, and the radio transmitter, and the television, and eventually the mainframe. And that meant they were market based, or they were government owned, depending on what kind of system they were in. And this characterized and anchored the way information and knowledge were produced for the next 150 years.

Now, let me tell you a different story.

(graph: “Top 500 Supercomputers”, supercomputers as of June 2002 graphed by teraflops, NEC Earth Simulator, HP ASCI-Q, and Linux Network, in descending order of size)

Around June 2002, the world of supercomputers had a bombshell. The Japanese had, for the first time, created the fastest supercomputer — the NEC Earth Simulator — taking the primary from the US, and about two years later — this, by the way, is measuring the trillion floating point operations per second that the computer’s capable of running.

(next bar added to graph — Mid 2004, IBM Gene Blue, slightly surpassing the NEC Earth Sim)

Sigh of relief, IBM Gene Blue has just edged ahead of the NEC Earth Simulator. All of this completely ignores the fact that, throughout this period, there’s another supercomputer running in the world — SETI@Home –

(bar added to show “SETI@Home”, massively surpassing the IBM Gene Blue)

4 and a half million users around the world, contributing their leftover computer cycles, whenever their computer isn’t working, by running a screen saver, and together sharing their resources to create a massive supercomputer that NASA harnesses to analyze the data coming from radio telescopes.

What this picture suggests to us is that we’ve got a radical change in the way information production and exchange is capitalized. Not that it’s become less capital intensive, that there’s less money that’s required, but that the ownership of this capital, the way the capitalization happens, is radically distributed. Each of us, in these advanced economies, has one of these (grabs nearby computer), or something rather like it — a computer. They’re not radically different from routers inside the middle of the network. And computation, storage, and communications capacity are in the hands of practically every connected person — and these are the basic physical capital means necessary for producing information, knowledge, and culture, in the hands of something like 600 million to a billion people around the planet.

What this means is that for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, the most important means — the most important components of the core economic activities — remember, we are in an information economy — of the most advanced economies, and there more than anywhere else, are in the hands of the population at large. This is completely different than what we’ve seen since the Industrial Revolution.

So we’ve got communications and computation capacity in the hands of the entire population, and we’ve got human creativity, human wisdom, human experience — the other major experience, the other major input. Which unlike simple labor -stand here turning this lever all day long — is not something that’s the same or fungible among people. Any one of you who has taken someone else’s job or tried to give yours to someone else, no matter how detailed the manual, you cannot transmit what you know, what you will intuit under a certain set of circumstances. In that, we’re unique, and each of us holds this critical input into production, as we hold this machine. (goes back to computer)

What’s the effect of this? So the story that most people know is the story of free or open source software. This is market share of Apache web server-

(graph showing market share of Apache skyrocketing over other systems)

-one of the critical applications in web based communications. In 1995, two groups of people said wow, this is really important, the web! We need a much better web server! One was a motley collection of volunteers who just decided you know, we really need this, we should write one, and what are we going to do with what — well, we’re gonna share it! And other people will be able to develop it. The other was Microsoft. Now if I told you that 10 years later, the motley crew of people who didn’t control anything that they produced acquired 20% of the market and was the red line (refers to second largest share on graph), it would be amazing! Right? Think of it in minivans. A group of automobile engineers on their weekends are competing with Toyota. Right?

But in fact, of course, the story is it’s the 70% (refers to top blue line), including the major e-commerce site — 70% of a critical application on which web based communications and applications work is produced in this form in direct competition with Microsoft, not in a side issue — in a central strategic decision to try to capture a component of the net.

Software has done this in a way that’s been very visible, because it’s measurable. But the thing to see is that this actually happens throughout the web.

(screen shot of NASA Mars Clickworker website)

So NASA, at some point, did an experiment where they took images of Mars that they were mapping, and they said instead of having 3 or 4 fully trained PhDs doing this all the time, let’s break it up into small components, put it up on the web, and see if people, using a very simple interface, will actually spend 5 minutes here, 10 minutes there, clicking. After 6 months, 85,000 people used this to generate mapping at a faster rate than the images were coming in, which was, quote, “practically indistinguishable from the markings of a fully trained PhD,” once you showed it to a number of people and computed the average.

Now if you have a little girl, and she goes and writes to — well, not so little, medium little — tries to do research on Barbie. And she’ll come to Encarta, one of the main online encyclopedias, this is what you’ll find out about Barbie.

(Encarta screenshot, showing very little info)

This is it, there’s nothing more to the definition, including “manufacturers” — plural — “now more commonly produce ethnically diverse dolls, like this black Barbie.” Which is vastly better than what you’ll find in the encyclopedia.com, which is “Barbie, Klaus.” (laughter)

(screen shot of Klaus Barbie’s entry on encyclopedia.com)

On the other hand, if they go to Wikipedia, they’ll find a genuine article –

(screenshot of Wikipedia’s Barbie entry)

and I won’t talk a lot about Wikipedia, because Jimmy Wales is here — but, roughly equivalent to what you would find in the Britannica, differently written, including the controversies over body image and commercialization, the claims about the way in which she’s a good role model, etcetera.

Another portion is not only how content is produced, but how relevance is produced.

(screen shot of Yahoo! directory page)

The claim to fame of Yahoo! was we hire people to look — originally, not anymore — we hire people to look at websites and tell you — if they’re in the index, they’re good.

(screen shot of Open Directory Project page)

This, on the other hand, is what 60,000 passionate volunteers produce in the open directory project. Each one willing to spend an hour or two on something they really care about to say this is good. So this is the Open Directory Project, with 60,000 volunteers, each one spending a little bit of time, as opposed to a few hundred fully paid employees. No one owns it, no one owns the output, it’s free for anyone to use, and it’s the output of people acting out of social and psychological motivations to do something interesting.

This is not only outside of businesses. When you think of what is the critical innovation of Google, the critical innovation is outsourcing the one most important thing — the decision as to what’s relevant — to the community of the web as a whole, doing whatever they want to do.

So — page rank. The critical innovation here is, instead of our engineers or our people saying which is the most relevant, we’re going to go out there and count what you, people out there on the web, for whatever reason — vanity, pleasure — produced links, and tied to each other. We’re gonna count those, and count them up. (referring to Google screenshot behind him) And again, here, you see Barbie.com, but also, very quickly, adiosbarbie.com, the body image for every size. A contested cultural object, which you won’t find anywhere soon on Overture, which is the classic market based mechanism.

(screenshot of Overture Barbie search)

Whoever pays the most is highest on the list.

So all of that is in the creation of content, of relevance, basic human expression. But remember, the computers were also physical. Just physical materials — our PCs, we share them together. We also see this in wireless.

(diagram of nodes in “Open wireless networks”)

It used to be wireless was one person owned the license, they transmitted in an area, and it had to be decided whether they would be licensed, or based on property. What we’re seeing now is that computers and radios are becoming so sophisticated that we’re developing algorithms to let people own machines, like wifi devices, and overlay them with a sharing protocol that would allow a community like this to build its own wireless broadband network simply from the simple principle: When I’m listening, when I’m not using, I can help you transfer your messages. And when you’re not using, you’ll help me transfer yours (sic). And this is not an idealized version, these are working models, that at least in some places in the United States are being implemented, at least for public security.

(slide: “Data storage & retrieval
-Data storage and retrieval system that
-Stores terabytes
-Available 24/7, from anywhere in the world
-Can support over 100,000,000 users at any moment
-Robust to attack, including
-Closure of the main index server
-Injection of malicious files
-Armed seizures of any given set of storage media”)

If in 1999 I told you — let’s build a data and storage retrieval system. It’s gotta store terabytes. It’s gotta be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. ‘S gotta be available from anywhere in the world. It has to support over 100 million users at any given moment. It’s gotta be robust to attack, including closing the main index, injecting malicious files, armed seizure of some major nodes. You’d say that would take years. It would take millions. But of course, what I’m describing is P2P filesharing. Right? We always think of it as stealing music, but fundamentally, it’s a distributed data storage and retrieval system, where people, for very obvious reasons, are willing to share their bandwidth and their storage to create something.

(slide: “Four transactional frameworks”; chart of market & non market based systems, decentralized or centralized models, with a notable void under “Non-market”; “decentralized” model)

So, essentially what we’re seeing is the emergence of a fourth transactional framework. It used to be that there were two primary dimensions along which you could divide things. They could be market based, or non-market based; they could be decentralized, or centralized. The price system was a market based and decentralized system. If things worked better,because you actually had somebody organizing them, you had firms, if you wanted to be in the market — or you had governments or sometimes larger non-profits in the non-market. It was too expensive to have decentralized social production, to have decentralized action in society — that was not about society itself. It was in fact economic.

(graph again, with “Social sharing & exchange” under “Non-market”/”decentralized” field)

But what we’re seeing now is the emergence of this fourth system, of social sharing and exchange. Not that it’s the first time that we do nice things to each other, or for each other, as social beings. We do it all the time. It’s that it’s the first time that it’s having major economic impact.

(“Social sharing & exchange as a modality of economic production
-Decentralized authority and capacity to contribute to effective action
-Instead of property: ‘may I create?’”)

What characterizes them is decentralized authority. You don’t have to ask permission, as you do in a property based system. May I do this? It’s open for anyone to create and innovate and share, if they want to, by themselves or with others, because property is one mechanism of coordination. But it’s not the only one.

Instead, what we see are social frameworks for all of the critical things that we use property and contract in the market. Information flows to decide what are interesting problems, who’s available and good for something, motivation structures — remember, money isn’t always the best motivator. If you leave a 50 dollar check after dinner with friends, you don’t increase the probability of being invited back. And if dinner isn’t entirely obvious, think of sex. (laughter)

It also requires certain new organizational approaches. And in particular what we’ve seen is task organization — you have to hire people who know what they’re doing. You have to hire them to spend a lot of time. Now, take the same problem, chunk it into little modules, and motivations become trivial. Five minutes, instead of watching TV? Five minutes I’ll spend just because it’s interesting. Just because it’s fun. Just because it gives me a certain sense of meaning, or, in places that are more involved, like Wikipedia, gives me a certain set of social relations.

So — A new social phenomenon is emerging. It’s creating, and it’s most visible when we see it, as a new form of competition.

(“New competition
P2P v Recording industry
Free/Open source software v Microsoft
Skype v Telecomms
Wikipedia v Grollier; Encarta”)

Peer to peer networks assaulting the recording industry. Free and open source software taking market share from Microsoft. Skype potentially threatening traditional telecoms. Wikipedia competing with online encyclopedias.

But it’s also a new source of opportunities for businesses. As you see a new set of social relations and behaviors emerging, you have new opportunities. Some of them are toolmakers. Instead of building well-behaved appliances — things that you know what they’ll do in advance — you begin to build more open tools. There’s a new set of values, a new set of things people value. You build platforms for self-expression and collaboration. Like Wikipedia, like the open directory project, you’re beginning to build platforms, and you see that as a model. And you see surfers, people who see this happening, and in some sense build it into a supply chain, which is a very curious one. Right?

(“New opportunities
-Toolmakers for newly able users
-Platforms for self-expression and collaboration
-’Surfers’”
inside cloud: “Stuff will flow out of connected human beings” contributes to “Inputs into production” (note flow is two-way))

You have a belief — stuff will flow out of connected human beings. That’ll give me something I can use, and I’m gonna contract with someone. I will deliver something based on what happens. It’s very scary — that’s what Google does, essentially. That’s what IBM does in software services, and they’ve done reasonably well.

(“Social Production
-A real fact, not a fad: the critical long term shift caused by the Internet
-In some contexts more efficient than markets or firms
-Sustainable and growing fast
-But a threat to, and threatened by, incumbent industrial models
-Intellectual property, telecoms, other new funky laws are the battlefield over the institutional ecology”)

So, social production is a real fact, not a fad. It is the critical long term shift caused by the internet. Social relations and exchange become significantly more important than they ever were as an economic phenomenon. In some context, it’s even more efficient, because of the quality of the information, the ability to find the best person, the lower transaction costs. It’s sustainable and growing fast.

But — and this is the dark lining. It is threatened by — in the same way that it threatens — the incumbent industrial systems. So next time you open the paper, and you see an intellectual property decision, a telecoms decision, it’s not about something small and technical. It is about the future of the freedom to be as social beings with each other, and the way information knowledge and culture will be produced. Because it is in this context that we see a battle over how easy or hard it will be for the industrial information economy to simply go on as it goes, or for the new model of production to begin to develop alongside that industrial model and change the way we begin to see the world and report what it is that we see. Thank you.