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Steve Jamison has co-authored five books with John Wooden, produced a documentary about him, and is consultant to his leadership program at UCLA. All this came about after one fateful meeting, for an innocuous interview.

Coach Wooden has influenced the lives of many, and he discusses his inspirational philosophy on personal success in today’s heartwarming TEDTalk. To understand why Steve got hooked by the story of this legendary basketball coach, read below the fold >>

An excerpt from the interview:
When I got back to transcribe the conversation, I realized that every single sentence was fully formed, enlightening and substantive. I just kept re-reading it. And it was about leadership and life, not basketball. He said things like, “Don’t forget, Steve, the most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.”What did Coach Wooden think about his talk being posted on TED.com?

He said, “Fine.” Well, he was delighted with TED when he was there. But he’s just come out of the hospital, and although his recovery is coming along fine, he was in the hospital for three weeks. And he’s currently on some very serious medication, so that’s all he could manage. But he is recovering, and was able to celebrate daughter’s birthday with her this weekend.

When we watched the video here at TED, we were all very impressed with Coach Wooden’s wit and public speaking prowess, especially considering his age.

He’s always had the ability to hold the attention of crowd. He’s got a sense of humor and a profound presence that is unique and probably brought on by his phenomenal experience and age. His presence is just riveting.

How did you first meet Coach Wooden and how did your relationship with him evolve?

It was totally unforeseeable. I interviewed him for another project I was doing that involved talking to the top performers in sports to understand their way of thinking and see how that could be applied elsewhere.

In my mind, he wasn’t a big deal. I was more impressed with his players. If you’re an average fan, like I was, you don’t talk to the bench. I knew he was good, but I didn’t go into the interview with any sense of awe. I actually took my dad along, because my dad understood and he was excited.

All of that changed when I met Coach Wooden. He has this combination of great inner strength and great inner youthfulness. As we went on, I got to see much more of what he was about.

When I got back to transcribe the conversation, I realized that every single sentence was fully formed, enlightening and substantive. I just kept re-reading it. And it was about leadership and life, not basketball. He said things like, “Don’t forget, Steve, the most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.”

So when I saw the transcript, literally I thought, “This is a book!” I called Coach with a great deal of enthusiasm to tell him about my intentions. He was polite, and said no. But I couldn’t get it out of my head, so I called him back in a week. And he said he had a lot of things on his agenda, and he was serious, even though he was in his 80s.

But I kept going back, and eventually wrote him a letter. I tried to convince him with all the usual arguments — money, visibility. He didn’t care. Then I remembered that he had said, “I am a teacher.” So I sent him a note that said this book is an opportunity to teach. He agreed to work on it.

Eventually we found a publisher, and created a small, blue book that started a real relationship in my life with Coach, that has turned into a great friendship. He views his team as an extended family, and we were a different type of a team, but we were a little team of two in writing this book.

I thought that was it. But the little blue book, “Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections,” became popular and the publisher asked if there were any other books we’d like to do. So we did another fabulous book together. We did a PBS show and I was the producer, called “John Wooden: Values, Victory and Peace of Mind.” We’ve also done a children’s book called “Inches and Miles” and other books since then.

Why do you think the books have had so much success?

These were all driven by John Wooden’s appeal. He talks about not just leadership, but his life and his father’s influence. A lot of young people get advice from their dad and just forget it. But he carried his dad’s advice with him all through his life.

His dad emphasized the golden rule and that was fundamental to his coaching. His definition of success comes from his father telling him not to compare himself to others, just do your best.

Coach was values-driven and character-based before those terms were coined. He understood how to treat people right, but he was also very demanding. His strategy is based on his dad, but also on his coach at Purdue, Piggy Lambert, who was another one of the greatest coaches of all time. He also had this “team as an extended family” idea.

I remember that first transcript, I sent it to my dad, and asked, “What do you think?” He sent it back with a note that said, “Everything that Coach Wooden says is pure gold. Don’t mess it up.”

It sounds like Coach Wooden was really influenced by his father and the idea of family. His father must also have been a tremendous man.

Yes he was. I once went to his father’s gravesite, actually — just to pay my respects to that kind of a man.

And the team is an extended family. All the players still contact Coach, and stop by for lunch or breakfast regularly. They send him letters, postcards and birthday cards from everywhere.

One of Coach’s first players, from his first high school team in 1932, contacted him while we working on a book. He hadn’t much longer to live, and wanted to talk to Coach. After they had spoken, I asked the player quickly, “How’d it go?” He replied, “Coach Wooden really cared about us boys on the team, and made us practice extra because of it.”

It sounds like Coach Wooden has an amazing philosophy.

Well, when he first started teaching he thought he was supposed to like all the players all the same. But then he started coaching, and he realized that he didn’t like everyone the same. He read something that Amos Alonzo Stagg had written, where he said, “I don’t like all my players the same. But I love them all the same.”

So, Coach changed his pre-season talk from, “I will like you all the same,” to “I will not like you all the same. I will love you all the same and I will give you the treatment you earn and deserve.”

He also liked when people paid attention to little things. I remember being at a game with him, where they sent in a waiter to serve his dinner. Now, this waiter didn’t know who Coach was, but he took his time making sure everything was done correctly, adjusting the cutlery and the flowers till they were just right. When the waiter left, Coach said, “Steve, if there’s a secret to success, it just might be little things done well. I love to see little things done well.”

He loved when people paid attention to perfecting the relevant details. And every season, he would show his players how to put on their socks. They had to learn to put on their socks properly to avoid folds, creases and wrinkles, because folds, creases and wrinkles could cause blisters. Blisters cause pain, and pain causes distraction, and that can come at the wrong time.

He also insisted that they double-knot their shoestrings. All of these nuts and bolts combined with the different elements of leadership — that’s what he was getting at. In my opinion he was the best at getting players to perform at the highest level they can.

How about the John Wooden Global Leadership Program at UCLA? How did that come to be? And to what extent are you involved with it?

I’m a consultant to that program. Coach sees over it and approves what’s done.

I was seeing from my results in book sales that there was a great interest in these skills in corporate America. So I got the idea for a program like this and I said, UCLA is the place for it. And so I set up a lunch meeting for Coach with Dean Judy Olian, and he had a great impact on her. She called me and said, “Let’s do it.”

Coach agreed to it because we have a banquet each year and the proceeds go to student scholarships. When you say scholarships for young people, you’re talking his language.

Right now, it’s still an award and a banquet with a distinguished keynote speaker. But in the future we’re hoping to get Coach’s teachings integrated into the curriculum.

Are there any other plans for the future?

Well, we would like to see the children’s book, “Inches and Miles,” animated. We’ve had a couple of offers on that, but not one I like yet. But you know, a child will watch “Winnie the Pooh” 400 times. Imagine if they did that with something that contained lessons that were this important.

Brenda Laurel spoke at TED in early 1998 — at a watershed moment. In 1997, she launched Purple Moon to make smart computer games aimed at girls. By 1999, the company had come to a much-publicized end. But between start and finish, Purple Moon marked a sea change in the girl-game market. The TED Blog interview Laurel via email last week, to get the rest of the Purple Moon story, and to talk about how the experience changed her and (just maybe) changed the world.

From the interview: I adored those [games]. I still get email from young women who still play them in order to hear the stories at the end of each path, because they “need to.” We even found a couple of girl-generated sites for trading stones outside of the Purple Moon world, as some of them became “rare.” I see that Facebook has this sort of feature now, and it makes me smile.

Read the full interview after the jump >>

Watch Brenda Laurel’s TEDTalk >>

Can you talk a bit about Purple Moon’s development in the two years after this talk — you mention more Rockett titles, for instance. Did you change the later games based on feedback from early Rockett players?

Yes, but in a more general way. One thing girls told us they wanted was the ability to make up their own stories about the characters, and to make up new characters and possibly put themselves as characters into the stories. So we developed a series that let girls make their own Rockett comic strips, complete with the ability to design new characters and even to choose their clothes (Rockett’s Adventure Maker) — Andrea Futter and Grace Chen did amazing work and figured out how to make those made-up characters look right in different positions, and how to get 3 dimensions into the comic frames.

Then we developed a series based on soccer (The Starfire Soccer Challenge), because women’s soccer was such a big deal to girls in that time period — during the time when American women were getting close to winning the World Cup. We did a boatload of research on how girls engage with sports, and learned, among other things, that boys engaged more from the perspective of watching sports on TV (hence all the TV-like UIs for sports games in those days), whereas girls engaged socially and in the first person. This research had a huge influence on both the plots and the UI for the Starfire series.

The moderate success of the first Secret Paths title led us to develop two more. I adored those titles. I still get email from young women who still play them in order to hear the stories at the end of each path, because they “need to.” We also learned from the huge success of the website that girls really liked being able to write articles for the Whistling Pines newspaper — that is, engage as fans in cultural production! — and they loved to collect and exchange the virtual secret stones and other goodies on the site. We even found a couple of girl-generated sites for trading stones outside of the Purple Moon world, as some of them became “rare.” I see that Facebook has this sort of feature now, and it makes me smile.

Since 1999, when Purple Moon ended, can you discern a line from your work to the next generation of games and online worlds? What lessons do you think the industry as a whole learned from your work?

It was a hard time, in that Mattel acquired and killed almost every company working in the girl space, with the exception of American Girl, which they acquired and kept alive for a while. But they had put some ungodly amount of money into that effort — all to protect Barbie — and by the next year were unable to service any of those brands. Eventually they closed their interactive group and the queen who ate us all up — Jill Barad — got ousted as CEO.

I think that the industry as a whole learned from the girl game movement that their audience could be much broader. This has come of age with things like the Wii. I think that interventions like Purple Moon enhanced girls’ comfort with computers, which we set out to do, and brought girls roaring into the online game space — eventually becoming major players in game worlds like World of Warcraft and, of course, the Sims. Will Wright has always designed with female players in mind. I don’t know whether he learned anything from us, but we were certainly on the same beam.

The “emotional navigation” interface we developed for the Rockett series has even turned out to be useful for working with folks with autism in helping them read emotional cues. I also got a fair amount of fan mail from adult men who thanked us for helping them understand how females think. There would have been another market there if we’d had time to pursue it (hee hee).

One of the coolest things that has happened is that, as the players get older, when I get email from one of them I can send them my book about the whole adventure from a business and cultural perspective, Utopian Entrepreneur, so they can see how the sausage was made. Some of them write back and tell me that they’re going to explore starting their own businesses as a result. So it’s a lovely closing of the circle.

Let’s discuss one of the powerful ideas in your talk: the idea of creating positive change through pop culture. Can you point to some companies or entities that you think are carrying this torch now? Who should be? Where would you look next, for the next you?

Things have changed so much, it’s hard to say which torches are being carried, and I don’t know that I can take any credit for any of them, but I see fellow travelers. Certainly, Will Wright continues to carry his own lovely torch of paying great attention to what players are doing in-world and tweaking the world continuously to help them along paths they seem to be enjoying. The whole Serious Games movement is carrying the torch of using games to help people deal with “serious” issues like health and citizenship, and the quality of the game design in that corner of the world is dramatically better than it used to be when “educational gaming” was a kind of ghetto populated by lots of absent-minded professors without a clue about real game dynamics.

Every year or so somebody “rediscovers” the “girl space” in the market, but I don’t sense that the goals for engaging it are as politically and culturally activist as ours were. In a way, the need for the kind of cultural intervention we made with Purple Moon no longer exists, in that girls and women are full participants in the world of computer-based interactivity, but we still have a problem with female designers getting their work out there. And there are many genres and areas of interest for girls and women that remain untouched. Heroes like Tracy Fullerton (USC), danah boyd (now at Microsoft, I believe), Justine Cassell (Northwestern) and Henry Jenkins (founder of the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT and moving now to USC) keep the flame burning for women in gaming.

I look for that generation of Purple Moon girls to shake things up in the near future.

Are there lessons from your Purple Moon experience that you make a point of teaching your students now?

You bet. One of the first courses they get in our program is Design Research, where they learn methods of ethnographic study that I learned from my pals at Cheskin while working on Purple Moon. I fervently believe in research as a necessity for good design and I teach it that way. We also have a required course in Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Ethics in the Grad Program in Design that I chair at CCA. Our students leave the program knowing how to speak business.

In more general terms, I try to make sure they don’t make the mistake of self-marginalization when they are trying something non-mainstream — that they always put themselves in the center, and see themselves as the wellspring of popular culture. I love my job.

And then — what’s next for you? Are there projects you’d like to make sure our TEDsters know about?

Designing the Grad Design program at CCA has taken all my energy recently, and I’m happy to do it. Other than that, I’ve been exploring the new world of distributed sensor networks, especially in the sense of how they may be able to engage us more profoundly with the natural world. Again, this is looking at a computational / technological affordance as a way to serve a political / cultural goal — of making us aware of our profound connection to Gaia as a way of making it impossible for us to continue to be destructive in the environment.

I’m also interested in how we can use distributed sensing to discover new patterns in nature (like Richard Voss‘ discovery of pink noise and the notion that it is a kind of temporal fractal). I’ve been greatly inspired by the work of Sean White at Columbia in this area. My first paper on the topic, “Designed Animism: Poetics for a New World,” appears in (Re)Searching the Digital Bauhaus (T. Binder, J. Löwgren and L. Malmborg, Eds., Springer, 2008). You can also download it from my website.

Watch Stephen Petranek’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.

Read more about Stephen Petranek on TED.com.

NEW: Read the transcript >>

Transcript: Stephen Petranek, TED2002

Stephen Petranek: 10 ways the world could end

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/167

To watch this TEDTalk, download it or comment on it, and to view many more TEDTalks, visit http://www.ted.com

The advances that have taken place in astronomy, cosmology, and biology, in the last ten years, are really extraordinary — to the point where we know more about our universe and how it works than many of you might imagine. But there was something else that I’ve noticed as those changes were taking place, as people were starting to find out that hmm, yeah, there really is a black hole at the center of every galaxy. The science writers and editors — I shouldn’t say science writers, I should say people who write about science — and editors would sit down over a couple of beers, after a hard day of work, and start talking about some of these incredible perceptions about how the universe works.

And they would inevitably end up in what I thought was a very bizarre place, which is ways the world could end very suddenly. And that’s what I wanna talk about today. (laughter) Ah, you laugh, ye fools. (more laughter)

(voice offstage, Chris Anderson?): Can we finish up a little early?

(more laughter) Yeah, we need the time! At first it all seemed a little fantastical to me, but after challenging a lot of these ideas, I began to take a lot of them seriously. And then September 11th happened, and I thought, ah, god, I can’t go to the TED conference and talk about how the world is gonna end. Who wants to hear that? Not after this! And that got me into a discussion with some other people, other scientists, about maybe some other subjects, and one of the guys I talked to was a neuroscientist, said, you know, I think there are a lot of solutions to the problems you brought up, and reminds me of Michael’s talk yesterday and his mother saying you can’t have a solution if you don’t have a problem. So we went out looking for solutions to ways that the world might end tomorrow, and lo and behold, we found them.

Which leads me to a videotape of a President Bush press conference from a couple of weeks ago. Can we run that, Andrew?

(video of Bush press conference, Bush speaking): “Whatever it costs to defend our security, and whatever it costs to defend our freedom, we must pay it.”

I agree with the president. He wants 2 trillion dollars to protect us from terrorists next year, a 2 trillion dollar federal budget which will land us back into deficit spending real fast — but terrorists aren’t the only threat we face. There are really serious calamities staring us in the eye that we’re in the same kind of denial about that we were about terrorism and what could’ve happened on September 11th.

I would propose, therefore, that if we took 10 billion dollars from that 2.13 trillion dollar budget — which is one — or is two one hundredths of that budget — and we doled out a billion dollars to each one of these problems I’m going to talk to you about — The vast majority could be solved, and the rest we could deal with. So I hope you find this both fascinating — I’m fascinated by this kind of stuff, I gotta admit — to me these are the — Richard’s cockroaches.

But I also hope — because I think the people in this room can literally change the world — I hope you take some of this stuff away with you, and when you have an opportunity to be influential, that you try to get some heavy duty money spent on some of these ideas.

So let’s start. Number 10: We lose the will to survive.

(slide: “Number 10: We Lose the Will to Survive”: video rolls of woman walking through debris, man tossing and turning on cot, man in asylum, pill factory & drug manufacturing/ pharmacy footage)

We live in an incredible age of modern medicine, we are all much healthier than we were 20 years ago. People around the world are getting better medicine — but mentally, we’re falling apart. The World Health Organization now estimates that one out of five people on the planet is clinically depressed. And the World Health Organization also says that depression is the biggest epidemic that humankind has ever faced.

Soon, genetic breakthroughs and even better medicine are going to allow us to think of 100 as a normal life-span. A female child born tomorrow on average — median — will live to age 83. Our life longevity is going up almost a year for every year that passes. Now the problem with all of this getting older is that people over 65 are the most likely people to commit suicide.

So what are the solutions?

(“Solutions:
-Give us insurance for mental health
-Advanced psychoactive drugs”)

We don’t really have mental health insurance in this country, and it’s — (applause) -it’s really a crime. Something like 98% of all people with depression — and I mean really severe depression — I have a friend with stunningly severe depression — This is a curable disease, with present medicine, and present technology. But it is often a combination of talk therapy and pills. Pills alone don’t do it. Especially in clinically depressed people. You ought to be able to go to a psychiatrist — or a psychologist — and put down your ten dollar co-pay, and get treated. Just like you do when you got a cut on your arm. It’s ridiculous.

Secondly, drug companies are not going to develop really sophisticated psychoactive drugs. We know that most mental illnesses have a biological component that can be dealt with. And we know just an amazing amount more about the brain now than we did ten years ago. We need a “pump-push” from the federal government, through NIH and National Science — NSF — and places like that to start helping the drug companies develop some advanced psychoactive drugs.

Moving on. Number nine:

(“Number 9: Aliens Invade Earth”)

Don’t laugh, aliens invade earth. Ten years ago, you couldn’t have found an astronomer — well, very few astronomers — in the world who would’ve told you that there’re any planets anywhere outside our solar system.

(video: flying through space, slides of galaxies and planets, astronomer making calculations on blackboard)

1995 we found three, the count now’s up to 80, we’re finding about two or three a month. All of the ones we’ve found, by the way, are in this little teeny tiny corner where we live, in the Milky Way. There must be millions of planets in the Milky Way, and as Carl Sagan insisted for many years, and was laughed at for it, there must be billions and billions in the universe. In a few years NASA is gonna launch 4 or 5 telescopes out to Jupiter, where there’s less dust, and start looking for Earth-like planets, which we cannot see with present technology, nor detect. It’s becoming obvious that the chance that life does not exist elsewhere in the universe, and probably fairly close to us, is a fairly remote idea. And the chance that some of it isn’t more intelligent than ours is also a remote idea.

Remember, we’ve only been an advanced civilization — an industrial civilization, if you would — for 200 years, although every time I go to Pompeii I’m amazed that they had the equivalent of a McDonald’s on every street corner too. So I don’t know how much civilization really has progressed since AD 79, but there’s a great likelihood — I really believe this, and I don’t believe in aliens, but — and I don’t believe there are any aliens on the earth or anything like that. But there’s a likelihood that we will confront a civilization that is more intelligent than our own.

(slide: stereotypical head of alien, cut to 50s style flying saucer ships)

Now, what will happen? What if they come to, you know, suck up our oceans for the hydrogen? And swat us away like flies, the way we swat away flies when we go into the rain forest and start logging it. We can look at our own history — (the) late physicist Gerard O’Neill said “Advanced western civilization has had a destructive effect on all primitive civilizations it has come in contact with, even in those cases where every attempt was ma
de to protect and guard the primitive civilization.” If the aliens come visiting, we’re the primitive civilization.

So what are the solutions to this?

(“Solutions:
-Get the State Department working on a
plan to meet, greet, and negotiate with an advanced species
-Become an outward-looking, space-faring nation”)

(laughter) Thank god you can all read! It may seem ridiculous, but we have a really lousy history of anticipating things like this and actually being prepared for them. How much energy and money does it take to actually have a plan to negotiate with an advanced species?

Secondly, and you’re gonna hear more from me about this — we have to become an outward-looking, space-faring nation. We have got to develop the idea that the Earth doesn’t last forever, our sun doesn’t last forever — If we want humanity to last forever, we have to colonize the Milky Way. And that is not something that is beyond comprehension at this point. (applause)

It’ll also help us a lot if we meet an advanced civilization along the way if we’re trying to be an advanced civilization.

Number 8-

(voice offstage: “Steve, that’s what I’m doing after TED.”)
(laughter & applause)

You’ve got it! You’ve got the job.

(“Number 8: The Ecosystem Collapses”; followed by undersea footage of fish swimming in coral reef, followed by footage from a rain forest)

Number 8: The ecosystem collapses. Last July, in Science, the journal Science, 19 oceanographers published a very very unusual article — it wasn’t really a research report, it was a screed. They said, we’ve been looking at the oceans for a long time now, and we wanna tell you they’re not in trouble, they’re near collapse. Many other ecosystems on Earth are in real, real danger. We’re living in a time of mass extinctions that exceeds the fossil record by a factor of 10,000. We have lost 25% of the unique species in Hawaii in the last 20 years, California is expected to lose 25% of its species in the next 40 years. Somewhere in the Amazon forest is the marginal tree. You cut down that tree, the rain forest collapses as an ecosystem. There’s really a tree like that out there. That’s really what it comes to. And when that ecosystem collapses, it could take a major ecosystem with it, like our atmosphere.

So what do we do about this? What are the solutions?

(“Solutions:
-Spend more money modeling ecosystems
-Create huge biodiversity reserves”)

There is some modeling of ecosystems going on now. The problem with ecosystems is that we understand them so poorly, that we don’t know they’re really in trouble, until it’s almost too late. We need to know earlier that they’re getting in trouble, and we need to be able to pump possible solutions into models. And with the kind of computing power we have now — there is, as I say, some of this going on, but it needs money. National Science Foundation needs to say, you know, almost all the money that’s spent on science in this country comes from the federal government, one way or another. And they get to prioritize, you know? There’re people at the National Science Foundation who get to say this is the most important thing. This is one of the things they ought to be thinking more about.

Secondly, we need to create huge bio-diversity reserves on the planet, and start moving them around, There’s been an experiment for the last four or five years on the George’s Bank — or the Grand Banks off of Newfoundland. It’s a no take fishing zone. They can’t fish there for a radius of 200 miles. And an amazing thing has happened — almost all the fish have come back, and they’re reproducing like crazy. We’re going to have to start doing this around the globe. We’re gonna have to have no take zones. We’re gonna have to say no more logging in the Amazon for 20 years. Let it recover, before we start logging again. (applause)

Number 7:

(“Number 7: Particle Accelerator Mishap”; photos of particle accelerators; graphics of particles, atomic explosion, more particle experiment photos)

Particle accelerator mishap. You all remember Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber? One (of) the things he raved about was that a particle accelerator experiment could go haywire, and set off a chain reaction that could destroy the world. A lot of very sober-minded physicists, believe it or not, have had exactly the same thought. This Spring, there’s a collider at Brookhaven, on Long Island — this Spring it’s going to have an experiment in which it creates black holes. They are expecting to create little tiny black holes. They expect them to evaporate. (pause)(laughter) I hope they’re right. (laughter) Other collider experiments — there’s one that’s gonna take place next summer at Cern — have the possibility of creating something called strangelets, which are kind of like anti-matter whenever they hit other matter they destroy it, and obliterate it. Most physicists say that the accelerators we have now are not really powerful enough to create black holes and strangelets that we need to worry about, and they’re probably right. But — all around the world, in Japan, in Canada — there’s talk about this in the United — of reviving this in the United States, we shut one down that was gonna be big. But there’s talk of building very big accelerators.

What can we do about this? What’re the solutions?

(“Solutions:
-Create an independent board of scientists to oversee accelerator experiments
-Study natural high-energy physics first”)

We’ve got the fox watching the henhouse here. We need to — we need the advice of particle physicists to talk about particle physics and what should be done in particle physics, but we need some outside thinking and watchdogging of what’s going on with these experiments.

Secondly, we have a natural laboratory surrounding the earth. We have an electromagnetic field around the earth, and it’s constantly bombarded by high energy particles, like protons. And we don’t — I, in my opinion — we don’t spend enough time looking at that natural laboratory and figuring out first what’s safe to do on Earth.

Number 6: Biotech Disaster.

(“Number 6 — Biotech Disaster”; photos of cornfields)

It’s one of my favorite ones, ’cause we’ve done several stories on BT corn. BT corn is a corn that creates its own pesticide to kill a corn-borer. You may of heard of it — heard it called Starling, especially when all those taco shells were taken out of the supermarkets about a year and a half ago. This stuff was supposed to only be feed for animals in the United States, and it got into the human food supply, and somebody should’ve figured out that it would get in the human food supply very easily. But the thing that’s alarming is a couple of months ago, in Mexico, where BT corn and all genetically altered corn is totally illegal, they found BT corn genes in wild corn plants. Now corn originated, we think, in Mexico. This is the genetic bio-diversity storehouse of corn. This brings back a skepticism that has gone away recently, that superweeds and superpests could spread around the world from biotechnology, that literally could destroy the world’s food supply in very short order.

(computer animated graphics of chromosomes floating around)

So what do we do about that?

(“Solution:
-Treat biotechnology with the same security scrutiny we apply to nuclear engineering”)

We treat biotechnology with the same scrutiny we apply to nuclear power plants. It’s that simple. This is an amazingly unregulated field. When the Starling disaster happened, there was a battle between the EPA and the FDA over who really had authority, and over what parts of this, and they didn’t get it straightened out for months. That’s kind of crazy.

Number 5, one of my favorites,

(“Number 5 — Reversal of the Earth’s Magnetic Field”; graphic of earth
with magnetic field surrounding it)

reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field. Believe it or not, this happens every few hundred thousand years, and has happened many times in our history — North Pole goes to the South, South Pole goes to the North, and vice versa. But what happens, as this occurs, is that we lose our magnetic field around the Earth over the period of about 100 years, and that means that all these cosmic rays and particles that are to come streaming at us from the sun, that this field protects us from, are — well basically, we’re gonna fry. (laughter)

(offstage voice: “I believe I have some additional hats downstairs.”)

So what can we do about this?

(“Solution:
-Replenish Earth’s ozone layer”)

Oh, by the way, we’re overdue — it’s been 780,000 years since this happened. So — shoulda happened about 480,000 years ago. Oh, and here’s one other thing — scientists think now our magnetic field may be diminished by about 5%. So maybe we’re in the throes of it. One of the problems of trying to figure out how healthy the Earth is, is that we have — you know, we don’t have good weather data from 60 years ago, much less data on our — things like the ozone layer.

So, there’s a fairly simple solution to this. There’s gonna be a lot of cheap rocketry that’s gonna come online in about six or seven years, that gets us into the low atmosphere very cheaply. You know, we can make ozone from car tailpipes. It’s not hard — it’s just three oxygen atoms. If you brought the entire ozone layer down to the surface of the Earth, it would be the thickness of two pennies, at 14 pounds per square inch. You don’t need that much up there. We need to learn how to repair and replenish the Earth’s ozone layer. (applause)

Number 4: Giant solar flares. Solar flares are enormous magnetic outbursts from the sun that bombard the Earth with high speed subatomic particles.

(video of various flares & other solar activity)

So far our atmosphere has done — and our magnetic field has done — pretty well protecting us from this. Occasionally, we get a flare from the sun that causes havoc with communications and so forth, and electricity, but the alarming thing is that astronomers have recently been studying stars that are similar to our sun, and they’ve found that a number of them, when they’re about the age of our sun, brighten, by a factor of as much as 20. Doesn’t last for very long. And they think these are super-flares, millions of times more powerful than any flares we’ve had from our sun so far. (long pause) Obviously we don’t want one of those. (laughter) There’s a flip side to it — in studying stars like our sun we’ve found that they go through periods of diminishment, when their total amount of energy that’s expelled from them goes down by maybe 1%. One percent doesn’t sound like a lot, but it would cause one hell of an ice age here.

(photo of wind whipping snow over a glacier)

So what can we do about this?

(“Solution:
-Start terraforming Mars now”)

(laughter) Start terraforming Mars. This is one of my favorite subjects, I wrote a story about this in Life magazine in 1993. This is rocket science, but it’s not hard rocket science. Everything that we need to make an atmosphere on Mars, and to make a livable planet on Mars, is probably there. And you just, literally, have to send little nuclear factories up there that gobble up the iron oxide on the surface of Mars and spit out the oxygen. The problem is it takes 300 years to terraform Mars, minimum. Really more like 500 years to do it right. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t start now. (laughter)

(“Number 3 — A New Global Epidemic”; photos from influenza epidemic, photos of laboratory work)

Number 3 — Isn’t this stuff cool? (more laughter) A new global epidemic. People have been at war with germs ever since there have been people, and from time to time the germs sure get the upper hand. In 1918, we had a flu epidemic in the United States that killed 20 million people. That was back when the population was around 100 million people. The bubonic plague in Europe, in the Middle Ages, killed one out of four Europeans. AIDS is coming back, ebola seems to be rearing its head with much too much frequency, and old diseases like cholera are becoming resistant to antibiotics. We’ve all learned what the kind of panic that can occur when an old disease rears its head, like anthrax. The worst possibility is that a very simple germ, like staph, for which we have one antibiotic that still works, mutates. And we know staph can do amazing things. A staph cell can be next to a muscle cell in your body and borrow genes from it, when antibiotics come, and change and mutate. The danger is that some germ like staph will be — will mutate into something that’s really virulent, very contagious, and will sweep through populations before we can do anything about it. That’s happened before. About 12,000 years ago, there was a massive wave of mammal extinctions in the Americas, and that is thought to have been a virulent disease.

So what can we do about it?

(“Solutions:
-Outlaw antibiotics for farm animals and farmed fish
-Get serious about our public health system”)

It is nuts. We give antibiotics — (applause) — Every cow, every lamb, every chicken, they get antibiotics every day, all — you know, you go to a restaurant, you eat fish, I got news for you, it’s all farmed — you know, you gotta ask when you go to a restaurant if it’s a wild fish, ’cause they’re not gonna tell you. We’re giving away the code — this is like being at war, and giving somebody your secret code. We’re telling the germs out there how to fight us. We gotta fix that. We gotta outlaw that right away.

Secondly, our public health system, as we saw with anthrax, is a real disaster. We have a real major outbreak of disease in the United States, we are not prepared to cope with it. Now there is money in the federal budget, next year, to build up the public health service. But I don’t think to any extent that it really needs to be done.

Number 2 — my favorite-

(“Number 2 — We Meet a Rogue Black Hole”; followed by black hole graphics)

We meet a rogue black hole. You know, ten years ago — or fifteen years ago, really — you walk into an astronomy convention, and you say, you know, there’s probably a black hole at the center of every galaxy, and they’re gonna hoot you off the stage. And now if you went into one of those conventions and you said, well, I don’t think black holes are out there, they’d hoot you off the stage. Our comprehension of the way the universe works is really — has just gained unbelievably in recent years. We think that there are about 10 million dead stars in the Milky Way alone — our galaxy. And these stars have compressed down to maybe something like 12, 15 miles wide, and they are black holes, and they are gobbling up everything around them, including light, which is why we can’t see them. Most of them should be in orbit around something. But galaxies are very violent places, and things can be spun out of orbit. And also, space is incredibly vast. So even if you flung a million of these things out of orbit, the chances that one would actually hit us is fairly remote. But — it only has to get close. About a billion miles away, one of these things. About a billion miles away, here’s what happens to Earth’s orbit — it becomes elliptical instead of circular. And for three months out of the year, the surface temperatures go up to 150 to 180; for three months out of the year they go to 50 below zero. That won’t work too well.

What can we do about this? And this is my scariest-

(“Solution:
-Hurry up that search for another earth-like planet”)

(laughter) I don’t have a good answer for this one. Again, we gotta think about being a colonizing race.

And finally, number one-

(“Number 1 — A Really
Big Asteroid Heads For Earth”; graphics of asteroids zinging around in space, and striking Earth; then graphic of asteroid belt & Oort cloud, back to asteroids heading for Earth)

Biggest danger to life as we know it, I think, a really big asteroid heads for Earth. The important thing to remember here — this is not a question of if, this is a question of when, and how big. In 1908, a — just a 200 foot piece of a comet — exploded over Siberia and flattened forests for maybe a hundred miles. It had the effect of about 1,000 Hiroshima bombs. Astronomers estimate that little asteroids like that come about every hundred years. In 1989, a large asteroid passed 400,000 miles away from Earth. Nothing to worry about, right? It passed directly through Earth’s orbit. We were in that spot six hours earlier. A small asteroid, say a half mile wide, would touch off firestorms followed by severe global cooling from the debris kicked up — Carl Sagan’s nuclear winter thing — An asteroid five miles wide causes major extinctions — we think the one that got the dinosaurs was about five miles wide.

Where are they? There’s something called the Kuiper belt, which — some people think Pluto’s not a planet, that’s where Pluto is — it’s in the Kuiper belt. There’s also something a little farther out called the Oort cloud. There’re about 100,000 balls of ice and rock — comets, really — out there, that are 50 miles in diameter or more, and they regularly take a little spin in towards the sun, and pass reasonably close to us. Of more concern, I think, is the asteroids that exist between Mars and Jupiter. The folks at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey told us last Fall — they’re making the first map of the universe — three dimensional map of the universe — that there’re probably 700,000 asteroids between Mars and Jupiter that are a half a mile big or bigger.

So you say yeah, well, what’re really the chances of this happening? Andrew, can you put that chart up?

(“Chances of dying from selected causes in the United States
Motor Vehicle accident: 1 in 100
Homicide: 1 in 300
Fire: 1 in 800
Firearms accidents: 1 in 2,500
Electrocution: 1 in 5,000
Asteroid/ Comet impact: 1 in 20,000
Passenger aircraft crash: 1 in 20,000
Flood: 1 in 30,000
Tornado: 1 in 60,000″)

This is a chart that Dr. Clark Chapman (at) the Southwestern (sic) Research Institute presented to Congress a few years ago. You’ll notice that the chance of an asteroid slash comet impact killing you is about one in 20,000, according to the work they’ve done. Now look at the one right below that. Passenger aircraft crash, one in 20,000. We spend an awful lot of money trying to be sure that we don’t die in airplane accidents, and we’re not spending hardly anything on this. And yet, this is completely preventable. We finally have, just in the last year, the technology to stop this cold. Could we have the solutions?

(“Solutions:
-Ramp up NASA’s search for asteroids with our name on them
-Figure out how to blow up an asteroid or alter its trajectory”)

NASA’s spending 3 million dollars a year — 3 million bucks — that is like pocket change — to search for asteroids. Because we can actually figure out every asteroid that’s out there, and if it might hit Earth, and when it might hit Earth. And they’re trying to do that. But it’s gona take them 10 years, at spending 3 million dollars a year, and even then they claim they’ll only have about 80% of them catalogued. Comets are a tougher act. We don’t really have the technology to predict comet trajectories, or when one with our name on it might arrive. But we would have lots of time, if we see it coming. We really need a dedicated observatory. You’ll notice that a lot of comets are named after people you never heard of — amateur astronomers? That’s because no one’s looking for them, except amateurs. We need a dedicated observatory that looks for comets.

Part two of the solutions — We need to figure out how to blow up an asteroid, or alter its trajectory. Now a year ago, we did an amazing thing. We sent a probe out to this asteroid belt, called NEAR. Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous. And these guys orbited a 30 — or no, about a 22 mile long asteroid called Eris. And then of course, you know, they pulled one of those sneaky NASA things where they had extra batteries, and extra gas aboard and everything, and then at the last minute they landed — when the mission was over they actually landed on the thing. We have landed a rocket ship on an asteroid. It’s not a big deal. Now the trouble with just sending a bomb out for this thing, is that you don’t have anything to push against in space, ’cause there’s no air. A nuclear explosion is just as hot, but we don’t really have anything big enough to melt a 22 mile long asteroid. Or vaporize it, would be more like it.

(graphic video starts of asteroid being landed on and re-directed)

But we can learn to land on these asteroids that have our name on them and put something like a small ion propulsion motor on it, which would gently, slowly, after a period of time, push it into a different trajectory, which, if we’ve done our math right, would keep it from hitting Earth. This is just a matter of finding ‘em, going there, and doing something about it.

I know your head is spinning from all this stuff. Yikes! so many big threats!

(slide of “Discover” logo)

The thing, I think, to remember, is September 11th. We don’t wanna get caught flat-footed again. We know about this stuff. Science has the power to predict the future in many cases now. Knowledge is power. The worst thing we can do is say jeez, I got enough to worry about without worrying about an asteroid. That’s a mistake that could literally cost us our future.

Thank you.

[Transcription by Robert Thomas Carter]

NEW: Read the transcript >>

Watch this talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.

How many creationists do we have in the room? Probably none. I think we’re all Darwinians. And yet, many Darwinians are anxious, a little uneasy, would like to see some limits on just how far the Darwinism goes.

It’s all right, you know. Spider webs? Sure, they are products of evolution. The World Wide Web? Not so sure. Beaver dams, yes; Hoover Dam, no.

What do they think it is that prevents the products of human ingenuity from being themselves fruits of the tree of life — and hence in some sense obeying evolutionary rules? And yet people are interestingly resistant to the idea of applying evolutionary thinking to thinking — to our thinking. And so I’m going to talk a little bit about that — keeping in mind that we have a lot on the program here.

So you’re out in the woods, or you’re out in the pasture, and you see this ant crawling up this blade of grass. It climbs to the top and it falls, and it climbs, and it falls, and it climbs — trying to stay at the very top of the blade of grass. What is this ant doing? What is this in aid of? What goals is this ant trying to achieve by climbing this blade of grass? What’s in it for the ant?

And the answer is, nothing. There’s nothing in it for the ant.

Well then, why is it doing this? Is it just a fluke?

Yeah, it’s just a fluke.

It’s a lancet fluke: it’s a little brain worm — a parasitic brain worm — that has to get into the stomach of a sheep or a cow in order to continue its life cycle. So, salmon swim upstream to get to their spawning grounds, and lancet flukes commandeer a passing ant, crawl into its brain, and drive it up a blade of grass like an all-terrain vehicle.

So there’s nothing in it for the ant. The ant’s brain has been hijacked by a parasite that infects the brain, inducing suicidal behavior. Pretty scary. Well, does anything like that happen with human beings? This is all on behalf of a cause other than one’s own genetic fitness, of course. Well, it may already have occurred to you that Islam means “surrender,” or “submission of self-interest to the will of Allah.” Well, it’s ideas — not worms — that hijack our brains. Now, am I saying that a sizable minority of the world’s population is having their brain hijacked by parasitic ideas? Oh, it’s worse than that. Most people have.

There are a lot of ideas to die for: Freedom, if you’re from New Hampshire. Justice. Truth. Communism. Many people have laid down their lives for Communism, and many have laid down their lives for Capitalism. And many for Catholicism. And many for Islam. These are just a few of the ideas that are to die for. They’re infectious.

Yesterday, Amory Lovins spoke about “infectious repetitis.” It was a term of abuse, in effect. This is unthinking engineering. Well, most of the cultural spread that goes on is not brilliant, new, out-of-the-box thinking; it’s infectious repetitis.
And we might as well try to have a theory of what’s going on when that happens, so that we can understand the conditions of infection.

Hosts work hard to spread these ideas to others. I myself am a philosopher, and one of our occupational hazards is that people ask us what the meaning of life is.
And you have to have a bumper sticker, you know, you have to have a statement. So, this is mine: The secret of happiness is to find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it. Most of us — now that the Me Decade is well in the past — we actually do this. One set of ideas or another have simply replaced our biological imperatives in our own lives. This is what our summum bonum is. It’s not maximizing the number of grandchildren we have.

Now, this is a profound biological effect: the subordination of genetic interest to other interests. And no other species does anything at all like it.

Well, how are we going to think about this? It is, on the one hand, a biological effect, and a very large one. Unmistakable. Now, what theories do we want to use to look at this? Well, many theories. But how — what’s going to tie them together?
The idea of replicating ideas. Ideas that replicate by passing from brain to brain.
Richard Dawkins, whom you’ll be hearing later in the day, invented the term “memes,” and put forward the first really clear and vivid version of this idea in his book The Selfish Gene.

Now, here am I talking about his idea. Well, you see, it’s not his. Yes — he started it. But it’s everybody’s idea now. And he’s not responsible for what I say about memes. I’m responsible for what I say about memes. Actually, I think we’re all responsible for not just the intended effects of our ideas, but for their likely misuses. So it is important, I think, to Richard, and to me, that these ideas not be abused and misused. They’re very easy to misuse; that’s why they’re dangerous. And it’s just about a full-time job trying to prevent people who are scared of these ideas from caricaturing them and then running off to one dire purpose or another.
So we have to keep plugging away, trying to correct the misapprehensions so that only the benign and useful variants of our ideas continue to spread. But it is a problem.

We don’t have much time, and I’m going to go over just a little bit of this and cut out, because there’s a lot of other things that are going to be said.
So let me just point out: memes are like viruses. That’s what Richard said, back in ’93. And you might think, Well, how can that be? I mean, a virus is, well, you know, it’s stuff. What’s a meme made of? Yesterday, Negroponte was talking about viral telecommunications, but — what’s a virus? A virus is a string of nucleic acid with attitude.

That is, there is something about it that tends to make it replicate better than the competition does. And that’s what a meme is. An information packet with attitude.
What’s a meme made of? “What are bits made of, Mom?” Not silicon. They’re made of information. Can be carried in any physical medium. What’s a word made of? Sometimes when people say, “Do memes exist?” I say, “Well, do words exist?” Are they in your ontology? If they are… Words are memes that can be pronounced. Then there’s all the other memes that can’t be pronounced — different species of memes.

Remember the Shakers? “Gift to Be Simple?” Simple furniture? And of course they’re basically extinct now. And one of the reasons is that, among the creed of Shakerdom is that one should be celibate. Not just the priests — everybody.
Well, it’s not so surprising that they’ve gone extinct. But in fact that’s not why they went extinct. They survived as long as they did at a time when the social safety nets weren’t there and there were lots of widows and orphans, people like that, who needed a foster home. And so they had a ready supply of converts. And they could keep it going. And, in principle, it could’ve gone on forever. With perfect celibacy on the part of the hosts. The idea being passed on through proselytizing, instead of through the gene line.

So the ideas can live on in spite of the fact that they’re not being passed on genetically. A meme can flourish in spite of having a negative impact on genetic fitness. After all, the meme for Shakerdom was essentially a sterilizing parasite.
There are other parasites which do this — which render the host sterile. It’s part of their plan. They don’t have to have minds to have a plan.

I’m just going to draw your attention to just one of the many implications of the memetic perspective, which I recommend. I’ve not time to go into more of it.
In Jared Diamond’s wonderful book Guns, Germs and Steel, he talks about how it was germs more than guns and steel that conquered the new hemisphere — the Western hemisphere — that conquered the rest of the world. When European explorers or travelers spread out, they brought with them the germs that they had become essentially immune to, that they had learned how to tolerate over hundreds and hundreds of years, thousands of years, of living with domesticated animals, the sources of those pathogens.

And they just wiped out — these pathogens just wiped out the native people who had no immunity to them at all.

And we’re doing it again. We’re doing it this time with toxic ideas.

Yesterday, a number of people — Nicholas Negroponte and others — spoke about all the wonderful things that are happening when our ideas get spread out thanks to all the new technology all over the world. I agree. It is, largely, wonderful. Largely wonderful. But among all those ideas that inevitably flow out into the whole world thanks to our technology, are a lot of toxic ideas.

Now, this has been realized for some time. Sayyid Qutb is one of the founding fathers of fanatical Islam, one of the — one of the ideologues that inspired Osama Bin Laden. One has only to glance at its press films, fashion shows, beauty contests, ballrooms, wine bars and broadcasting stations — memes. These memes are spreading around the world and they are wiping out whole cultures. They are wiping out languages. They are wiping out traditions, practices. And it’s not our fault anymore than it’s our fault when our germs lay waste to people that haven’t developed the immunity. We have an immunity to all of the junk that lies at the edges of our culture. We — free society, so we let pornography, and all these things, you know, we shrug them off. They’re like a mild cold. They’re not a big deal for us. But we should realize that, for many people in the world, they are a big deal. And we should be very alert to this as we spread our education and our technology.

One of the things that we are doing is, we’re the vectors of memes that are correctly viewed by the hosts of many other memes as a dire threat to their favorite memes — the memes that they are prepared to die for. Well, now how are we going to tell the good memes from the bad memes? That is not the job of memetics, of the science of memetics. Memetics is morally neutral. And so it should be. This is not the place for hate and anger. It’s — if you’ve had a friend who’s died of AIDS, then you hate the HIV virus. But the way to deal with that is to do science, and understand how it spreads and why in a morally neutral perspective. Get the facts. Work out the implications. There’s plenty of room for moral passion once we’ve got the facts and can figure out the best thing to do.

And, as with germs, the trick is not to try to annihilate them. You will never annihilate the germs. What you can do, however, is foster public health measures, and the like, that will encourage the evolution of avirulence. That will encourage the spread of relatively benign mutations of the most toxic varieties.

That’s all the time I have, so thank you very much for your attention.