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we are designing and building an unit in some land that was spare at the back of the high school like you do and now we're going to be growing fish and vegetables in an orchard with bees and the kids are helping us build that and the kids are on the board and because the community was really keen on working with the high school the high school is now teaching agriculture and because it's teaching agriculture we started to think how could we then get those kids that never had a qualification before in their lives but are really excited about growing how can we give them some more experience so we got some land that was donated by a local garden center it was really quite muddy but in a truly incredible way totally voluntary led we have turned that into a market garden training center and that is and raised beds and all the things you need to get the soil under your fingers and think maybe there's a job in this for me in the future and because we were doing that some local academics said you know we could help design a commercial horticulture course for you
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first they're going to create an asset register of spare land that they've got put it in a food bank so that communities can use that wherever they live and they're going to underpin that with a license and then they've said to every single one of their workforce if you can help those communities grow and help them to maintain their spaces suddenly we're seeing actions on the ground from local government
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if we want to inspire the farmers of tomorrow then please let us say to every school create a sense of purpose around the importance to the environment local food and soils put that at the heart of your school culture and you will create a different generation there are so many things you can do but ultimately this is about something really simple
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that's because it is hard for most people to recognize seriousness which is rare but more comfortable to endorse solemnity which is commonplace jogging which is commonplace and widely accepted as good for you is solemn poker is serious washington d c is solemn new york is serious going to educational conferences to tell you anything about the future is solemn taking a long walk by yourself during which you devise a foolproof scheme for robbing tiffany's is serious
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serious design is also often quite unsuccessful from the solemn point of view that's because the art of serious play is about invention change rebellion not perfection perfection happens during solemn play now i always saw design careers like surreal staircases if you look at the staircase you'll see that in your the are very high and the steps are very short and you make huge discoveries you sort of leap up very quickly in your youth that's because you don't know anything and you have a lot to learn and so that anything you do is a learning experience and you're just jumping right up there as you get older the get shallower and the steps get wider and you start moving along at a slower pace because you're making fewer discoveries and as you get older and more decrepit you sort of inch along on this sort of depressing long staircase leading you into oblivion
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it's great to be a kid now when i was in my early i worked in the record business designing record covers for records and i had no idea what a great job i had i thought everybody had a job like that and what the way i looked at design and the way i looked at the world was what was going on around me and the things that came at the time i walked into design were the enemy i really really really hated the typeface i thought the typeface was the cleanest most boring most really repressive typeface and i hated everything that was designed in and when i was in my college days this was the sort of design that was fashionable and popular this is actually quite a lovely book jacket by rudy de but i just hated it because it was designed with and i made parodies about it i just thought it was you know completely boring
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this is symphony space on street and broadway and the type is interwoven into the stainless steel and with fiber optics and the architect jim essentially gave me a canvas to play typography out on and it was serious play this is the children's museum in pittsburgh pennsylvania made out of completely inexpensive materials extruded typography that's with neon things i never did before built before i just thought they'd be kind of fun to do donors' walls made out of lucite and then inexpensive signage
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so during this time i needed some kind of counterbalance for this crazy crazy existence of going to these long idiotic meetings and i was up in my country house and for some reason i began painting these very big very involved laborious complicated maps of the entire world and listing every place on the planet and putting them in and misspelling them and putting things in the wrong spot and completely controlling the information and going totally and completely nuts with it they would take me about six months initially but then i started getting faster at it here's the united states every single city of the united states is on here and it hung for about eight months at the cooper hewitt and people walked up to it and they would point to a part of the map and they'd say oh i've been here and of course they couldn't have been because it's in the wrong spot
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one of my favorites was this painting i did of florida after the election that has the election results rolling around in the water i keep that for evidence
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i'm both a kid and i'm gambling all the time and i think that if you're not there's probably something inherently wrong with the structure or the situation you're in if you're a designer but the serious part is what threw me and i couldn't quite get a handle on it until i remembered an essay and it's an essay i read years ago it was written by russell baker who used to write an observer column in the new york times he's a wonderful humorist and i'm going to read you this essay or an excerpt from it because it really hit home for me here is a letter of friendly advice be serious it says
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be serious it says what it means of course is be solemn being solemn is easy being serious is hard children almost always begin by being serious which is what makes them so entertaining when compared with adults as a class adults on the whole are solemn in politics the rare candidate who is serious like adlai stevenson is easily overwhelmed by one who is solemn like eisenhower that's because it is hard for most people to recognize seriousness which is rare but more comfortable to endorse solemnity which is commonplace
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serious design serious play is something else for one thing it often happens spontaneously intuitively accidentally or incidentally it can be achieved out of innocence or arrogance or out of selfishness sometimes out of carelessness but mostly it's achieved through all those kind of crazy parts of human behavior that don't really make any sense serious design is imperfect it's filled with the kind of craft laws that come from something being the first of its kind serious design is also often quite unsuccessful from the solemn point of view that's because the art of serious play is about invention change rebellion not perfection perfection happens during solemn play
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so the women who came to north carolina to compete for a spot on these teams which would put women on the special operations front lines landed and found very quickly a community the likes of which they had never seen full of women who were as fierce and as fit as they were and as driven to make a difference they didn't have to apologize for who they were and in fact they could celebrate it and what they found when they were there was that all of a sudden there were lots of people like them as one of them said it was like you looked around and realized there was more than one giraffe at the zoo among this team of standouts was cassie a young woman who managed to be an cadet a sorority sister and a women's studies minor all in one person tristan a west point track star who always ran and road marched with no socks and had shoes whose smell proved it
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for them biology had shaped part of their destiny and put as cassie once said everything noble out of reach for girls and yet here was a chance to serve with the best of the best on a mission that mattered to their country not despite the fact that they were female but because of it this team of women in many ways was like women everywhere they wore makeup and in fact they would bond in the ladies' room over eyeliner and eye pencil they also wore body armor they would put pounds of weight on their backs and board the helicopter for an operation and they would come back and watch a movie called bridesmaids
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so lane an iraq war veteran you see her here on my left decided she was going to go on amazon and order a pair of to her base so that her pants would fit better when she went out on mission each night these women would get together over video conference from all around afghanistan from their various bases and they would talk about what it was like to be one of the only women doing what they were doing they would swap jokes they would talk about what was working what wasn't what they had learned to do well what they needed to do better and they would talk about some of the lighter moments of being women out on the special operations front lines including the which was a tool that let you pee like a guy although it's said to have had only a percent accuracy rate out there
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i jane she was someone who loved to make dinner for her husband her kent state sweetheart who pushed her to be her best and to trust herself and to test every limit she could she also loved to put pounds of weight on her back and run for miles and she loved to be a soldier she was somebody who had a bread maker in her office in kandahar and would bake a batch of raisin bread and then go to the gym and bust out or pull ups from a dead hang she was the person who if you needed an extra pair of boots or a home cooked dinner would be on your speed dial because she never ever would talk to you about how good she was but let her character speak through action she was famous for taking the hard right over the easy wrong and she was also famous for walking up to a rope climbing it using only her arms and then shuffling away and apologizing because she knew she was supposed to use both her arms and her legs as the rangers had trained them
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every group of female friends has the funny one the one you go to when you need a good cry the one who tells you to suck it up when you've had a hard day and this group was no different except that this was a community of groundbreaking women who came together first to become teammates then friends and then family in the least likely of places on the special operations battlefield this was a group of women whose friendship and valor was cemented not only by what they had seen and done at the tip of the spear but by the fact that they were there at a time when women officially at least remained banned from ground combat and america had no idea they existed this story begins with special operations leaders some of the most tested men in the united states military saying we need women to help us wage this war america would never kill its way to the end of its wars it argued
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and as everyone knows if you want to understand what's happening in a community and in a home you talk to women whether you're talking about southern afghanistan or southern california but in this case men could not talk to women because in a conservative and traditional society like afghanistan that would cause grave offense so you needed women soldiers out there that meant at this time in the war that the women who would be recruited to serve alongside army rangers and navy seals would be seeing the kind of combat experienced by less than five percent of the entire united states military less than five percent so the call went out
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so the call went out female soldiers become a part of history join special operations on the battlefield in afghanistan this is in and from alabama to alaska a group of women who had always wanted to do something that mattered alongside the best of the best and to make a difference for their country answered that call to serve and for them it was not about politics it was about serving with purpose and so the women who came to north carolina to compete for a spot on these teams which would put women on the special operations front lines landed and found very quickly a community the likes of which they had never seen full of women who were as fierce and as fit as they were and as driven to make a difference
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these women lived in the and they proved you could be fierce and you could be feminine you could wear mascara and body armor you could love and really like cross stitch you could love to climb out of helicopters and you could also love to bake cookies women live in the and every single day and these women brought that to this mission as well
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do you remember these glow dark little stars which you had on the ceiling when you were a boy or a girl yes it is light it is pure light i think i stared at them way too long when i was a five you know it's so beautiful no energy bill no maintenance it is there so two years ago we went back to the lab making it more durable more light emitting with the experts and at the same time we got a request from this guy van gogh the famous van gogh foundation who wanted to celebrate his anniversary in the netherlands and they came to me and asked can you make a place where he feels more alive again in the netherlands and i liked that question a lot so in way we sort of started to connect these two different worlds this is how my brain works by the way
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and the governments all around the world are fighting their war on smog but i wanted to make something within the now so we decided to build the largest smog vacuum cleaner in the world it sucks up polluted air cleans it and then releases it and we built the first one so it sucks up cubic meters per hour cleans it on the nano level the particles using very little electricity and then releases the clean air so we have parks playgrounds which are to percent more clean than the rest of the city yes and every month or so it opens like a spaceship like a marilyn monroe with the well you know what anyway
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this is the stuff we are capturing this is beijing smog this is in our lungs right now if you live next to a highway it's the same as cigarettes per day are we insane when did we say yes to that and we had buckets of this disgusting material in our studio and on a monday morning we were discussing we were like shit what should we do with it should we throw it away like help and then we realized no no no no no waste should not exist waste for the one should be food for the other so here maybe show it around do not put this in your coffee
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here a little floating cube i will give one to you i'm not going to propose don't worry
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and we put this online campaign and people started to it but more importantly they started to prepay it so the finance we made with the jewelry helped us to realize to build the first tower and that's powerful so the waste the activator it was the enabler also the feedback from the community this is a wedding couple from india where he proposed to her with the smog free ring as a sign of true beauty as a sign of hope and she said yes
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yes but very good yes but it's too expensive it's too cheap it's too fast it's too slow it's too beautiful it's too ugly it cannot be done it already exists i heard everything about the same project in the same week and i got really really annoyed i got a bit of gray hair started to dress in black like a true architect
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and one morning i woke up and i said stop this is dragging you down you have to do something with this you have to use it as an ingredient as a component and so we decided to build to realize the famous yes but chair
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yeah really that's a weird call you're going to get but it's fascinating that this is not just a sort of one off nice special i think this kind of creative thinking these kinds of connections it's the new economy the world economic forum the think tank in geneva did an interview with a lot of smart people all around the world asking what are the top skills you and i need to become successful and what is interesting what you see here it's not about money or being really good in c although these are great skills to have i have to admit but look at number three creativity number two critical thinking number one complex problem solving all the things a robot or a computer is really bad at
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and a creative process like that i don't know how it works for you but in my brain it always starts with a question why why does a jellyfish emit light or a firefly or why do be accept pollution this is from my room in beijing three years ago left image is a good day saturday
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and a creative process like that i don't know how it works for you but in my brain it always starts with a question why why does a jellyfish emit light or a firefly or why do be accept pollution this is from my room in beijing three years ago left image is a good day saturday i can see the cars and the people the birds life is ok in a dense urban city and on the right image holy moly pollution complete layers i couldn't even see the other side of the city and this image made me really sad this is not the bright future we envision here at ted this is the horror we live five to six years shorter children have lung cancer when they're six years old
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and right now the project is touring through china actually with the support of china's central government so the first goal is to create local clean air parks and that works already quite well percent more clean and at the same time we team up with the ngos with the governors with the students with the tech people to say hey what do we need to do to make a whole city smog free it's about the dream of clean air we do workshops new ideas pop up
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so it's all about connecting new technology with creative thinking and if you start thinking about that there is so much you can imagine so much more you can do we worked on dance floors which produce electricity when you dance on them we did the design for that so it moves eight or nine millimeters produces watts the electricity that we generate is used for the lighting or the booth
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on a larger scale the netherlands where i'm from we live below sea level so because of these beauties the kilometers built by hand in we live with the water we fight with the water we try to find harmony but sometimes we forget and therefore we made a combination of and lenses which show how high the water level would be global change if we stop if today we all go home and we say oh whatever somebody else will do it for us or we'll wait for government or whomever you know we're not going to do that it goes wrong
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thank you you're too nice you're too nice that's not good for a designer so thousands of people showed up and some actually were scared and they left they experienced the floods in and others were mesmerized
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and gentlemen let's not be afraid let's be curious yes and you know walking through ted in these days and hearing the other speakers and feeling the energy of the crowd i was remembering this quote of the canadian author marshall who once famously said on spacecraft earth there are no passengers we are all crew and i think this so beautiful this is so beautiful we're not just consumers we're makers we make decisions we make new inventions we make new dreams and i think if we start implementing that kind of thinking even more within today there's still a whole new world to be explored all right thank you
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so for example there are doctors in china who believe that it's their job to keep you healthy so any month you are healthy you pay them and when you're sick you don't have to pay them because they failed at their job they get rich when you're healthy not sick in most music we think of the one as the downbeat the beginning of the musical phrase one two three four but in west african music the one is thought of as the end of the phrase like the period at the end of a sentence so you can hear it not just in the phrasing but the way they count off their music two three four one and this map is also accurate
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well when i arrived in peru actually i had no idea about what i would do there and i just had one phone number actually of one person three months later after traveling all around the country i had recorded films only with the help of local people only with the help of people that i was asking all the time the same question what is important to record here today by living in such a way by working without any structure i was able to react to the moment and to decide oh this is important to make now this is important to record that whole person this is important to create this exchange when i went to chechnya the first person i met looked at me and was like what are you doing here are you a journalist ngo politics what kind of problems are you going to study well i was there to research on rituals in chechnya actually incredible culture of in chechnya which is absolutely unknown outside of the region as soon as people understood that i would give them those films i would publish them online for free under a creative commons license but i would also really give them to the people and i would let them do what they want with it i just want to represent them in a beautiful light i just want to portray them in a way that their grandchildren are going to look at their grandfather and they're going to be like whoa my grandfather is as cool as
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computers cameras microphones to represent the world in an alternative way as much as possible how maybe is it possible to use the internet to create a new form of cinema and actually why do we record well it is with such simple questions in mind that i started to make films years ago first with a friend christophe he had a website la dedicated to independent music we were crazy about music
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i had similar notions as an social worker in san francisco i had met many gay immigrants they told me their stories of persecution in their home countries just for being gay and the reasons why they escaped to the us i saw how this had beaten them down after years of doing this kind of work i needed better stories for myself i knew the world was far from perfect but surely not every gay story was tragic so as a couple we both had a need to find stories of hope so we set off on a mission to travel the world and look for the people we finally termed as the
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these would be the individuals who were doing something extraordinary in the world they would be courageous resilient and most of all proud of who they were they would be the kind of person that i aspire to be our plan was to share their stories to the world through film there was just one problem we had zero reporting and zero filmmaking experience
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of i'm a person i'm so proud of my life on december the supreme court gave the decision for the nepal government to give identity cards and same sex marriage i can appreciate confidence on a daily basis something as simple as using a public restroom can be a huge challenge when you don't fit in to people's strict gender expectations traveling throughout asia i tended to freak out women in public restrooms they weren't used to seeing someone like me i had to come up with a strategy so that i could just pee in peace
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while getting my hair cut the woman cutting my hair asked me do you have a husband now this was a dreaded question that i got asked a lot by locals while traveling when i explained to her that i was with a woman instead of a man she was incredulous and she asked me a lot of questions about my parents' reactions and whether i was sad that i'd never be able to have children i told her that there are no limitations to my life and that lisa and i do plan to have a family some day now this woman was ready to write me off as yet another crazy westerner she couldn't imagine that such a phenomenon could happen in her own country that is until i showed her the photos of the that we interviewed in india she recognized prince from television and soon i had an audience of other hairdressers interested in meeting me
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after nepal we traveled to india on one hand india is a hindu society without a tradition of homophobia on the other hand it is also a society with a deeply patriarchal system which rejects anything that threatens the male female order when we spoke to activists they told us that empowerment begins with ensuring proper gender equality where the women's status is established in society and in that way the status of people can be affirmed as well there we met prince he's the world's first openly gay prince prince came out on the oprah winfrey show very internationally his parents disowned him and accused him of bringing great shame to the royal family
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in kenya we met the soft spoken david david had a huge mission of wanting to work for the poor and improve his own government so he decided to run for senate he became kenya's first openly gay political candidate david wanted to run his campaign without denying the reality of who he was but we were worried for his safety because he started to receive death threats at that point i was really scared because they were actually asking for me to be killed and yeah there are some people out there who do it and they feel that they are doing a religious obligation david wasn't ashamed of who he was
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u will put together a conference like this even before they do that they will ask for foreign aid i would also like to pay homage and honor to the ted fellows june james andrew and the other ted fellows i call them the cheetah generation the cheetah generation is a new breed of africans who brook no nonsense about corruption they understand what accountability and democracy is they're not going to wait for government to do things for them that's the cheetah generation and africa's salvation rests on the backs of these cheetahs in contrast of course we have the hippo generation
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but the mineral wealth of africa is not being utilized to lift its people out of poverty that's what makes a lot of africans very angry and in a way africa is more than a tragedy in more ways than one there's another enduring tragedy and that tragedy is that there are so many people so many governments so many organizations who want to help the people in africa they don't understand now we're not saying don't help africa helping africa is noble but helping africa has been turned into a theater of the absurd it's like the blind leading the clueless
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know that something has gone fundamentally wrong you know it i know it but let's not waste our time talking about these mistakes because we'll spend all day here let's move on and flip over to the next chapter and that's what this conference is all about the next chapter the next chapter begins with first of all asking ourselves this fundamental question whom do we want to help in africa there is the people and then there is the government or leaders now the previous speaker before me mohammed indicated that we've had abysmal leadership in africa that characterization in my view is even more charitable
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is they couldn't go beyond even if they had been able to name me what does that tell you out of means that the vast majority of the african leaders failed their people and if you look at them the slate of the post colonial leaders an assortment of military heads swiss bank socialists crocodile liberators vampire elites quack revolutionaries now this leadership is a far cry from the traditional leaders that africans have known for centuries the second false premise that we make when we're trying to help africa is that sometimes we think that there is something called a government in africa that cares about its people serves the interests of the people and represents the people there is one particular quote a lesotho chief once said that here in lesotho we've got two problems rats and the government
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the hippo generation are the ruling elites they are stuck in their intellectual patch complaining about colonialism and imperialism they wouldn't move one foot if you ask them to reform the economies they're not going to reform it because they benefit from the rotten status quo now there are a lot of africans who are very angry angry at the condition of africa now we're talking about a continent that is not poor
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there are certain things that we need to recognize africa's begging bowl leaks did you know that percent of the wealth created in africa is not invested here in africa it's taken out of africa that's what the world bank says look at africa's begging bowl
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did you know that percent of the wealth created in africa is not invested here in africa it's taken out of africa that's what the world bank says look at africa's begging bowl it leaks horribly there are people who think that we should pour more money more aid into this bowl which leaks what are the corruption alone costs africa billion dollars a year yes put that aside capital flight out of africa billion a year put that aside
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what you and i understand as a government doesn't exist in many african countries in fact what we call our governments are vampire states vampires because they suck the economic vitality out of their people government is the problem in africa a vampire state is the government which has been hijacked by a phalanx of bandits and crooks who use the instruments of state power to enrich themselves their cronies and tribesmen and exclude everybody else the richest people in africa are heads and ministers and quite often the chief bandit is the head himself
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this is tim ferriss circa a d age two you can tell by the power squat i was a very confident boy and not without reason i had a very charming at the time which was to wait until late in the evening when my parents were from a hard day's work doing their crossword puzzles watching television i would run into the living room jump up on the couch rip the cushions off throw them on the floor scream at the top of my lungs and run out because i was the incredible hulk
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i couldn't read any of it hieroglyphics it could have been because it was kanji chinese characters adapted into the japanese language asked him what this said and he goes ahh okay okay world history calculus traditional japanese and so on and so it came to me in waves there had been something lost in translation the japanese classes were not japanese instruction classes per se they were the normal high school curriculum for japanese students the other students in the school who were japanese besides the american and that's pretty much my response
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but no you'd be wrong because my body is very poorly designed for most things pretty well designed for lifting heavy rocks perhaps i used to be much bigger much more muscular and so i ended up walking like this i looked a lot like an orangutan our close cousins or the incredible hulk not very good for ballroom dancing i found myself in argentina in decided to watch a tango class had no intention of participating went in paid my ten pesos walked up women two guys usually a good ratio the instructor says you are participating immediately death sweat
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i was humiliated she came back she goes come on i don't have all day as someone who wrestled since age eight i proceeded to crush her of mice and men style and she looked up and said now that's better so i bought a month's worth of classes
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you could jump off the end into the deep end i was born premature i was always very small my left lung had collapsed when i was born and i've always had buoyancy problems so water was something that scared me to begin with but i would go in on occasion and on one particular day the campers were jumping through inner tubes they were diving through inner tubes and i thought this would be great fun
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and on one particular day the campers were jumping through inner tubes they were diving through inner tubes and i thought this would be great fun so i dove through the inner tube and the bully of the camp grabbed my ankles and i tried to come up for air and my lower back hit the bottom of the inner tube and i went wild eyed and thought i was going to die a camp counselor fortunately came over and separated us from that point onward i was terrified of swimming that is something that i did not get over my inability to swim has been one of my greatest humiliations and embarrassments
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there is a happy ending to this story at age that's my age now in august i took two weeks to re examine swimming and question all the of the obvious aspects of swimming and went from swimming one lap so yards like a drowning monkey at about beats per minute heart rate i measured it to going to on long island close to where i grew up and jumping into the ocean and swimming one kilometer in open water getting out and feeling better than when i went in and i came out in my european style feeling like the incredible hulk and that's what i want everyone in here to feel like the incredible hulk at the end of this presentation more specifically i want you to feel like you're capable of becoming an excellent long distance swimmer a world class language learner and a tango champion
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i find that the best results in life are often held back by false constructs and untested assumptions and the turnaround in swimming came when a friend of mine said i will go a year without any stimulants this is a six type of guy if you can complete a one kilometer open water race so the clock started ticking i started seeking out because i found that lifelong swimmers often couldn't teach what they did i tried my feet would slice through the water like razors i wouldn't even move i would leave demoralized staring at my feet hand paddles everything even did lessons with olympians nothing helped
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i'm a designer and an educator i'm a multitasking person and i push my students to fly through a very creative multitasking design process but how efficient is really this multitasking let's consider for a while the option of a couple of examples look at that this is my multitasking activity result
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have you ever been to venice how beautiful it is to lose ourselves in these little streets on the island but our multitasking reality is pretty different and full of tons of information so what about something like that to rediscover our sense of adventure i know that it could sound pretty weird to speak about mono when the number of possibilities is so huge but i push you to consider the option of focusing on just one task or maybe turning your digital senses totally off so nowadays everyone could produce his mono product
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billion years old the oldest rock on earth is only billion the reason there is a billion year gap in our geological understanding is because of plate tectonics the crust of the earth has been recycled we have no geological record prior for the first billion years that record exists on mars and this terrain that we're looking at dates back to billion years when earth and mars were formed it was a tuesday
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i want to talk about billion years of history in minutes that's million years per minute let's start with the first photograph nasa obtained of planet mars this is fly by mariner it was taken in when this picture appeared that well known scientific journal the new york times wrote in its editorial mars is uninteresting
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this is fly by mariner it was taken in when this picture appeared that well known scientific journal the new york times wrote in its editorial mars is uninteresting it's a dead world nasa should not spend any time or effort studying mars anymore fortunately our leaders in washington at nasa headquarters knew better and we began a very extensive study of the red planet one of the key questions in all of science is there life outside of earth i believe that mars is the most likely target for life outside the earth i'm going to show you in a few minutes some amazing measurements that suggest there may be life on mars but let me start with a viking photograph
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us to dr aubrey de grey at cambridge de grey definitely has scientists squirming with an interesting idea we can be immortal we can beat aging now most scientists think he's a crackpot any biology student knows that aging is an inevitable consequence of living for example when we eat we take in food and we metabolize it and that throws off what we call free radicals you might have heard of those also known as oxygen ions those bind to our cause it to mutate and cause us to get old and lose our hair
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it's just like no it's exactly like oxygen binding to iron and making it rust so you age because you rust out
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yeah he started off life as a computer scientist not a biologist but he earned a in biology from cambridge and he has published some very significant work on and a bunch of other stuff secondly he started an foundation that has identified seven different causes of aging to me that seem very plausible and he is hot in pursuit of fixes for every single one of them for example one of the reasons we age is that our and we get kind of old and our cells lose energy he believes and he's made a convincing case that using viruses we can do gene therapy fix that and rejuvenate our cells one more thing we have an existent proof that extreme longevity is possible pine trees live years and some lobsters don't age at all now this doesn't mean that de grey is going to revolutionize our i mean after all we're not trees and most of us are not lobsters
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tonight i'm going to share with you my passion for science i'm not talking about science that takes baby steps i'm talking about science that takes enormous leaps i'm talking darwin i'm talking einstein i'm talking revolutionary science that turns the world on its head in a moment i'm going to talk about two ideas that might do this i say might because with revolutionary ideas most are flat wrong and even those that are right seldom have the impact that we want them to have
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to explain why i picked two ideas in particular i'm going to start with a mystery vienna austria was a somber compulsively thorough doctor who ran two maternity clinics they were identical except for one thing women were dying of high fevers soon after giving birth three times more often at one of the clinics than at the other trying to figure out what the difference was that caused this looked at everything he could sanitation no
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was a somber compulsively thorough doctor who ran two maternity clinics they were identical except for one thing women were dying of high fevers soon after giving birth three times more often at one of the clinics than at the other trying to figure out what the difference was that caused this looked at everything he could sanitation no medical procedures no air flow no the puzzle went unsolved until he happened to autopsy a doctor who died of an infected scalpel cut the doctor's symptoms were identical to those of the mothers who were dying
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i broke some bones in my feet my whole right side was ripped open filled with gravel my head was cut open across the front lifted back exposing the skull underneath i had head injures i had internal injuries i had massive blood loss in fact i lost about five liters of blood which is all someone my size would actually hold by the time the helicopter arrived at prince henry hospital in sydney my blood pressure was over nothing i was having a really bad day
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i had no movement in my legs i had tight stockings on to protect from blood clots i had one arm in plaster one arm tied down by drips i had a neck brace and sandbags on either side of my head and i saw my world through a mirror that was suspended above my head i shared the ward with five other people and the amazing thing is because we were all lying paralyzed in a spinal ward we didn't know what each other looked like how amazing is that how often in life do you get to make friendships judgment free purely based on spirit and there were no superficial conversations as we shared our innermost thoughts our fears and our hopes for life after the spinal ward i remember one night one of the nurses came in jonathan with a whole lot of plastic straws he put a pile on top of each of us and he said start threading them together well there wasn't much else to do in the spinal ward so we did
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said mom i'm going to learn how to fly she said that's nice dear
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i said pass me the yellow pages she passed me the phone book i rang up the flying school i said i'd like to make a booking to come out for a flight they said when do you want to come out i said well i have to get a friend to drive me because i can't drive sort of can't walk either is that a problem i made a booking and weeks later my friend chris and my mom drove me out to the airport all pounds of me covered in a plaster body cast in a baggy pair of overalls
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so he got over to the runway and he applied the power and as we took off down the runway and the wheels lifted up off the tarmac and we became airborne i had the most incredible sense of freedom and andrew said to me as we got over the training area you see that mountain over there and i said yeah and he said well you take the controls and you fly towards that mountain and as i looked up i realized that he was pointing towards the blue mountains where the journey had begun and i took the controls and i was flying and i was a long long way from that spinal ward i knew right then that i was going to be a pilot didn't know how on earth i'd ever pass a medical
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and i practiced my walking as much as i could and i went from the point of two people holding me up to one person holding me up to the point where i could walk around the furniture as long as it wasn't too far apart and then i made great progression to the point where i could walk around the house holding onto the walls like this and mom said she was forever following me wiping off my fingerprints
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and then everything went black where was i what was happening my body was consumed by pain i'd been hit by a speeding utility truck with only minutes to go on the bike ride i was airlifted from the scene of the accident by a rescue helicopter to a large spinal unit in sydney i had extensive and life threatening injuries i'd broken my neck and my back in six places i broke five ribs on my left side i broke my right arm i broke my collarbone
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for over days i drifted between two dimensions i had an awareness of being in my body but also being out of my body somewhere else watching from above as if it was happening to someone else why would i want to go back to a body that was so broken but this voice kept calling me come on stay with me no it's too hard come on
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the central nervous system nerves there is no cure you're what we call a partial paraplegic and you'll have all of the injuries that go along with that you'll have no feeling from the waist down and at most you might get or percent return you'll have internal injuries for the rest of your life you'll have to use a catheter for the rest of your life and if you walk again it will be with calipers and a walking frame and then she said janine you'll have to rethink everything you do in your life because you're never going to be able to do the things you did before i tried to grasp what she was saying i was an athlete
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i soaked it up and i thought how could i ever have taken this for granted i felt so incredibly grateful for my life but before i left hospital the head nurse had said to me janine i want you to be ready because when you get home something's going to happen and i said what and she said you're going to get depressed and i said not me not janine the machine which was my nickname she said you are because see it happens to everyone in the spinal ward that's normal you're in a wheelchair that's normal but you're going to get home and realize how different life is
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attributed smiles to descriptions of situations the same way you and i would so from papua new guinea to hollywood all the way to modern art in beijing we smile often and use smiles to express joy and satisfaction how many people here in this room smile more than times per day raise your hand if you do oh wow outside of this room more than a third of us smile more than times per day whereas less than percent of us smile less than five
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so we're going to put up some slides of some of your companies here you've started one or two in your time so you know virgin atlantic virgin records i guess it all started with a magazine called student and then yes all these other ones as well i mean how do you do this i read all these sort of ted instructions you must not talk about your own business and this and now you ask me so i suppose you're not going to be able to kick me off the stage since you asked the question
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yeah we were launching a megastore in los angeles i think no i mean i think ca but is that your hair rb no ca what was that one dropping in for tea ok
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well i think the balloon adventures were each one was each one actually i think we came close and i mean first of all we nobody had actually crossed the atlantic in a hot air balloon before so we had to build a hot air balloon that was capable of flying in the jet stream and we weren't quite sure when a balloon actually got into the jet stream whether it would actually survive the miles an hour winds that you can find up there and so just the initial lift off from to cross the atlantic as we were pushing into the jet stream this enormous balloon the top of the balloon ended up going at a couple of hundred miles an hour the capsule that we were in at the bottom was going at maybe two miles an hour and it just took off and it was like holding onto a thousand horses and we were just crossing every finger praying that the balloon would hold together which fortunately it did but the ends of all those balloon trips were you know something seemed to go wrong every time and on that particular occasion the more experienced balloonist who was with me jumped and left me holding on for dear life
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they have a point richard in fact i think our airline took a full page ad at the time saying you know come on richard there are better ways of crossing the atlantic
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so the police knocked on the door and told us they were going to arrest us if we carried on mentioning the word venereal disease we changed it to social diseases and people came along with acne and spots but nobody came with any more so we put it back to and promptly got arrested and then subsequently never mind the here's the sex pistols the word the police decided was a rude word and so we were arrested for using the word on the sex album and john mortimer the playwright defended us and he asked if i could find a linguistics expert to come up with a different definition of the word and so i rang up nottingham university and i asked to talk to the professor of linguistics and he said look is not a has nothing to do with balls whatsoever it's actually a nickname given to priests in the eighteenth century
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and so i said would you mind coming to the court and he said he'd be delighted and i said and he said would you like me to wear my dog collar and i said yes definitely please
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that's great so our key witness argued that it was actually never mind the priest here's the sex pistols
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so i've seen life as one long learning process and if i see you know if i fly on somebody else's airline and find the experience is not a pleasant one which it wasn't years ago then i'd think well you know maybe i can create the kind of airline that i'd like to fly on
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well i think that there's a very thin dividing line between success and failure and i think if you start a business without financial backing you're likely to go the wrong side of that dividing line we had we were being attacked by british airways they were trying to put our airline out of business and they launched what's become known as the dirty tricks campaign and i realized that the whole empire was likely to come crashing down unless i chipped in a chip and in order to protect the jobs of the people who worked for the airline and protect the jobs of the people who worked for the record company i had to sell the family jewelry to protect the airline post you're looking like a bit of a genius actually for that as well yeah as it turned out it proved to be the right move but yeah it was sad at the time but we moved on
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i was actually also curious why i think you missed an opportunity with your condoms launch you called it mates i mean couldn't you have used the virgin brand for that as well ain't virgin no longer or something again we may have had problems finding customers i mean we had often when you launch a company and you get customer complaints you know you can deal with them
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yeah well years earlier we'd launched the sex god save the queen and i'd certainly never expected that years later that she'd actually knight us but somehow she must have had a forgetful memory i think well god saved her and you got your just reward do you like to be called sir richard or how nobody's ever called me sir richard occasionally in america i hear people saying sir richard and think there's some shakespearean play taking place
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did he tell you to jump or he just said i'm out of here and no he told me jump but once his weight had gone the balloon just shot up to feet and i and you inspired an ian mcewan novel i think with that yeah no i put on my oxygen mask and stood on top of the balloon with my parachute looking at the swirling clouds below trying to pluck up my courage to jump into the north sea which and it was a very very very lonely few moments
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ok this isn't exactly hardball ok didn't weren't you just terrible at school i was dyslexic i had no understanding of schoolwork whatsoever i certainly would have failed tests
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were you a rebel then or how would you yeah i think i was a bit of a maverick and but i and i was yeah i was fortunately good at sport and so at least i had something to excel at at school and some bizarre things happened just earlier in your life i mean there's the story about your mother allegedly dumping you in a field aged four and saying ok walk home
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well i've done both i think i went to prison first i was actually prosecuted under two quite ancient acts in the u k i was prosecuted under the venereal diseases act and the indecent advertisements act on the first occasion for mentioning the word venereal disease in public which we had a center where we would help young people who had problems and one of the problems young people have is venereal disease
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one ok why don't you go get your gift and sit down so behave next year someone might say something nice about you
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so that was one version of me and i would die to avoid being in that situation again to get rejected in public again that's one version then fast forward eight years bill gates came to my hometown beijing china to speak and i saw his message i fell in love with that guy i thought wow i know what i want to do now that night i wrote a letter to my family telling them by age i will build the biggest company in the world and that company will buy microsoft
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this is also bad handwriting but i did highlight some key words you get the idea
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