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7,941
but there's a great difference between an and my wife for instance that is if i value the the on the other hand it doesn't value me back whereas my wife she calls me the star of her life
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i call this act of collecting along with others seduction capital indeed our consumer society is largely based on seduction capital it is said about this consumption that our age is materialistic but it's not true we only accumulate objects in order to communicate with other minds we do it to make them love us to seduce them nothing could be less materialistic or more sentimental than a teenager buying brand new jeans and tearing them at the knees because he wants to please jennifer
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therefore only another desiring conscience can conceive me as a desirable being i know this that's why love can be defined in a more accurate way as the desire of being desired hence the eternal problem of love how to become and remain desirable the individual used to find an answer to this problem by submitting his life to community rules you had a specific part to play according to your sex your age your social status and you only had to play your part to be valued and loved by the whole community think about the young woman who must remain chaste before marriage
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in light of this observation on contemporary love how can we think of love in the years to come we can envision two hypotheses the first one consists of betting that this process of narcissistic capitalization will intensify it is hard to say what shape this intensification will take because it largely depends on social and technical innovations which are by definition difficult to predict but we can for instance imagine a dating website which a bit like those loyalty points programs uses seduction capital points that vary according to my age my ratio my degree my salary or the number of clicks on my profile we can also imagine a chemical treatment for breakups that weakens the feelings of attachment
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the first paradox is that growing up is about rejecting the past and then promptly reclaiming it feminism was the water i grew up in when i was just a little girl my mom started what is now the longest running women's film festival in the world so while other kids were watching sitcoms and cartoons i was watching very esoteric documentaries made by and about women you can see how this had an influence but she was not the only feminist in the house my dad actually resigned from the male only business club in my hometown because he said he would never be part of an organization that would one day welcome his son but not his daughter he's actually here today the trick here is my brother would become an experimental poet not a businessman but the intention was really good
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this firsthand myself when i graduated from barnard college in i was fired up i was ready to make a difference i went out and i worked at a non profit i went to grad school i phone banked i protested i volunteered and none of it seemed to matter and on a particularly dark night of december of i sat down with my family and i said that i had become very disillusioned i admitted that i'd actually had a fantasy kind of a dark fantasy of writing a letter about everything that was wrong with the world and then lighting myself on fire on the white house steps my mom took a drink of her signature sea breeze her eyes really with tears and she looked right at me and she said i will not stand for your desperation she said you are smarter more creative and more resilient than that which brings me to my third paradox growing up is about aiming to succeed wildly and being fulfilled by failing really well
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many of them are working in deeply intractable systems the military congress the education system etc but what they managed to do within those systems was be a humanizing force and at the end of the day what could possibly be more important than that cornel west says of course it's a failure but how good a failure is it this isn't to say we give up our wildest biggest dreams it's to say we operate on two levels on one we really go after changing these broken systems of which we find ourselves a part but on the other we root our self esteem in the daily acts of trying to make one person's day more kind more just etc so when i was a little girl i had a couple of very strange habits one of them was i used to lie on the kitchen floor of my childhood home and i would suck the thumb of my left hand and hold my mom's cold toes with my right hand
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so my feminism is very indebted to my mom's but it looks very different my mom says patriarchy i say so race class gender ability all of these things go into our experiences of what it means to be a woman pay equity yes absolutely a feminist issue but for me so is immigration
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but for me so is immigration thank you my mom says protest march i say online organizing i co edit along with a collective of other super smart amazing women a site called com we are the most widely read feminist publication ever and i tell you this because i think it's really important to see that there's a continuum feminist is basically the century version of consciousness raising but we also have a straightforward political impact
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look if you do this and he takes the laces out of their hand and instantly he starts tying these knots and even better than they were doing it remarkably and it turns out they are medical students on their way to a lecture about the latest techniques and he's the guy giving the lecture
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one of the very lucky things when i was at notre dame i was on the boxing team so i put my hands up right away instinctively the guy on the right had a knife with a blade and he went in under my elbow and it went up and cut my inferior vena cava if you know anything about anatomy that's not a good thing to get cut and everything of course on the way up and then i still had my hands up he pulled it out and went for my neck and sunk it in up to the hilt in my neck and i got one straight right punch and knocked the middle guy out the other guy was still working on me collapsing my other lung and i managed to by hitting that guy to get a minute i ran down the street and collapsed and the ambulance guys me on the sidewalk and let the trauma room know they had an incoming and one of the side effects of having major massive blood loss is you get tunnel vision so i remember being on the stretcher and having a little nickel sized cone of vision and i was moving my head around and we got to st vincent's and we're racing down this hallway and i see the lights going and it's a peculiar effect of memories like that they don't really go to the usual place that memories go they kind of have this vault where they're stored in high and george lucas did all the sound effects
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you know we wake up in the morning you get dressed put on your shoes you head out into the world you plan on coming back getting undressed going to bed waking up doing it again and that anticipation that rhythm helps give us a structure to how we organize ourselves and our lives and gives it a measure of predictability living in new york city as i do it's almost as if with so many people doing so many things at the same time in such close quarters it's almost like life is dealing you extra hands out of that deck you're never there's just juxtapositions are possible that just aren't you don't think they're going to happen and you never think you're going to be the guy who's walking down the street and because you choose to go down one side or the other the rest of your life is changed forever and one night i'm riding the uptown local train
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and so i just think they got their lecture to go to i step off i'm standing on the platform and i feel my index finger in the first scar that i ever got from my umbilical cord and then around that is traced the last scar that i got from my surgeon and i think that that chance encounter with those kids on the street with their knives led me to my surgical team and their training and their skill and always a little bit of luck pushed back against chaos thank you
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now four years ago i injured my foot in a climbing accident and i went to the doctor she gave me heat she gave me cold aspirin narcotic painkillers anti cortisone shots it didn't work several months later i was in the northeast amazon walked into a village and the shaman said you're limping and i'll never forget this as long as i live he looked me in the face and he said take off your shoe and give me your machete
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my colleague the late great loren mcintyre discoverer of the source lake of the amazon laguna mcintyre in the peruvian andes was lost on the peru brazil border about years ago he was rescued by a group of isolated indians called the they beckoned for him to follow them into the forest which he did there they took out palm leaf baskets there they took out these green monkey frogs these are big suckers they're like this and they began licking them it turns out they're highly hallucinogenic mcintyre wrote about this and it was read by the editor of high times magazine you see that have friends in all sorts of strange cultures this guy decided he would go down to the amazon and give it a whirl or give it a lick and he did and he wrote my blood pressure went through the roof i lost full control of my bodily functions i passed out in a heap i woke up in a hammock six hours later felt like god for two days
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these are in fact different tribes as isolated as these areas are let me show you how the outside world is crowding in here we see trade and transport increased in with the diminishment of the civil war in colombia the outside world is showing up to the north we have illegal gold mining also from the east from brazil there's increased hunting and fishing for commercial purposes we see illegal logging coming from the south and drug runners are trying to move through the park and get into brazil this in the past is why you didn't mess with isolated indians and if it looks like this picture is out of focus because it was taken in a hurry here's why
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now i'm an that's a scientist who works in the rainforest to document how people use local plants i've been doing this for a long time and i want to tell you these people know these forests and these medicinal treasures better than we do and better than we ever will but also these cultures these indigenous cultures are disappearing much faster than the forests themselves and the greatest and most endangered species in the amazon rainforest is not the jaguar it's not the eagle it's the isolated and tribes now four years ago i injured my foot in a climbing accident and i went to the doctor
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the pain disappeared for seven months when it came back i went to see the shaman again he gave me the same treatment and i've been cured for three years now who would you rather be treated by now make no mistake western medicine is the most successful system of healing ever devised but there's plenty of holes in it where's the cure for breast cancer where's the cure for schizophrenia where's the cure for acid where's the cure for insomnia the fact is that these people can sometimes sometimes sometimes cure things we cannot here you see a medicine man in the northeast amazon treating a really nasty disease that afflicts million people around the world western treatment are injections of they're painful they're expensive and they're probably not good for your heart it's a heavy metal
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i want to talk about the election for the first time in the united states a predominantly white group of voters voted for an african american candidate for president and in fact did quite well he won electoral votes and he won about million popular votes more than any other presidential candidate of any race of any party in history if you compare how did against how john kerry had done four years earlier democrats really like seeing this transition here where almost every state becomes bluer becomes more democratic even states lost like out west those states became more blue
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squared is yes thank you very much let me try to take this one step further
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this will take me a little bit of time so bear with me million yes thank you very much now i would attempt to square a five digit number and i can but unfortunately most calculators cannot
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good then i shall attempt the impossible or at least the improbable what i'd like each of you to do is to call out for me any six of your seven digits any six of them in any order you'd like
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same as she did ok you've got a seven digit number call out any six of them loud and clear i think you left out the number that's three the odds of me getting all four of these right by random guessing would be one in to the fourth power ok any six of them
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anybody here who'd like to know the day of the week they were born we can do it that way of course i could just make up an answer and you wouldn't know so i come prepared for that i brought with me a book of calendars it goes as far back into the past as because you never know
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june what ca sixth was that a sunday it was ab and it was cloudy
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but i'd like to wrap things up now by alluding to something from earlier in the presentation there was a gentleman up here who had a calculator where is he would you stand up guy ok stand up for me just for a second so i can see where you are you have a calculator sir as well ok what i'm going to try and do is to square in my head a five digit number requiring a calculator but to make my job more interesting for you as well as for me i'm going to do this problem thinking out loud so you can actually honestly hear what's going on in my mind while i do a calculation of this size now i have to apologize to our magician friend green i know as a magician we're not supposed to reveal our secrets but i'm not too afraid that people are going to start doing my show next week so i think we're ok
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three squared yuck let me explain to you how i'm going to attempt this problem i'm going to break the problem down into three parts i'll do squared plus squared plus times times two add all those numbers together and with any luck arrive at the answer now let me recap
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creep into the calculation let me explain what that is this is a phonetic code a mnemonic device that i use that allows me to convert numbers into words i store them as words and later on retrieve them as numbers i know it sounds complicated it's not i don't want you to think you're seeing something out of rain man
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there's definitely a method to my madness definitely definitely sorry
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would you like to try a more standard calculator just in case ok great what i'm going to try and do then i notice it took some of you a little bit of time to get your answer that's ok i'll give you a shortcut for multiplying even faster on the calculator there is something called the square of a number which most of you know is taking a number and multiplying it by itself
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eight digit capacity don't you hate that so since we've reached the limits of our calculators what's that does yours go higher i don't know oh yours does i can probably do it
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i shall try and determine the digit you've left out starting with your seven digit number call out any six of them please did you leave out the number good ok that's one you have a seven digit number call out any six of them please
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so let's see let's take a different row of people starting with you i'll get five digits one two three four oh i did this row already let's do the row before you starting with you one two three four five call out a single digit that will be the five digit number that i will try to square go ahead five
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in other domains the world of communications there was a time when i was a boy when you could get any kind of telephone service you wanted as long as it came from ma bell you rented your phone you didn't buy it one consequence of that by the way is that the phone never broke and those days are gone we now have an almost unlimited variety of phones especially in the world of cell phones these are cell phones of the future my favorite is the middle one the player nose hair trimmer and torch
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nowadays everything is very much up for grabs i teach wonderfully intelligent students and i assign percent less work than i used to and it's not because they're less smart and it's not because they're less diligent it's because they are preoccupied asking themselves should i get married or not should i get married now should i get married later should i have kids first or a career first all of these are consuming questions and they're going to answer these questions whether or not it means not doing all the work i assign and not getting a good grade in my courses and indeed they should these are important questions to answer work we are blessed as carl was pointing out with the technology that enables us to work every minute of every day from any place on the planet except the randolph hotel
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beautiful day they have it all to themselves what could be better well damn it this guy is thinking it's august everybody in my manhattan neighborhood is away i could be parking right in front of my building and he spends two weeks nagged by the idea that he is missing the opportunity day after day to have a great parking space opportunity costs subtract from the satisfaction we get out of what we choose even when what we choose is terrific and the more options there are to consider the more attractive features of these options are going to be reflected by us as opportunity costs here's another example
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this hit me when i went to replace my jeans i wear jeans almost all the time there was a time when jeans came in one flavor and you bought them and they fit like crap they were incredibly uncomfortable if you wore them and washed them enough times they started to feel ok i went to replace my jeans after years of wearing these old ones and i said i want a pair of jeans here's my size and the shopkeeper said do you want slim fit easy fit relaxed fit you want button fly or zipper fly you want or acid washed do you want them distressed you want boot cut tapered blah blah on and on he went my jaw dropped and after i recovered i said i want the kind that used to be the only kind
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you wouldn't all know what this was about the truth is more like this everything was better back when everything was worse the reason that everything was better back when everything was worse is that when everything was worse it was actually possible for people to have experiences that were a pleasant surprise nowadays the world we live in we affluent industrialized citizens with perfection the expectation the best you can ever hope for is that stuff is as good as you expect it to be you will never be pleasantly surprised because your expectations my expectations have gone through the roof the secret to happiness this is what you all came for the secret to happiness is low expectations
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i'm going to talk to you about some stuff that's in this book of mine that i hope will resonate with other things you've already heard and i'll try to make some connections myself in case you missed them but i want to start with what i call the official dogma the official dogma of what the official dogma of all western industrial societies and the official dogma runs like this if we are interested in maximizing the welfare of our citizens the way to do that is to maximize individual freedom the reason for this is both that freedom is in and of itself good valuable worthwhile essential to being human
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and the official dogma runs like this if we are interested in maximizing the welfare of our citizens the way to do that is to maximize individual freedom the reason for this is both that freedom is in and of itself good valuable worthwhile essential to being human and because if people have freedom then each of us can act on our own to do the things that will maximize our welfare and no one has to decide on our behalf the way to maximize freedom is to maximize choice the more choice people have the more freedom they have and the more freedom they have the more welfare they have this i think is so deeply embedded in the water supply that it wouldn't occur to anyone to question it and it's also deeply embedded in our lives i'll give you some examples of what modern progress has made possible for us this is my supermarket
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this is my supermarket not such a big one i want to say just a word about salad dressing salad dressings in my supermarket if you don't count the extra virgin olive oils and vinegars you could buy to make a very large number of your own salad dressings in the off chance that none of the the store has on offer suit you so this is what the supermarket is like and then you go to the consumer electronics store to set up a stereo system speakers cd player tape player tuner amplifier and in this one single consumer electronics store there are that many stereo systems we can construct six different stereo systems out of the components that are on offer in one store you've got to admit that's a lot of choice
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and if by some chance you haven't seen that in your store yet you can rest assured that one day soon you will and what this does is it leads people to walk into their stores asking this question and do you know what the answer to this question now is the answer is no it is not possible to buy a cell phone that doesn't do too much so in other aspects of life that are much more significant than buying things the same explosion of choice is true
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alright i'm going to show you a couple of images from a very diverting paper in the journal of ultrasound in medicine i'm going to go way out on a limb and say that it is the most diverting paper ever published in the journal of ultrasound in medicine the title is observations of in utero masturbation
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orgasm is a reflex of the autonomic nervous system now this is the part of the nervous system that deals with the things that we don't consciously control like digestion heart rate and sexual arousal and the orgasm reflex can be triggered by a surprisingly broad range of input genital stimulation duh but also kinsey interviewed a woman who could be brought to orgasm by having someone stroke her eyebrow people with spinal cord injuries like will often develop a very very sensitive area right above the level of their injury wherever that is there is such a thing as a knee orgasm in the literature i think the most curious one that i came across was a case report of a woman who had an orgasm every time she brushed her teeth
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something in the complex sensory motor action of brushing her teeth was triggering orgasm and she went to a neurologist who was fascinated he checked to see if it was something in the toothpaste but no it happened with any brand they stimulated her gums with a toothpick to see if that was doing it no it was the whole you know motion and the amazing thing to me is that you would think this woman would have excellent oral hygiene
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sadly this is what it said in the journal paper she believed that she was possessed by demons and switched to mouthwash for her oral care it's so sad
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okay now on the left you can see the hand that's the big arrow and the penis on the right the hand hovering and over here we have in the words of radiologist israel meisner the hand grasping the penis in a fashion resembling masturbation movements bear in mind this was an ultrasound so it would have been moving images orgasm is a reflex of the autonomic nervous system now this is the part of the nervous system that deals with the things that we don't consciously control like digestion heart rate and sexual arousal
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i was on academic and disciplinary probation before i hit double digits and i first felt handcuffs on my wrists when i was years old and so when i was years old my mother came up to me and she was like i'm not going to do this anymore i'm going to send you to military school and i looked at her and i said mommy i can see you're upset and i'm going to work harder and she was like no you're going next week and that was how i first got introduced to this whole idea of the military because she thought this was a good idea i had to disagree with her wholeheartedly when i first showed up there because literally in the first four days i had already run away five times from this school they had these big black gates that surrounded the school and every time they would turn their backs i would just simply run out of the black gates and take them up on their offer that if we don't want to be there we can leave at any time so i just said well if that's the case then i'd like to leave
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i'm excited to be here to speak about vets because i didn't join the army because i wanted to go to war i didn't join the army because i had a lust or a need to go overseas and fight frankly i joined the army because college is really damn expensive and they were going to help with that and i joined the army because it was what i knew and it was what i knew that i thought i could do well i didn't come from a military family i'm not a military brat no one in my family ever had joined the military at all and how i first got introduced to the military was when i was years old and i got sent away to military school because my mother had been threatening me with this idea of military school ever since i was eight years old
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famously napoleon wrote many love letters to josephine but perhaps amongst the most memorable is this brief and urgent note home in three days don't bathe
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up i had a nickname they used to call me meaning the soft harmless boy like every other human being i avoided trouble in my childhood they taught me silence don't argue do as you're told in sunday school they taught me don't confront don't argue even if you're right turn the other cheek this was reinforced by the political climate of the time
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this was reinforced by the political climate of the day we had a president moi who was a dictator he ruled the country with an iron fist and anyone who dared question his authority was arrested tortured jailed or even killed that meant that people were taught to be smart cowards stay out of trouble being a coward was not an insult
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the san francisco harbor was clogged with ships at the peak because the ships would get there and the crews would abandon to go search for gold so there were literally captains and ships they turned the ships into hotels because they couldn't sail them anywhere you had fever and you had gold fever and you saw some of the excesses that the fever created and the same thing happened the fort in san francisco at the time had about soldiers half of them deserted to go look for gold and they wouldn't let the other half out to go look for the first half because they were afraid they wouldn't come back
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bride you are mine little man announcer could be a really big deal to you husband is that your wife husband not for another minutes announcer after all it's your special day com life's an event announce it to the world it's very difficult to figure out what that ad is for
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so the light bulb laid down the heavy infrastructure and then home appliances started coming into being and this was huge the first one was the electric fan this was the electric fan and the appliances the golden age of appliances really lasted it depends how you want to measure it but it's anywhere from to years it goes on a long time it starts about and the electric fan was a big success the electric iron also very big by the way this is the beginning of the asbestos lawsuit
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but three years later by it weighed pounds now not all these things were highly successful
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electric tie press which never really did catch on people i guess decided that they would not wrinkle their ties these never really caught on either the electric shoe warmer and drier never a big seller this came in like six different colors
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on the left hand side this was the soapy water and there's a rotor there that this motor is spinning and it would clean your clothes this is the clean rinse water so you'd take the clothes out of here put them in here and then you'd run the clothes through this electric wringer and this was a big deal you'd keep this on your porch it was a little bit messy and kind of a pain and you'd run a long cord into the house where you could screw it into your light socket
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and that's actually kind of an important point in my presentation because they hadn't invented the off switch that was to come much later the off switch on appliances because it didn't make any sense i mean you didn't want this thing clogging up a light socket so you know when you were done with it you it that's what you did you didn't turn it off and as i said before they hadn't invented the electric outlet either so the washing machine was a particularly dangerous device and there are when you research this there are gruesome descriptions of people getting their hair and clothes caught in these devices and they couldn't yank the cord out because it was screwed into a light socket inside the house
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is supposed don't even get me started but that's not the worst one this is what it looks like under my desk i took this picture just two days ago so we really haven't progressed that much since
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it's a total total mess and you know we think it's getting better but have you tried to install
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i challenge you to try it's very hard i know ph d s in computer science this process has brought them to tears absolute tears
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we don't get our hair caught in it but that's the level of of where we are we're in and if you believe that then stuff like this doesn't bother you this is all the negatives add up to making the online experience not worth the trouble amazon toast in amazon bomb my mom hates this picture
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a lot of how we decide how we're supposed to react to things and what we're supposed to expect about the future depends on how we bucket things and how we categorize them and so i think the tempting analogy for the boom bust that we just went through with the internet is a gold rush
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so i think the tempting analogy for the boom bust that we just went through with the internet is a gold rush it's easy to think of this analogy as very different from some of the other things you might pick for one thing both were very real in in that gold rush they took over million worth of gold out of california it was very real the internet was also very real this is a real way for humans to communicate with each other it's a big deal
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but you had the same thing with the gold rush gold gold gold sixty eight rich men on the steamer portland stacks of yellow metal some have many have more
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some have many have more a few bring out dollars each people would get very excited about this when they read these articles the eldorado of the united states of america the discovery of inexhaustible gold mines in california and the parallels between the gold rush and the internet rush continue very strongly so many people left what they were doing and what would happen is and the gold rush went on for years people on the east coast in when they first started to get the news they thought ah this isn't real
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this is the white pass trail they loaded up their mules and their horses
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this is the white pass trail they loaded up their mules and their horses and they didn't plan right and they didn't know how far they would really have to go and they overloaded the horses with hundreds and hundreds of pounds of stuff in fact it was so bad that most of the horses died before they could get where they were going it got renamed the dead horse trail and the canadian minister of the interior wrote this at the time thousands of pack horses lie dead along the way sometimes in bunches under the cliffs with pack saddles and packs where they've fallen from the rock above sometimes in tangled masses filling the mud holes and furnishing the only footing for our poor pack animals on the march often i regret to say exhausted but still alive a fact we were unaware of until after the miserable turned beneath the hooves of our cavalcade the eyeless sockets of the pack animals everywhere account for the of ravens along the road the inhumanity which this trail has been witness to the heartbreak and suffering which so many have undergone cannot be imagined
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they've come thousands of miles on a perilous trip risked life health and property spent months of the most arduous labor a man can perform and at length with expectations raised to the highest pitch have reached the coveted goal only to discover the fact that there is nothing here for them and that was of course the very common story
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and that was of course the very common story because when you take out that last piece of gold and they did incredibly quickly i mean if you look at the gold rush the entire american river region within two years every stone had been turned and after that only big companies who used more sophisticated mining technologies started to take gold out of there so there's a much better analogy that allows you to be incredibly optimistic and that analogy is the electric industry and there are a lot of similarities between the internet and the electric industry with the electric industry you actually have to one of them is that they're both sort of thin horizontal enabling layers that go across lots of different industries it's not a specific thing
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but electricity is also very very broad so you have to sort of narrow it down you know it can be used as an incredible means of transmitting power it's an incredible means of coordinating in a very fine grained way information flows there's a bunch of things that are interesting about electricity and the part of the electric revolution that i want to focus on is sort of the golden age of appliances the killer app that got the world ready for appliances was the light bulb so the light bulb is what wired the world
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the killer app that got the world ready for appliances was the light bulb so the light bulb is what wired the world and they weren't thinking about appliances when they wired the world they were really thinking about they weren't putting electricity into the home they were putting lighting into the home and but it really it got the electricity it took a long time this was a huge as you would expect a huge capital build out all the streets had to be torn up this is work going on down in lower manhattan where they built some of the first electric power generating stations
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so this was remember they didn't wire the houses for electricity they wired them for lighting
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you start thinking about what you would do with this time and you say i'm going to spend more time with the kids i'm going to visit these places i'm going to go up and down mountains and places and i'm going to do all the things i didn't do when i had the time but of course we all know these are very bittersweet memories we're going to have it's very difficult to do you spend a good part of the time crying probably so i said i'm going to do something else every monday and thursday i'm going use my terminal days and i will do during those days whatever it is i was going to do if i had received that piece of news
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so we started asking questions one by one we'd say it like this one how do we find people we'd go out and try and recruit people and we'd say look when you come to us we're not going to have two or three interviews and then you're going to be married to us for life that's not how we do the rest of our lives so come have your interviews anyone who's interested in interviewing you will show up and then we'll see what happens out of the intuition that rises from that instead of just filling out the little items of whether you're the right person and then come back spend an afternoon spend a whole day talk to anybody you want make sure we are the bride you thought we were and not all the bullshit we put into our own ads
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so let's give people these three pieces of information so we started having in the cafeteria a computer where you could go in and you could ask what someone spent how much someone makes what they make in benefits what the company makes what the margins are and so forth and this is years ago as this information started coming to people we said things like we don't want to see your expense report we don't want to know how many holidays you're taking we don't want to know where you work we had at one point different offices around town and we'd say go to the one that's closest to your house to the customer that you're going to visit today don't tell us where you are and more even when we had thousands of people people we had two people in the h r department and thankfully one of them has retired
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so the process is looking for wisdom and in the process of course we wanted people to know everything and we wanted to be truly democratic about the way we ran things so our board had two seats open with the same voting rights for the first two people who showed up
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so we created this school which is called and one of them is a public school and says the following let's divide this role of the teacher into two one guy we'll call a tutor a tutor in the old sense of the greek look after the kid what's happening at home what's their moment in life etc but please don't teach because the little you know compared to we don't want to know keep that to yourself
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you can't and try any one of you using for something you don't know anymore so this is lost and that's what we try to do there which is looking for wisdom in that school and that brings us back to this graph and this distribution of our life i accumulated a lot of money when i think about it when you think and you say now is the time to give back well if you're giving back you took too much
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and that did two things one it freed our five kids from following in our steps our shadow they don't know what i do
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and that did two things one it freed our five kids from following in our steps our shadow they don't know what i do which is good and i'm not going to take them somewhere and say one day all of this will be yours
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i'm free to start something new every time and to decide things from scratch in part of those terminal days and some people would say oh so now you have this time these terminal days and so you go out and do everything no we've been to the beaches so we've been to samoa and maldives and mozambique so that's done i've climbed mountains in the himalayas i've gone down meters to see sharks i've spent days on the back of a camel from chad to timbuktu i've gone to the magnetic north pole on a dog sled so we've been busy it's what i'd like to call my empty bucket list
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but very few of us have learned how to go to the movies on monday afternoon and if we're looking for wisdom we need to learn to do that as well and so what we've done all of these years is very simple is use the little tool which is ask three whys in a row because the first why you always have a good answer for the second why it starts getting difficult by the third why you don't really know why you're doing what you're doing what i want to leave you with is the seed and the thought that maybe if you do this you will come to the question what for what am i doing this for and hopefully as a result of that and over time i hope that with this and that's what i'm wishing you you'll have a much wiser future thank you very much so ricardo you're kind of crazy
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they don't even have the incentive you're running a company with a mandate it's a quarterly report if you're not good in days you're out so you say here's a great program that in less than one generation and the guy says get out of here so this is the problem
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my wife fernanda doesn't like the term but a lot of people in my family died of melanoma cancer and my parents and grandparents had it and i kept thinking one day i could be sitting in front of a doctor who looks at my exams and says ricardo things don't look very good you have six months or a year to live and you start thinking about what you would do with this time
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but the fact is that leisure is a very busy thing you go play golf and tennis and you meet people and you're going for lunch and you're late for the movies it's a very crowded thing that we do the opposite of work is idleness
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it's a very crowded thing that we do the opposite of work is idleness but very few of us know what to do with idleness when you look at the way that we distribute our lives in general you realize that in the periods in which we have a lot of money we have very little time and then when we finally have time we have neither the money nor the health so we started thinking about that as a company for the last years this is a complicated company with thousands of employees hundreds of millions of dollars of business that makes rocket fuel systems runs in brazil does income tax preparation for dozens of thousands so this is not a simple business we looked at it and we said let's devolve to these people let's give these people a company where we take away all the boarding school aspects of this is when you arrive this is how you dress this is how you go to meetings this is what you say this is what you don't say and let's see what's left
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and we said let's devolve to these people let's give these people a company where we take away all the boarding school aspects of this is when you arrive this is how you dress this is how you go to meetings this is what you say this is what you don't say and let's see what's left so we started this about years ago and we started dealing with this very issue and so we said look the retirement the whole issue of how we distribute our graph of life instead of going mountain climbing when you're why don't you do it next week and we'll do it like this we'll sell you back your wednesdays for percent of your salary so now if you were going to be a violinist which you probably weren't you go and do this on wednesday and what we found we thought these are the older people who are going to be really interested in this program and the average age of the first people who adhered were of course
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we have all kinds of things where we say don't worry about the course material anymore we have approximately great threads that go from to things like how do we measure ourselves as humans so there's a place for math and physics and all that there how do we express ourselves so there's a place for music and literature etc but also for grammar and then we have things that everyone has forgotten which are probably the most important things in life the very important things in life we know nothing about we know nothing about love we know nothing about death we know nothing about why we're here so we need a thread in school that talks about everything we don't know
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and we'd say you put the rules together and then you decide what you want to do with it so can you all hit yourself on the head sure for a week try they came up with the very same rules that we had except they're theirs and then they have the power which means they can and do suspend and expel kids so that we're not playing school they really decide and then in this same vein we keep a digital mosaic because this is not or montessori or something it's something where we keep the brazilian curriculum with tiles of a mosaic which we want to expose these kids to by the time they're and follow this all the time and we know how they're doing and we say you're not interested in this now let's wait a year and the kids are in groups that don't have an age category so the six kid who is ready for that with an old that eliminates all of the gangs and the groups and this stuff that we have in the schools in general and they have a zero to percent grading which they do themselves with an app every couple of hours
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and i was still a teenager so i whisper shouted back to him yes the computer can tell if you're lying
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i had become a computer programmer because i was one of those kids crazy about math and science but somewhere along the line i'd learned about nuclear weapons and i'd gotten really concerned with the ethics of science i was troubled however because of family circumstances i also needed to start working as soon as possible so i thought to myself hey let me pick a technical field where i can get a job easily and where i don't have to deal with any troublesome questions of ethics so i picked computers
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she stared at me and she said i don't want to hear another word about this and she turned around and walked away mind you she wasn't rude it was clearly what i don't know isn't my problem go away death stare
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the two humans got it right watson on the other hand answered toronto for a us city category the impressive system also made an error that a human would never make a second grader wouldn't make our machine intelligence can fail in ways that don't fit error patterns of humans in ways we won't expect and be prepared for it'd be lousy not to get a job one is qualified for but it would triple suck if it was because of stack overflow in some
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look yes we've been using computers for a while but this is different this is a historical twist because we cannot anchor computation for such subjective decisions the way we can anchor computation for flying airplanes building bridges going to the moon are airplanes safer did the bridge sway and fall there we have agreed upon fairly clear benchmarks and we have laws of nature to guide us we have no such anchors and benchmarks for decisions in messy human affairs to make things more complicated our software is getting more powerful but it's also getting less transparent and more complex
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to make things more complicated our software is getting more powerful but it's also getting less transparent and more complex recently in the past decade complex algorithms have made great strides they can recognize human faces they can decipher handwriting they can detect credit card fraud and block spam and they can translate between languages they can detect tumors in medical imaging they can beat humans in chess and go much of this progress comes from a method called machine learning
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of this progress comes from a method called machine learning machine learning is different than traditional programming where you give the computer detailed exact painstaking instructions it's more like you take the system and you feed it lots of data including unstructured data like the kind we generate in our digital lives and the system learns by churning through this data and also crucially these systems don't operate under a single answer logic they don't produce a simple answer it's more this one is probably more like what you're looking for now the upside is this method is really powerful the head of ai systems called it the unreasonable effectiveness of data
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so consider a hiring algorithm a system used to hire people using machine learning systems such a system would have been trained on previous employees' data and instructed to find and hire people like the existing high performers in the company sounds good i once attended a conference that brought together human resources managers and executives high level people using such systems in hiring they were super excited they thought that this would make hiring more objective less biased and give women and minorities a better shot against biased human managers and look human hiring is biased
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clinically he literally walk across the street without getting severe chest pain within a month like most people was pain free and within a year climbing more than floors a day on a this is not unusual and its part of what enables people to maintain these kinds of changes because it makes such a big difference in their quality of life overall if you looked at all the arteries in all the patients they got worse and worse from one year to five years in the comparison group this is the natural history of heart disease but its really not natural because we found it could get better and better and much more quickly than people had once thought we also found that the more people change the better they got it a function of how old or how sick they were it was mainly how much they changed and the oldest patients improved as much as the young ones i got this as a christmas card a few years ago from two of the patients in one of our programs the younger brother is the older ones they wanted to show me how much more flexible they were and the following year they sent me this one which i thought was kind of funny
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