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and it began to feel weird and empty when there wasn't a powerful person who had misused their privilege that we could get a day without a shaming began to feel like a day picking fingernails and treading water let me tell you a story
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on that night a few of you did joke overwhelm your feed the way it did mine it did mine and i thought what everybody thought that night which was wow somebody's screwed somebody's life is about to get terrible and i sat up in my bed and i put the pillow behind my head and then i thought i'm not entirely sure that joke was intended to be racist maybe instead of gleefully flaunting her privilege she was mocking the gleeful flaunting of privilege there's a comedy tradition of this like south park or colbert or randy newman maybe justine sacco's crime was not being as good at it as randy newman in fact when i met justine a couple of weeks later in a bar she was just crushed and i asked her to explain the joke and she said living in america puts us in a bit of a bubble when it comes to what is going on in the third world i was making of fun of that bubble you know another woman on that night a new statesman writer helen lewis she reviewed my book on public shaming and wrote that she that night i'm not sure that her joke was intended to be racist and she said straightaway she got a fury of saying well you're just a privileged bitch too
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the i'm actually kind of hoping justine sacco gets aids somebody else on that wrote somebody positive should rape this bitch and then we'll find out if her skin color protects her from aids and that person got a free pass nobody went after that person we were all so excited about destroying justine and our shaming brains are so simple minded that we couldn't also handle destroying somebody who was inappropriately destroying justine justine was really uniting a lot of disparate groups that night from philanthropists to rape the bitch
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i hope you get fired you demented bitch just let the world know you're planning to ride bare back while in africa women always have it worse than men when a man gets shamed it's i'm going to get you fired when a woman gets shamed it's i'm going to get you fired and raped and cut out your uterus and then employers got involved on tweet this is an outrageous offensive comment employee in question currently unreachable on an flight
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is an outrageous offensive comment employee in question currently unreachable on an flight and that's when the anger turned to excitement all i want for christmas is to see face when her plane lands and she checks her fired oh man is going to have the most painful phone moment ever when her plane lands we are about to watch this bitch get fired in real time before she even knows she's getting fired what we had was a delightful narrative arc we knew something that justine didn't
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about years ago i went through a little bit of a hard time so i decided to go see a therapist i had been seeing her for a few months when she looked at me one day and said who actually raised you until you were three seemed like a weird question i said my parents and she said i don't think that's actually the case because if it were we'd be dealing with things that are far more complicated than just this it sounded like the setup to a joke but i knew she was serious because when i first started seeing her i was trying to be the funniest person in the room and i would try and crack these jokes but she caught on to me really quickly and whenever i tried to make a joke she would look at me and say that is actually really sad
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so i knew i had to be serious and i asked my parents who had actually raised me until i was three and to my surprise they said my primary caregiver had been a distant relative of the family i had called her my auntie i remember my auntie so clearly it felt like she had been part of my life when i was much older i remember the thick straight hair and how it would come around me like a curtain when she bent to pick me up her soft southern thai accent the way i would cling to her even if she just wanted to go to the bathroom or get something to eat i loved her but with the ferocity that a child has sometimes before she understands that love also requires letting go
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a day how long does it take them to fall off a week meanwhile the lamb that he had just done his little procedure on is you know he's just prancing around bleeding stopped he's you know nibbling on some grass frolicking and i was just so blown away at how completely wrong i was in that second and i was reminded how utterly wrong i am so much of the time
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like how did i get here how did i mean how did i get here it's just it's one of those moments where the brain goes off on its own and suddenly i'm standing there in the rockies and all i can think of is the aristotelian definition of a tragedy you know aristotle says a tragedy is that moment when the hero comes face to face with his true identity
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and i'm like what is this jacked up metaphor i don't like what i'm thinking right now and i can't get this thought out of my head and i can't get that vision out of my sight so i did what i had to do i went in and i took them i took them like this and i yanked my head back and i'm standing there with two testicles on my chin
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i mean bruce willis in the sixth sense right spends the whole movie trying to help the little kid who sees dead people and then boom oh i'm dead you know it's crushing when the audience sees it the right way neo in the matrix you know oh i'm living in a computer program that's weird these discoveries that lead to sudden realizations and i've been having them over dirty jobs i have them all the time but that one that one drilled something home in a way that i just wasn't prepared for and as i stood there looking at the happy lamb that i had just but it looked ok looking at that poor other little thing that i'd done it the right way on and i just was struck by if i'm wrong about that and if i'm wrong so often in a literal way what other peripatetic misconceptions might i be able to comment upon because look i'm not a social anthropologist but i have a friend who is and i talk to him
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and i'll never forget up in the bering sea i was on a crab boat with the deadliest catch guys which i also work on in the first season we were about miles off the coast of russia seas big waves green water coming over the right most hazardous environment i'd ever seen and i was back with a guy lashing the pots down so i'm feet off the deck which is like looking down at the top of your shoe you know and it's doing this in the ocean dangerous i scamper down i go into the and i say with some level of incredulity captain osha and he says osha ocean and he points out there
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but in that moment what he said next can't be repeated in the lower it can't be repeated on any factory floor or any construction site but he looked at me and said son he's my age by the way he calls me son i love that he says son i'm the captain of a crab boat my responsibility is not to get you home alive my responsibility is to get you home rich
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right here guys silicon valley i mean how many people have an on them right now how many people have their blackberry we're plugged in we're connected i would never suggest for a second that something bad has come out of the tech revolution good grief not to this crowd
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the dirty jobs crew and i were called to a little town in colorado called craig it's only a couple dozen square miles it's in the rockies and the job in question was sheep rancher my role on the show for those of you who haven't seen it it's pretty simple i'm an apprentice and i work with the people who do the jobs in question
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ok i call the to confirm this they confirm it i also call peta just for fun and they don't like it but they confirm it ok that's basically how you do it so the next day i go out and i'm given a horse and we go get the lambs and we take them to a pen that we built and we go about the business of animal husbandry melanie is the wife of albert albert is the shepherd in question
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and now i can't get i can't shake the metaphor i'm still in in aristotle and i'm thinking out of nowhere two terms come crashing into my head that i hadn't heard since my classics professor in college drilled them there and they are and and is the greek word for discovery literally the transition from ignorance to knowledge is
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i can still see hillary doing the shots of rye dribbling down her chin with the steel workers i mean these are the people that i work with every single day and if you have something to say about their thoughts collectively it might be time to think about it because dude you know four years so that's in my head testicles are on my chin thoughts are bouncing around and after that shoot dirty jobs really didn't change in terms of what the show is but it changed for me personally and now when i talk about the show i no longer just tell the story you heard and like it i do but i also start to talk about some of the other things i got wrong some of the other notions of work that i've just been assuming are sacrosanct and they're not people with dirty jobs are happier than you think
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i can give you examples right now bob combs the pig farmer in las vegas who collects the scraps of food from the casinos and feeds them to his swine why because there's so much protein in the stuff we don't eat his pigs grow at twice the normal speed and he's one rich pig farmer he's good for the environment he spends his days doing this incredible service and he smells like hell but god bless him he's making a great living you ask him did you follow your passion here and he'd laugh at you the guy's worth he just got offered like million dollars for his farm and turned it down outside of vegas he didn't follow his passion
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he's making a great living you ask him did you follow your passion here and he'd laugh at you the guy's worth he just got offered like million dollars for his farm and turned it down outside of vegas he didn't follow his passion he stepped back and he watched where everybody was going and he went the other way and i hear that story over and over matt freund a dairy farmer in new canaan connecticut who woke up one day and realized the crap from his cows was worth more than their milk if he could use it to make these biodegradable now he's selling them to walmart right follow his passion the guy's come on so i started to look at passion i started to look at efficiency vs
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i would suggest that innovation without imitation is a complete waste of time and nobody celebrates imitation the way dirty jobs guys know it has to be done your without those people making the same interface the same circuitry the same board over and over all of that that's what makes it equally as possible as the genius that goes inside of it so we've got this new toolbox you know our tools today don't look like shovels and picks
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the infrastructure is a huge deal this war on work that i suppose exists has casualties like any other war the infrastructure is the first one declining trade school enrollments are the second one every single year fewer electricians fewer carpenters fewer plumbers fewer welders fewer pipe fewer steam the infrastructure jobs that everybody is talking about creating are those guys the ones that have been in decline over and over meanwhile we've got two trillion dollars at a minimum according to the american society of civil engineers that we need to expend to even make a dent in the infrastructure which is currently rated at a d minus so if i were running for anything and i'm not i would simply say that the jobs we hope to make and the jobs we hope to create aren't going to stick unless they're jobs that people want and i know the point of this conference is to celebrate things that are near and dear to us but i also know that clean and dirty aren't opposites they're two sides of the same coin just like innovation and imitation like risk and responsibility like and like that poor little lamb who i hope isn't quivering anymore and like my time that's gone
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now we know from neuroscience that compassion has some very extraordinary qualities for example a person who is cultivating compassion when they are in the presence of suffering they feel that suffering a lot more than many other people do however they return to baseline a lot sooner this is called resilience many of us think that compassion drains us but i promise you it is something that truly us another thing about compassion is that it really enhances what's called neural integration it hooks up all parts of the brain another which has been discovered by various researchers at emory and at davis and so on is that compassion enhances our immune system hey we live in a very noxious world
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women have manifested for thousands of years the strength arising from compassion in an unfiltered way in perceiving suffering as it is they have infused societies with kindness and we have really felt that as woman after woman has stood on this stage in the past day and a half and they have compassion through direct action jody williams called it it's good to meditate i'm sorry you've got to do a little bit of that jody step back give your mother a break okay
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i want to address the issue of compassion compassion has many faces some of them are fierce some of them are some of them are tender some of them are wise a line that the dalai lama once said he said love and compassion are necessities they are not luxuries without them humanity cannot survive
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they are not luxuries without them humanity cannot survive and i would suggest it is not only humanity that won't survive but it is all species on the planet as we've heard today it is the big cats and it's the plankton two weeks ago i was in bangalore in india i was so privileged to be able to teach in a hospice on the outskirts of bangalore and early in the morning i went into the ward in that hospice there were men and women who were actively dying and i walked up to the bedside of an old woman who was breathing very rapidly fragile obviously in the latter phase of active dying
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so somehow for nearly two million years we are killing animals without any weapons now we're not using our strength because we are the biggest in the jungle every other animal is stronger than we are they have fangs they have claws they have they have speed we think bolt is fast bolt can get his ass kicked by a squirrel we're not fast that would be an olympic event turn a squirrel loose whoever catches it gets a gold medal
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but you get to the marathon we were just talking about you've only been allowed to run the marathon for years because prior to the medical science said if a woman tried to run miles does anyone know what would happen if you tried to run miles why you were banned from the marathon before the her uterus would be torn her uterus would be torn yes torn reproductive organs the uterus would literally fall out of the body
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then you go beyond miles into the distance that medical science also told us would be fatal to humans remember died when he ran miles you get to and miles and suddenly it's a different game you take a runner like ann or nikki kimball or jenn shelton put them in a race of or miles against anybody in the world and it's a coin toss who's going to win i'll give you an example a couple years ago emily baer signed up for a race called the which tells you all you need to know about the race they give you hours to finish this race well emily baer runners she finishes in eighth place in the top even though she stopped at all the aid stations to breastfeed her baby during the race
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it's only in our lifetime that running has become associated with fear and pain geronimo used to say my only friends are my legs i only trust my legs that's because an apache triathlon used to be you'd run miles across the desert engage in hand combat steal a bunch of horses and slap leather for home geronimo was never saying you know something my achilles i'm tapering i've got to take this week off or i need to cross train i didn't do yoga i'm not ready
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the gun goes off and i mean she's not even an underdog she's like under the underdogs but the under underdog hangs tough and miles into a race there is up there with the lead pack now this is when something really bizarre happens paula radcliffe the one person who is sure to snatch the big paycheck from under underdog hands suddenly grabs her leg and starts to fall back so we all know what to do in this situation right you give her a quick crack in the teeth with your elbow and blaze for the finish line ruins the script instead of taking off she falls back and she grabs paula radcliffe and says come on come with us
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instead of taking off she falls back and she grabs paula radcliffe and says come on come with us you can do it so paula radcliffe unfortunately does it she catches up with the lead pack and is pushing toward the finish line but then she falls back again the second time grabs her and tries to pull her and paula radcliffe at that point says i'm done go
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and paula radcliffe at that point says i'm done go so that's a fantastic story and we all know how it ends she loses the check but she goes home with something bigger and more important except ruins the script again instead of losing she blazes past the lead pack and wins wins the new york city marathon goes home with a big fat check it's a heartwarming story but if you drill a little bit deeper you've got to sort of wonder about what exactly was going on there when you have two in one organism it's not a coincidence
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it's a heartwarming story but if you drill a little bit deeper you've got to sort of wonder about what exactly was going on there when you have two in one organism it's not a coincidence when you have someone who is more competitive and more compassionate than anybody else in the race again it's not a coincidence you show me a creature with webbed feet and gills somehow water's involved someone with that kind of heart there's some kind of connection there and the answer to it i think can be found down in the copper canyons of mexico where there's a reclusive tribe called the tarahumara indians now the tarahumara are remarkable for three things number one is they have been living essentially unchanged for the past years when the arrived in north america you had two choices you either fight back and engage or you could take off
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you couldn't sell cocaine a great product powdered cocaine but you've got to know rich white people and most of the inner city gang members didn't know any rich white people so couldn't sell to that market you couldn't really do petty crime either turns out petty crime's a terrible way to make a living as a result as a gang leader you had you know power it's a pretty good life but the thing was in the end you were living at home with your mother and so it wasn't really a career there were limits to how powerful and important you could be if you had to live at home with your mother then along comes crack cocaine and in the words of malcolm gladwell crack cocaine was the extra chunky version of tomato sauce for the inner city
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this is about peak of the crack epidemic this is a very dangerous job being in a gang you don't like to be surprised you don't like to be surprised by people who come around the corner and the mantra was shoot first ask questions later now was lucky he was such a freak and that clipboard probably saved his life because they figured no other rival gang member would be coming up to shoot at them with a clipboard
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the survey was not in the end going to be what got off the hook he was held hostage overnight in the stairwell there was a lot of gunfire there were a lot of philosophical discussions he had with the gang members by morning the gang leader arrived checked out decided he was no threat and they let him go home so went home took a shower took a nap and you and i probably faced with the situation would think i guess i'm going to write my dissertation on the grateful dead i've been following them for the last three months
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got right back walked down to the housing project went up to the second floor and said hey guys i had so much fun hanging out with you last night i wonder if i could do it again tonight and that was the beginning of what turned out to be a beautiful relationship that involved living in the housing project on and off for years hanging out in crack houses going to jail with the gang members having the windows shot out of his car having the police break into his apartment and steal his computer disks you name it but ultimately the story has a happy ending for who became one of the most respected sociologists in the country and especially for me as i sat in my office with my excel spreadsheet open waiting for to come and deliver to me the latest load of data that he would get from the gang
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what did we find what did we find in the gang well let me say one thing we really got access to everybody in the gang we got an inside look at the gang from the very bottom up to the very top they trusted in ways that really no academic has ever or really anybody any outsider has ever earned the trust of these gangs to the point where they actually opened up what was most interesting for me their books the financial records they kept they made them available to us and we not only could study them but we could ask them questions about what was in them so if i have to kind of summarize very quickly in the short time i have what the bottom line of what i take away from the gang is it's that if i had to draw a parallel between the gang and any other organization it would be that the gang is just like mcdonald's in a lot of different respects the restaurant mcdonald's so first in one way which isn't maybe the most interesting way but it's a good way to start is in the way it's organized the hierarchy of the gang the way it looks so here's what the org chart of the gang looks like i don't know if you know much about org charts but if you were to assign a stripped down and simplified mcdonald's org chart this is exactly what it would look like it's amazing but the top level of the gang they actually call themselves the board of directors
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and says it's not like these guys had a very sophisticated view of what happened in american corporate life but they had seen movies like wall street and they had learned a little bit about what it was like to be in the real world now below that board of directors you've got essentially what are regional people who control say the south side of chicago or the west side of chicago got to know very well the guy who had the unfortunate assignment of trying to take the iowa franchise which it turned out for this black gang was not one of the more brilliant financial endeavors they undertook
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why is it such a bad job well the reason it's such a bad job is that there's somebody shooting at you a lot of the time so with shooting at you what are the death rates we found in our gang and admittedly this was not really a standard situation this was a time of intense violence of a lot of gang wars as this gang actually became quite successful but there were costs and so the death rate not to mention the rate of being arrested sent to prison being wounded the death rate in our sample was seven percent per person per year you're in the gang for four years you expect to die with about a percent likelihood that is about as high as you can get so for purposes let's think about some other walk of life you may expect might be extremely risky let's say that you were a murderer and you were convicted of murder and you're sent to death row it turns out the death rates on death row from all causes including execution two percent a year
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because they're not willing to be at risk and the words of a gang member capture it quite nicely he says would you stand around here when all this shit the shooting if all this going on no right so if i gonna be asked to put my life on the line then front me the cash man i think the gang member says it much more than the economist about what's going on
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theories related to cash flow and lack of access to capital markets and things like that then we asked the gang member why is it you always get paid and your workers don't always get paid his response is you got all these niggers below you who want your job you dig if you start taking losses they see you as weak and shit and i thought about it and said often pay themselves million dollar bonuses even when companies are losing a lot of money and it never would really occur to an economist that this idea of and could really be important
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so what was it about crack cocaine it was a brilliant way of getting the brain high because you could smoke crack cocaine you can't smoke powdered cocaine and smoking is a much more efficient mechanism of delivering a high than snorting it and it turned out there was this audience that didn't know it wanted crack cocaine but when it came it really did and it was a perfect drug you could buy the cocaine that went into it for a dollar sell it for five dollars highly addictive the high was very short so for fifteen minutes you get this great high and then when you come down all you want to do is get high again it created a wonderful market and for the people who were there running the gang it was a great way seemingly to make a lot of money
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so this is where we enter the picture not really me i'm really a bit player in all this my co author venkatesh is the main character he was a math major in college who had a good heart and decided he wanted to get a sociology came to the university of chicago now the three months before he came to chicago he had spent following the grateful dead and in his own words he looked like a freak
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my co author venkatesh is the main character he was a math major in college who had a good heart and decided he wanted to get a sociology came to the university of chicago now the three months before he came to chicago he had spent following the grateful dead and in his own words he looked like a freak he's a south asian very dark skinned south asian big man and he had hair in his words down to his ass defied all kinds of boundaries was he black or white was he man or woman he was really a curious sight to be seen so he showed up at the university of chicago and the famous sociologist william julius wilson was doing a book that involved surveying people all across chicago he took one look at who was going to go do some surveys for him and decided he knew exactly the place to send him which was to one of the toughest most notorious housing projects not just in chicago but in the entire united states
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they get the name of the gang behind them for merchandising and marketing and they're the ones who basically make the profit or lose a profit depending on how good they are at running the business
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now the group i really want you to think about though are the ones at the bottom the foot soldiers these are the teenagers typically who'd be standing out on the street corner selling the drugs extremely dangerous work and important to note is that almost all of the weight all of the people in this organization are at the bottom just like mcdonald's so in some sense the foot soldiers are a lot like the people who are taking your order at mcdonald's and it's not just by chance that they're like them in fact in these neighborhoods they'd be the same people so the same kids who are working in the gang were actually at the very same time typically working part time at a place like mcdonald's
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so in some sense the foot soldiers are a lot like the people who are taking your order at mcdonald's and it's not just by chance that they're like them in fact in these neighborhoods they'd be the same people so the same kids who are working in the gang were actually at the very same time typically working part time at a place like mcdonald's which already foreshadows the main result that i've talked about about what a job it was being in the gang because obviously if being in the gang were such a wonderful lucrative job why in the world would these guys moonlight at mcdonald's so what do the wages look like you might be surprised but based on being able to talk to them and to see their records this is what it looks like in terms of the wages the hourly wage the foot soldiers were earning was an hour it was below the minimum wage
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you look at this the relationship to mcdonald's breaks down here the money looks about the same
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and this is violent death it's unbelievable in some sense to put it into perspective if you compare this to the soldiers in iraq for instance right now fighting the war
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so why in the world you might ask would anybody be willing to stand out on a street corner selling drugs for an hour with a percent chance of dying over the next four years why would they do that and i think there are a couple answers i think the first one is that they got fooled by history it used to be the gang was a rite of passage that the young people controlled the gang that as you got older you dropped out of the gang so what happened was the people who happened to be in the right place at the right time the people who happened to be leading the gang in the mid became very very wealthy
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in some sense that's what happened exactly to the set of people we were looking at they were willing to start at the bottom just like say a first year lawyer at a law firm is willing to start at the bottom work weeks for not that much money because they think they're going to make partner
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indeed the same people who were running all of the major gangs in the late are still running the major gangs in chicago today they never passed on any of the wealth so everybody got stuck at that hour job and it turned out to be a disaster the other thing the gang was very good at was marketing and trickery and so for instance one thing the gang would do is the gang leaders would have big and they'd drive fancy cars and have fancy jewelry so what eventually realized as he hung out with them more is that really they didn't own those cars they just leased them because they couldn't afford to own the fancy cars and they didn't really have gold jewelry they had gold plated jewelry
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so i have a couple minutes let me do one last thing i hadn't thought i'd have time to do which is to talk about what we learned more generally about economics from the study of the gang
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that's getting harder to do because cities are becoming smooth new downtowns sprout towers that are almost always made of concrete and steel and covered in glass you can look at all over the world houston guangzhou frankfurt and you see the same army of high gloss robots marching over the horizon now just think of everything we lose when architects stop using the full range of available materials when we reject granite and limestone and sandstone and wood and copper and terra cotta and brick and and plaster we simplify architecture and we impoverish cities it's as if you reduced all of the world's cuisines down to airline food
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cities are full of roughness and shadow texture and color you can still find architectural surfaces of great individuality and character in apartment buildings in riga and yemen social housing in vienna hopi villages in arizona in new york wooden houses in san francisco these aren't palaces or cathedrals
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tension here is between institution as enabler and institution as obstacle when you're dealing with the left hand edge of one of these distributions when you're dealing with the people who spend a lot of time producing a lot of the material you want that's an institution world you can hire those people as employees you can coordinate their work and you can get some output but when you're down here where the psycho of the world are adding one photo at a time that's institution as obstacle institutions hate being told they're obstacles one of the first things that happens when you institutionalize a problem is that the first goal of the institution immediately shifts from whatever the nominal goal was to self preservation and the actual goal of the institution goes to two through n right so when institutions are told they are obstacles and that there are other ways of coordinating the value they go through something a little bit like the kubler ross stages of reaction being told you have a fatal illness denial anger bargaining acceptance
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the bigger question is what do you do about the value down here right how do you capture that and institutions as i've said are prevented from capturing that steve ballmer now of microsoft was criticizing a couple of years ago and he said oh this business of thousands of programmers contributing to this is a myth we've looked at who's contributed to and most of the patches have been produced by programmers who've only done one thing right you can hear this distribution under that complaint and you can see why from point of view that's a bad idea right we hired this programmer he came in he drank our cokes and played for three years and he had one idea
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the bigger question is what do you do about the value down here right how do you capture that and institutions as i've said are prevented from capturing that steve ballmer now of microsoft was criticizing a couple of years ago and he said oh this business of thousands of programmers contributing to this is a myth we've looked at who's contributed to and most of the patches have been produced by programmers who've only done one thing right you can hear this distribution under that complaint and you can see why from point of view that's a bad idea right we hired this programmer he came in he drank our cokes and played for three years and he had one idea right bad hire
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so there are significant downsides to these changes as well as and of course in the current environment one need allude only lightly to the work of non state actors trying to influence global affairs and taking advantage of these this is a social map of the hijackers and their associates who perpetrated the attack it was produced by analyzing their communications patterns using a lot of these tools and doubtless the intelligence communities of the world are doing the same work today for the attacks of last week now this is the part of the talk where i tell you what's going to come as a result of all of this but i'm running out of time which is good because i don't know
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right how do you organize a group of individuals so that the output of the group is something coherent and of lasting value instead of just being chaos and the economic framing of that problem is called coordination costs and a coordination cost is essentially all of the financial or institutional difficulties in arranging group output and we've had a classic answer for coordination costs which is if you want to coordinate the work of a group of people you start an institution right you raise some resources you found something it can be private or public it can be for profit or not profit it can be large or small but you get these resources together you found an institution and you use the institution to coordinate the activities of the group
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more recently because the cost of letting groups communicate with each other has fallen through the floor and communication costs are one of the big inputs to coordination there has been a second answer which is to put the cooperation into the infrastructure to design systems that coordinate the output of the group as a by product of the operating of the system without regard to institutional models so that's what i want to talk about today i'm going to illustrate it with some fairly concrete examples but always pointing to the broader themes so i'm going to start by trying to answer a question that i know each of you will have asked yourself at some point or other and which the internet is purpose built to answer which is where can i get a picture of a roller skating mermaid so in new york city on the first saturday of every summer coney island our local charmingly run down amusement park hosts the mermaid parade it's an amateur parade people come from all over the city people get all dressed up some people get less dressed up
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so i'm going to start by trying to answer a question that i know each of you will have asked yourself at some point or other and which the internet is purpose built to answer which is where can i get a picture of a roller skating mermaid so in new york city on the first saturday of every summer coney island our local charmingly run down amusement park hosts the mermaid parade it's an amateur parade people come from all over the city people get all dressed up some people get less dressed up young and old dancing in the streets colorful characters and a good time is had by all and what i want to call your attention to is not the mermaid parade itself charming though it is but rather to these photos i didn't take them how did i get them and the answer is i got them from is a photo sharing service that allows people to take photos them share them over the web and so forth
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power tool extremely useful but dangerous if i'm not handling it properly woman if i don't pay close attention i'll suddenly realize that i've lost an hour of time doing something totally mindless ok but to really measure any improvement we needed data right because that's what we do these days so we with some apps that would measure how much time we were spending every day on our phone if you're thinking it's ironic that i asked people to download another app so that they would spend less time on their phones yeah but you gotta meet people where they are
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take that phone out of your hand see if you can eliminate the reflex to check it all day long just for a day and if this sounds easy you haven't tried it here's listener amanda i am absolutely itching i feel a little bit crazy because i have noticed that i pick up my phone when i'm just walking from one room to another getting on the elevator and even and this is the part that i am really embarrassed to actually say out loud in the car yeah well but as amanda learned this itching feeling is not actually her fault that is exactly the behavior that the technology is built to trigger
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if i'm or i'm or i'm i have literally a thousand engineers whose job is to get more attention from you i'm very good at this and i don't want you to ever stop and you know the of recently said our biggest competitors are and sleep i mean so there's a million places to spend your attention but there's a war going on to get it i mean you know the feeling that amazing episode of transparent ends and then the next one starts playing so you're like eh ok fine i'll just stay up and watch it or the progress bar says you are this close to having the perfect profile so you add a little more personal information as one designer told me the only people who refer to their customers as users are drug dealers and technologists
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everyone found day three's challenge the hardest it was called delete that app take that app you know the one that one that always gets you it sucks you in take it off your phone even if just for the day i deleted the game two dots and nearly cried
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before motherhood i had been a journalist who rushed off when the concorde crashed i was one of the first people into belgrade when there was a revolution in serbia
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before motherhood i had been a journalist who rushed off when the concorde crashed i was one of the first people into belgrade when there was a revolution in serbia now i was exhausted this walking went on for weeks it was only until about three months in that something shifted though as i pounded the pavement my mind started to wander too i began imagining what i would do when i finally did sleep again so the did fade and i finally got an and i put all those hours of wandering into action i created my dream job hosting a public radio show
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want you to picture this you host a and you have to prove that the investment of precious public radio dollars in you is worth it my goal was to increase my audience size tenfold so one day i sat down to brainstorm as you do and i came up barren this was different than writer's block right it wasn't like there was something there waiting to be unearthed there was just nothing and so i started to think back when was the last time i actually had a good idea yeah it was when i was pushing that damn stroller now all the cracks in my day were filled with phone time i checked the headlines while i waited for my latte i updated my calendar while i was sitting on the couch
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then i started to wonder what actually happens to us when we get bored or more importantly what happens to us if we never get bored and what could happen if we got rid of this human emotion entirely i started talking to and cognitive psychologists and what they told me was fascinating it turns out that when you get bored you ignite a network in your brain called the default mode so our body it goes on autopilot while we're folding the laundry or we're walking to work but actually that is when our brain gets really busy here's boredom researcher dr sandi mann dr sandi mann once you start daydreaming and allow your mind to really wander you start thinking a little bit beyond the conscious a little bit into the subconscious which allows sort of different connections to take place it's really awesome actually totally awesome right so this is my brain in an and i learned that in the default mode is when we connect disparate ideas we solve some of our most nagging problems and we do something called autobiographical planning
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this is when we look back at our lives we take note of the big moments we create a personal narrative and then we set goals and we figure out what steps we need to take to reach them but now we chill out on the couch also while updating a doc or replying to email we call it getting shit done but here's what neuroscientist dr daniel says we're actually doing dr daniel every time you shift your attention from one thing to another the brain has to engage a switch that uses up nutrients in the brain to accomplish that so if you're attempting to multitask you know doing four or five things at once you're not actually doing four or five things at once because the brain doesn't work that way instead you're rapidly shifting from one thing to the next depleting neural resources as you go so switch switch switch you're using glucose glucose glucose
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a decade ago we shifted our attention at work every three minutes now we do it every seconds and we do it all day long the average person checks email times a day and switches tasks on their computer times a day i discovered all this talking to professor of informatics dr gloria mark dr gloria mark so we find that when people are stressed they tend to shift their attention more rapidly we also found strangely enough that the shorter the amount of sleep that a person gets the more likely they are to check
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so it goes on to show you people making things out of wood a grandfather making a ship in a bottle a woman making a pie somewhat standard fare of the day but it was a sense of pride that we made things that the world around us was made by us it didn't just exist we made it and we were connected to it that way and i think that's tremendously important now i'm going to tell you one funny thing about this this particular reel it's an industrial video but it was shown in drive in theaters in in the detroit area in fact and it preceded alfred hitchcock's psycho
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that is all of us are makers i really believe that all of us are makers we're born makers we have this ability to make things to grasp things with our hands we use words like grasp metaphorically to also think about understanding things
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so makers are enthusiasts they're amateurs they're people who love doing what they do they don't always even know why they're doing it we have begun organizing makers at our maker faire there was one held in detroit here last summer and it will be held again next summer at the henry ford
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and i believe that if you look at the biggest challenge we face it is to persuade people to have the confidence that we can build a truly global society with the institutions that are founded on these rules so i come back to my initial point sometimes you think things are impossible nobody would have said years ago that apartheid would have gone in or that the berlin wall would have fallen at the turn of the and or that polio could be eradicated or perhaps years ago nobody would have said a man could gone to the moon all these things have happened by tackling the impossible you make the impossible possible and we have had a speaker who said that very thing and swallowed a sword right after that which was quite dramatic
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well indeed but what do you do when the two come into conflict and you're forced to make a decision that either is in britain's interest or the interest of britons or citizens elsewhere in the world well i think we can persuade people that what is necessary for britain's long term interests what is necessary for america's long term interests is proper engagement with the rest of the world and taking the action that is necessary there is a great story again told about richard nixon ghana becomes independent so it is just over years ago
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so one of the things that i do is i take my kids to the museum recently i took them to the natural history museum i had my two sons with me and and we go into the front entrance of the museum and there's that amazing sculpture of teddy roosevelt out there you guys know which one i'm talking about teddy roosevelt is sitting there with one hand on the horse bold strong sleeves rolled up i don't know if he's bare chested but it kind of feels like it
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now i didn't grow up going to museums that's not my history my mother was years old when i was born she is amazing my father was struggling with his own things for most of my life if you really want to know the truth the only reason i got into art is because of a woman there was this amazing amazing fantastic beautiful smart woman four years older than me and i wanted to go out with her but she said you're too young and you're not thinking about your future so i ran on down to the junior college registered for some classes ran on back and basically was like i'm thinking about my future now
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we go out for the record she's even more amazing i married her so when i randomly ran down to the junior college and registered for classes i really wasn't paying attention to what i was registering to
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so i ended up with an art history class and i didn't know a thing about art history but something amazing happened when i went into that class for the first time in my academic career my visual intelligence was required of me for the first time the professor would put up an image bold strokes of blues and yellows and say who's that and i'd go that's van gogh clearly that is van gogh i got this
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keep taking these art history classes one of the last art history classes i will not forget i will never forget it was one of those survey art history classes anybody ever have one of those survey art history classes where they try to teach you the entire history of art in a single semester i'm talking about cave paintings and jackson pollock just crunched together all in the same it doesn't really work but they try anyway well at the beginning of the semester i looked at the book and in this book was about a section that was on black people in painting now this was a crammed in section that had representations of black people in painting and black people who painted it was poorly let's just put it that way
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i'm sorry i'm sorry please i really need to understand clearly the author thinks that this is significant why are we skipping over this titus i do not have time for this ok last question i'm really sorry here when can we talk because we need to talk
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and on the left hand side of him is a native american walking and on the right hand side of him is an african american walking and as we're moving up the stairs getting closer to the sculpture my oldest son who's nine says dad how come he gets to ride and they have to walk it stopped me in my tracks it stopped me in my tracks there was so much history that we would have to go through to try to explain that and that's something i try to do with them anyways
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went to her office hours i ended up getting kicked out of her office i went to the dean the dean finally told me i can't force her to teach anything and i knew in that moment if i wanted to understand this history if i wanted to understand the roles of those folks who had to walk i was probably going to have to figure that out myself so above you right here on the slide is a painting by frans
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there is a reason why the painter is showing us this gold necklace here he's trying to tell us something about the economic status of these people in these paintings painting is a visual language where everything in the painting is meaningful is important it's coded but sometimes because of the compositional structure because of compositional hierarchy it's hard to see other things this silk is supposed to tell us also that they have quite a bit of money there's more written about dogs in art history than there are about this other character here historically speaking in research on these kinds of paintings i can find out more about the lace that the woman is wearing in this painting the manufacturer of the lace than i can about this character here about his dreams about his hopes about what he wanted out of life i want to show you something
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so i was fortunate enough to be born a very dreamy child my older sister was busy torturing my parents and they were busy torturing her i was lucky enough to be completely ignored which is a fabulous thing actually i want to tell you so i was able to completely daydream my way through my life and i finally daydreamed my way into at a very good time in where i met a man who was trying to blow up the math building of and i was writing terrible poetry and knitting sweaters for him and feminists hated us and the whole thing was wretched from beginning to end but i kept writing bad poetry and he didn't blow up the math building but he went to cuba but i gave him the money because i was from riverdale so i had more money than he did
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and i were on our way to a party in the bronx and somebody said and somebody said and we came up with this new yorker cover which we were able to we didn't know what we were doing we weren't trying to be funny we weren't trying to be well we were trying to be funny actually that's not true we hoped we'd be funny but we didn't know it would be a cover and we didn't know that that image at the moment that it happened would be something that would be so wonderful for a lot of people and it really became the i don't know you know it was one of those moments people started laughing at what was going on and from you know to to you know for the you know we were able to take the city and make fun of this completely foreign who are what's going on over here who are these people what are these tribes and david remnick who was really wonderful about it had one problem he didn't like al because he thought it would insult people with alzheimer's but you know we said david who's going to know they're not
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and i took the examples that they gave and just did paintings basically so this is i don't know if you can read this well susan this is a fine mess you are in and when you're dealing with grammar which is you know incredibly dry e b white wrote such wonderful whimsical and actually strunk and then you come to the rules and you know there are lots of grammar things do you mind me asking a question do you mind my asking a question would could should or would should could and would is coco lover should is edith and could is an august sander subject and he noticed a large stain in the center of the rug
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and then he breathed his last with loved ones around him and i know that he had chicken soup also as his last meal i happen to know it for a fact and then he died and there was no more spinoza extinct and then we don't have a stuffed spinoza but we do have a stuffed dog and i visited him in the museum of hygiene in st petersburg in russia and there he is with this horrible electrical box on his rump in this fantastic decrepit palace and i think it must have been a very very dark day when the bolsheviks arrived maybe amongst themselves they had a few good laughs but stalin was a paranoid man even more than my father
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too many pogroms leaving the shack the wild blueberry woods the geese the river they went to palestine and then america and my mother drew this map for me of the united states of america and that is my over here because that person who i grew up with had no use for facts whatsoever facts were actually banished from our home and so if you see that texas you know texas and california are under canada and that south carolina is on top of north carolina this is the home that i grew up in ok so it's a miracle that i'm here today but actually it's not it's actually a wonderful thing but then she says tel aviv and lenin which is the town they came from and sorry the rest unknown thank you but in her lexicon sorry the rest unknown thank you is sorry the rest unknown go to hell because she couldn't care less
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i'm going to quickly go through this a quote by bertrand russell all the labor of all the ages all the devotion all the inspiration all the brightness of human genius are destined to extinction so now my friends if that is true and it is true what is the point a complicated question and so you know i talk to my friends and i go to plays where they're singing russian songs oh my god you know what could we have no we don't have time i taped my aunt i taped my aunt singing a song in russian from the you know could we have it for a second do you have that ok i taped my my aunt used to swim in the ocean every day of the year until she was about so and that's a song about how everybody's miserable because you know we're from russia
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i went to visit kitty carlisle hart and she is and when i brought her a copy of the elements of style she said she would treasure it and then i said oh and she was talking about moss hart and i said when you met him you knew it was him and she said i knew it was he
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and she dated george gershwin so you know get out gershwin died at the age of he's buried in the same cemetery as my husband i don't want to talk about that now i do want to talk the absolute icing on this cemetery cake is the family mausoleum nearby i think the family should open a store there and sell chocolate
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and i went to visit louise who's also still working and i looked at her sink which is really amazing and left and then i photograph and do a painting of a sofa on the street and a woman who lives on our street lolita and then i go and have some tea and then my aunt frances dies and before she died she tried to pay with low packets for her bagel
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i'm trying to figure out two very simple things how to live and how to die period that's all i'm trying to do all day long and i'm also trying to have some meals and have some snacks and you know and yell at my children and do all the normal things that keep you grounded so i was fortunate enough to be born a very dreamy child
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but then he came back and things happened and i decided i really hated my writing that it was awful awful purple prose and i decided that i wanted to tell but i still wanted to tell a narrative story and i still wanted to tell my stories so i decided that i would start to draw how hard could that be and so what happened was that i started just becoming an editorial illustrator through you know sheer whatever sheer ignorance and we started a studio
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you have to condense a story into pages usually and what you have to do is you really have to edit down to what you want to say and hopefully you're not talking down to kids and you're not talking in such a way that you you know couldn't stand reading it after one time so i hopefully am writing you know books that are good for children and for adults
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