Jamais Cascio: Tools for a better world

00:11The future that we will create can be a future that we'll be proud of. I think
about this every day; it's quite literally my job. I'm co-founder and senior
columnist at Worldchanging.com. Alex Steffen and I founded Worldchanging in
late 2003, and since then we and our growing global team of contributors have
documented the ever-expanding variety of solutions that are out there, right now
and on the near horizon.
00:41In a little over two years, we've written up about 4,000 items -- replicable
models, technological tools, emerging ideas -- all providing a path to a
future that's more sustainable, more equitable and more desirable. Our emphasis
on solutions is quite intentional. There are tons of places to go, online and off, if
what you want to find is the latest bit of news about just how quickly our hellbound handbasket is moving. We want to offer people an idea of what they can
do about it. We focus primarily on the planet's environment, but we also address
issues of global development, international conflict, responsible use of emerging
technologies, even the rise of the so-called Second Superpower and much, much
more.
01:33The scope of solutions that we discuss is actually pretty broad, but that
reflects both the range of challenges that need to be met and the kinds of
innovations that will allow us to do so. A quick sampling really can barely scratch
the surface, but to give you a sense of what we cover: tools for rapid disaster
relief, such as this inflatable concrete shelter; innovative uses of bioscience, such
as a flower that changes color in the presence of landmines; ultra high-efficiency
designs for homes and offices;distributed power generation using solar power,
wind power, ocean power, other clean energy sources;ultra, ultra high-efficiency
vehicles of the future; ultra high-efficiency vehicles you can get right now; and
better urban design, so you don't need to drive as much in the first place; biomimetic approaches to design that take advantage of the efficiencies of natural
models in both vehicles and buildings;distributed computing projects that will
help us model the future of the climate. Also, a number of the topics that we've
been talking about this week at TED are things that we've addressed in the past
on Worldchanging: cradle-to-cradle design, MIT's Fab Labs, the consequences of
extreme longevity, the One Laptop per Child project, even Gapminder.
02:44As a born-in-the-mid-1960s Gen X-er, hurtling all too quickly to my fortieth
birthday, I'm naturally inclined to pessimism. But working at Worldchanging has
convinced me, much to my own surprise, that successful responses to the
world's problems are nonetheless possible. Moreover, I've come to realize that
focusing only on negative outcomes can really blind you to the very possibility of
success. As Norwegian social scientist Evelin Lindner has observed, "Pessimism
is a luxury of good times ... In difficult times, pessimism is a self-fulfilling, selfinflicted death sentence." The truth is, we can build a better world, and we can
do so right now. We have the tools: we saw a hint of that a moment ago, and
we're coming up with new ones all the time. We have the knowledge, and our

understanding of the planet improves every day. Most importantly, we have the
motive: we have a world that needs fixing, and nobody's going to do it for us.
03:46Many of the solutions that I and my colleagues seek out and write up every
day have some important aspects in common: transparency, collaboration, a
willingness to experiment, and an appreciation of science -- or, more
appropriately, science! (Laughter) The majority of models, tools and ideas on
Worldchanging encompass combinations of these characteristics, so I want to
give you a few concrete examples of how these principles combine in worldchanging ways.
04:17We can see world-changing values in the emergence of tools to make the
invisible visible -- that is, to make apparent the conditions of the world around
us that would otherwise be largely imperceptible. We know that people often
change their behavior when they can see and understand the impact of their
actions. As a small example, many of us have experienced the change in driving
behavior that comes from having a real time display of mileage showing
precisely how one's driving habits affect the vehicle's efficiency. The last few
years have all seen the rise of innovations in how we measure and display
aspects of the world that can be too big, or too intangible, or too slippery to
grasp easily. Simple technologies, like wall-mounted devices that display how
much power your household is using, and what kind of results you'll get if you
turn off a few lights -- these can actually have a direct positive impact on your
energy footprint. Community tools, like text messaging, that can tell you when
pollen counts are up or smog levels are rising or a natural disaster is
unfolding, can give you the information you need to act in a timely fashion. Datarich displays like maps of campaign contributions, or maps of the disappearing
polar ice caps, allow us to better understand the context and the flow of
processes that affect us all.
05:36We can see world-changing values in research projects that seek to meet
the world's medical needsthrough open access to data and collaborative
action. Now, some people emphasize the risks of knowledge-enabled
dangers, but I'm convinced that the benefits of knowledge-enabled solutions are
far more important. For example, open-access journals, like the Public Library of
Science, make cutting-edge scientific research free to all -- everyone in the
world. And actually, a growing number of science publishers are adopting this
model. Last year, hundreds of volunteer biology and chemistry
researchersaround the world worked together to sequence the genome of the
parasite responsible for some of the developing world's worst diseases: African
sleeping sickness, leishmaniasis and Chagas disease. That genome data can now
be found on open-access genetic data banks around the world, and it's an
enormous boon to researchers trying to come up with treatments. But my
favorite example has to be the global response to the SARS epidemic in 2003,
2004, which relied on worldwide access to the full gene sequence of the SARS
virus. The U.S. National Research Council in its follow-up report on the outbreak
specifically cited this open availability of the sequence as a key reason why the
treatment for SARS could be developed so quickly.

06:56And we can see world-changing values in something as humble as a cell

phone. I can probably count on my fingers the number of people in this
room who do not use a mobile phone -- and where is Aubrey, because I know he
doesn't? (Laughter) For many of us, cell phones have really become almost an
extension of ourselves, and we're really now beginning to see the social
changes that mobile phones can bring about. You may already know some of the
big-picture aspects: globally, more camera phones were sold last year than any
other kind of camera, and a growing number of people live lives mediated
through the lens, and over the network -- and sometimes enter history books. In
the developing world, mobile phones have become economic drivers. A study
last year showed a direct correlation between the growth of mobile phone
use and subsequent GDP increases across Africa. In Kenya, mobile phone
minutes have actually become an alternative currency. The political aspects of
mobile phones can't be ignored either, from text message swarms in Korea
helping to bring down a government, to the Blairwatch Project in the UK, keeping
tabs on politicians who try to avoid the press. (Laughter)
08:03And it's just going to get more wild. Pervasive, always-on networks, high
quality sound and video, even devices made to be worn instead of carried in the
pocket, will transform how we live on a scale that few really appreciate. It's no
exaggeration to say that the mobile phone may be among the world's most
important technologies. And in this rapidly evolving context, it's possible to
imagine a world in which the mobile phone becomes something far more than a
medium for social interaction.
08:29I've long admired the Witness project, and Peter Gabriel told us more
details about it on Wednesday, in his profoundly moving presentation. And I'm
just incredibly happy to see the news that Witness is going to be opening up a
Web portal to enable users of digital cameras and camera phones to send in their
recordings over the Internet, rather than just hand-carrying the videotape. Not
only does this add a new and potentially safer avenue for documenting abuses, it
opens up the program to the growing global digital generation.
09:01Now, imagine a similar model for networking environmentalists. Imagine a
Web portal collecting recordings and evidence of what's happening to the
planet: putting news and data at the fingertips of people of all kinds, from
activists and researchers to businesspeople and political figures. It would
highlight the changes that are underway, but would more importantly give
voice to the people who are willing to work to see a new world, a better world,
come about. It would give everyday citizens a chance to play a role in the
protection of the planet. It would be, in essence, an "Earth Witness" project. Now,
just to be clear, in this talk I'm using the name "Earth Witness" as part of the
scenario, simply as a shorthand, for what this imaginary project could aspire
to, not to piggyback on the wonderful work of the Witness organization. It could
just as easily be called, "Environmental Transparency Project," "Smart Mobs for
Natural Security" -- but Earth Witness is a lot easier to say.

10:00Now, many of the people who participate in Earth Witness would focus on
ecological problems, human-caused or otherwise, especially environmental
crimes and significant sources of greenhouse gases and emissions. That's
understandable and important. We need better documentation of what's
happening to the planet if we're ever going to have a chance of repairing the
damage. But the Earth Witness project wouldn't need to be limited to
problems. In the best Worldchanging tradition, it might also serve as a showcase
for good ideas, successful projects and efforts to make a difference that deserve
much more visibility. Earth Witness would show us two worlds: the world we're
leaving behind, and the world we're building for generations to come.
10:41And what makes this scenario particularly appealing to me is we could do it
today. The key components are already widely available. Camera phones, of
course, would be fundamental to the project. And for a lot of us, they're as close
as we have yet to always-on, widely available information tools. We may not
remember to bring our digital cameras with us wherever we go, but very few of
us forget our phones. You could even imagine a version of this scenario in which
people actually build their own phones. Over the course of last year, open-source
hardware hackers have come up with multiple models for usable, Linux-based
mobile phones, and the Earth Phone could spin off from this kind of project. At
the other end of the network, there'd be a server for people to send photos and
messages to, accessible over the Web, combining a photo-sharing service, social
networking platforms and a collaborative filtering system. Now, you Web 2.0
folks in the audience know what I'm talking about, but for those of you for whom
that last sentence was in a crazy moon language, I mean simply this: the online
part of the Earth Witness projectwould be created by the users, working together
and working openly. That's enough right there to start to build a compelling
chronicle of what's now happening to our planet, but we could do more.
12:02An Earth Witness site could also serve as a collection spot for all sorts of
data about conditions around the planet picked up by environmental sensors that
attach to your cell phone. Now, you don't see these devices as add-ons for
phones yet, but students and engineers around the world have attached
atmospheric sensors to bicycles and handheld computers and cheap robots and
the backs of pigeons --that being a project that's actually underway right now at
U.C. Irvine, using bird-mounted sensors as a way of measuring smog-forming
pollution. It's hardly a stretch to imagine putting the same thing on a phone
carried by a person. Now, the idea of connecting a sensor to your phone is not
new: phone-makers around the world offer phones that sniff for bad breath, or
tell you to worry about too much sun exposure. Swedish firm Uppsala
Biomedical, more seriously, makes a mobile phone add-on that can process
blood tests in the field, uploading the data, displaying the results. Even the
Lawrence Livermore National Labs have gotten into the act, designing a
prototype phone that has radiation sensors to find dirty bombs.
13:05Now, there's an enormous variety of tiny, inexpensive sensors on the
market, and you can easily imagine someone putting together a phone that
could measure temperature, CO2 or methane levels, the presence of some

biotoxins -- potentially, in a few years, maybe even H5N1 avian flu virus. You
could see that some kind of system like this would actually be a really good
fit with Larry Brilliant's InSTEDD project. Now, all of this data could be tagged
with geographic information and mashed up with online maps for easy viewing
and analysis. And that's worth noting in particular. The impact of open-access
online maps over the last year or two has been simply phenomenal. Developers
around the world have come up with an amazing variety of ways to layer useful
data on top of the maps, from bus routes and crime statistics to the global
progress of avian flu. Earth Witness would take this further, linking what you
see with what thousands or millions of other people see around the world.
14:01It's kind of exciting to think about what might be accomplished if
something like this ever existed. We'd have a far better -- far better knowledge of
what's happening on our planet environmentally than could be gathered with
satellites and a handful of government sensor nets alone. It would be a
collaborative, bottom-up approach to environmental awareness and
protection, able to respond to emerging concerns in a smart mobs kind of way
-- and if you need greater sensor density, just have more people show up.And
most important, you can't ignore how important mobile phones are to global
youth. This is a system that could put the next generation at the front lines of
gathering environmental data. And as we work to figure out ways to mitigate the
worst effects of climate disruption, every little bit of information matters. A
system like Earth Witness would be a tool for all of us to participate in the
improvement of our knowledge and, ultimately, the improvement of the planet
itself.
14:58Now, as I suggested at the outset, there are thousands upon thousands of
good ideas out there, so why have I spent the bulk of my time telling you about
something that doesn't exist? Because this is what tomorrow could look
like: bottom-up, technology-enabled global collaboration to handle the biggest
crisis our civilization has ever faced. We can save the planet, but we can't do it
alone -- we need each other. Nobody's going to fix the world for us, but working
together, making use of technological innovations and human communities
alike, we might just be able to fix it ourselves. We have at our fingertips a
cornucopia of compelling models, powerful tools, and innovative ideas that can
make a meaningful difference in our planet's future. We don't need to wait for a
magic bullet to save us all; we already have an arsenal of solutions just waiting
to be used. There's a staggering array of wonders out there, across diverse
disciplines, all telling us the same thing: success can be ours if we're willing to
try.And as we say at Worldchanging, another world isn't just possible; another
world is here. We just need to open our eyes. Thank you very much.

Thomas Barnett: Let's rethink America's military strategy

00:12I get asked a lot what the difference between my work is and typical
Pentagon long-range strategic planners. And the answer I like to offer is what
they typically do is they think about the future of wars in the context of war. And
what I've spent 15 years doing in this business -- and it's taken me almost 14 to

figure it out -- is I think about the future of wars in the context of everything
else. So I tend to specialize on the scene between war and peace. The material
I'm going to show you is one idea from a book with a lot of ideas. It's the one that
takes me around the world right now interacting with foreign militaries quite a
bit. The material was generated in two years of work I did for the Secretary of
Defense, thinking about a new national grand strategy for the United States. I'm
going to present a problem and try to give you an answer.
00:59Here's my favorite bonehead concept from the 1990s in the Pentagon: the
theory of anti-access, area-denial asymmetrical strategies. Why do we call it
that? Because it's got all those A's lined up I guess.This is gobbledygook for if the
United States fights somebody we're going to be huge. They're going to be
small. And if they try to fight us in the traditional, straight-up manner we're going
to kick their ass,which is why people don't try to do that any more. I met the last
Air Force General who had actually shot down an enemy plane in combat. He's
now a one star General. That's how distant we are from even meeting an air
force willing to fly against ours. So that overmatched capability creates problems
--catastrophic successes the White House calls them.
01:47(Laughter)
01:50And we're trying to figure that out, because it is an amazing capability. The
question is, what's the good you can do with it? OK? The theory of anti-access,
area-denial asymmetrical strategies -- gobbledygook that we sell to
Congress, because if we just told them we can kick anybody's asses they
wouldn't buy us all the stuff we want. So we say, area-denial, anti-access
asymmetrical strategies and their eyes glaze over.
02:16(Laughter)
02:19And they say, "Will you build it in my district?"
02:22(Laughter)
02:24(Applause)
02:28Here's my parody and it ain't much of one. Let's talk about a battle space. I
don't know, Taiwan Straits 2025. Let's talk about an enemy embedded within
that battle space. I don't know, the Million Man Swim.
02:37(Laughter)
02:40The United States has to access that battle space instantaneously. They
throw up anti-access, area-denial asymmetrical strategies. A banana peel on the
tarmac.
02:49(Laughter)
02:50Trojan horses on our computer networks reveal all our Achilles' heels
instantly. We say, "China, it's yours." Prometheus approach, largely a geographic
definition, focuses almost exclusively on the start of conflict. We field the first-

half team in a league that insists on keeping score until the end of the
game.That's the problem. We can run the score up against anybody, and then
get our asses kicked in the second half -- what they call fourth generation
warfare.
03:16Here's the way I like to describe it instead. There is no battle space the U.S.
Military cannot access. They said we couldn't do Afghanistan. We did it with
ease. They said we couldn't do Iraq. We did it with 150 combat casualties in six
weeks. We did it so fast we weren't prepared for their collapse. There is nobody
we can't take down. The question is, what do you do with the power?
03:38So there's no trouble accessing battle spaces. What we have trouble
accessing is the transition spacethat must naturally follow, and creating the
peace space that allows us to move on. Problem is, the Defense Department over
here beats the hell out of you. The State Department over here says, "Come on
boy, I know you can make it." And that poor country runs off that ledge, does
that cartoon thing and then drops.
04:02(Laughter)
04:08This is not about overwhelming force, but proportional force. It's about nonlethal technologies, because if you fire real ammo into a crowd of women and
children rioting you're going to lose friends very quickly.This is not about
projecting power, but about staying power, which is about legitimacy with the
locals.Who do you access in this transition space?
04:27You have to create internal partners. You have to access coalition
partners. We asked the Indians for 17,000 peace keepers. I know their senior
leadership, they wanted to give it to us. But they said to us, "You know what? In
that transition space you're mostly hat not enough cattle. We don't think you can
pull it off, we're not going to give you our 17,000 peace keepers for fodder." We
asked the Russians for 40,000. They said no. I was in China in August, I said, "You
should have 50,000 peace keepers in Iraq.It's your oil, not ours." Which is the
truth. It's their oil. And the Chinese said to me, "Dr. Barnett, you're absolutely
right. In a perfect world we'd have 50,000 there. But it's not a perfect world, and
your administration isn't getting us any closer." But we have trouble accessing
our outcomes.
05:13We lucked out, frankly, on the selection. We face different opponents
across these three. And it's time to start admitting you can't ask the same 19year-old to do it all, day in and day out. It's just too damn hard.We have an
unparalleled capacity to wage war. We don't do the everything else so
well. Frankly, we do it better than anybody and we still suck at it. We have a
brilliant Secretary of War. We don't have a Secretary of Everything Else. Because
if we did, that guy would be in front of the Senate, still testifying over Abu
Ghraib. The problem is he doesn't exist. There is no Secretary of Everything
Else. I think we have an unparalleled capacity to wage war. I call that the
Leviathan Force. What we need to build is a force for the Everything Else. I call
them the System Administrators.

05:59What I think this really represents is lack of an A to Z rule set for the world
as a whole for processing politically bankrupt states. We have one for processing
economically bankrupt states. It's the IMF Sovereign Bankruptcy Plan, OK? We
argue about it every time we use it. Argentina just went through it, broke a lot of
rules. They got out on the far end, we said, "Fine, don't worry about it." It's
transparent. A certain amount of certainty gives the sense of a non-zero
outcome. We don't have one for processing politically bankrupt states that,
frankly, everybody wants gone. Like Saddam, like Mugabe, like Kim Jong-Il
-- people who kill in hundreds of thousands or millions. Like the 250,000 dead so
far in Sudan.
06:41What would an A to Z system look like? I'm going to distinguish between
what I call front half and back half. And let's call this red line, I don't know,
mission accomplished.
06:52(Laughter)
06:55(Applause)
06:59What we have extant right now, at the beginning of this system, is the U.N.
Security Council as a grand jury. What can they do? They can indict your
ass. They can debate it. They can write it on a piece of paper. They can put it in
an envelope and mail it to you, and then say in no uncertain terms, "Please cut
that out."
07:17(Laughter)
07:22That gets you about four million dead in Central Africa over the 1990s. That
gets you 250,000 dead in the Sudan in the last 15 months. Everybody's got to
answer their grandchildren some day what you did about the holocaust in
Africa, and you better have an answer. We don't have anything to translate that
will into action.
07:43What we do have is the U.S.-enabled Leviathan Force that says, "You want
me to take that guy down? I'll take that guy down. I'll do it on Tuesday. It will cost
you 20 billion dollars."
07:52(Laughter)
07:57But here's the deal. As soon as I can't find anybody else to air out, I leave
the scene immediately. That's called the Powell Doctrine. Way downstream we
have the International Criminal Court. They love to put them on trial. They've got
Milosevic right now.
08:11What are we missing? A functioning executive that will translate will into
action, because we don't have it.Every time we lead one of these efforts we have
to whip ourselves into this imminent threat thing. We haven't faced an imminent
threat since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. But we use this language from a
bygone era to scare ourselves into doing something because we're a democracy

and that's what it takes.And if that doesn't work we scream, "He's got a
gun!" just as we rush in.
08:38(Laughter)
08:46And then we look over the body and we find an old cigarette lighter and we
say, "Jesus, it was dark."
08:51(Laughter)
08:53Do you want to do it, France? France says, "No, but I do like to criticize you
after the fact."
09:00What we need downstream is a great power enabled -- what I call that Sys
Admin Force. We should have had 250,000 troops streaming into Iraq on the
heels of that Leviathan sweeping towards Baghdad. What do you get then? No
looting, no military disappearing, no arms disappearing, no ammo
disappearing, no Muqtada al-Sadr -- I'm wrecking his bones -- no insurgency. Talk
to anybody who was over there in the first six months. We had six months to feel
the lob, to get the job done, and we dicked around for six months. And then they
turned on us. Why? Because they just got fed up. They saw what we did to
Saddam. They said, "You're that powerful, you can resurrect this country. You're
America."
09:36What we need is an international reconstruction fund -- Sebastian Mallaby,
Washington Post, great idea.Model on the IMF. Instead of passing the hat each
time, OK? Where are we going to find this guy? G20, that's easy. Check out their
agenda since 9/11. All security dominated. They're going to decide up front how
the money gets spent just like in the IMF. You vote according to how much money
you put in the kitty. Here's my challenge to the Defense Department. You've got
to build this force. You've got to seed this force. You've got to track coalition
partners. Create a record of success. You will get this model. You tell me it's too
hard to do. I'll walk this dog right through that six part series on the Balkans. We
did it just like that. I'm talking about regularizing it, making it transparent. Would
you like Mugabe gone? Would you like Kim Jong-Il, who's killed about two million
people, would you like him gone? Would you like a better system? This is why it
matters to the military. They've been experiencing an identity crisis since the
end of the Cold War. I'm not talking about the difference between reality and
desire, which I can do because I'm not inside the beltway.
10:39(Laughter)
10:42I'm talking about the 1990s. The Berlin Wall falls. We do Desert Storm. The
split starts to emerge between those in the military who see a future they can
live with, and those who see a future that starts to scare them, like the U.S.
submarine community, which watches the Soviet Navy disappear overnight.Ah!
10:58(Laughter)

11:00So they start moving from reality towards desire and they create their own
special language to describe their voyage of self-discovery and self-actualization.
11:09(Laughter)
11:12The problem is you need a big, sexy opponent to fight against. And if you
can't find one you've got to make one up. China, all grown up, going to be a
looker!
11:19(Laughter)
11:23The rest of the military got dragged down into the muck across the
1990s and they developed this very derisive term to describe it: military
operations other than war. I ask you, who joins the military to do things other
than war? Actually, most of them. Jessica Lynch never planned on shooting
back. Most of them don't pick up a rifle. I maintain this is code inside the Army
for, "We don't want to do this." They spent the 1990s working the messy
scene between globalized parts of the world What I call the core and the
gap. The Clinton administration wasn't interested in running this. For eight years,
after screwing up the relationship on day one -- inauguration day with gays in the
military -- which was deft.
12:07(Laughter)
12:09So we were home alone for eight years. And what did we do home
alone? We bought one military and we operated another. It's like the guy who
goes to the doctor and says, "Doctor, it hurts when I do this."
12:20(Laughter)
12:23The doctor says, "Stop doing that you idiot."
12:26I used to give this brief inside the Pentagon in the early 1990s. I'd say,
"You're buying one military and you're operating another, and eventually it's
going to hurt. It's wrong. Bad Pentagon, bad!"
12:34(Laughter)
12:36And they'd say, "Dr. Barnett, you are so right. Can you come back next year
and remind us again?"
12:40(Laughter)
12:46Some people say 9/11 heals the rift -- jerks the long-term transformation
gurus out of their 30,000 foot view of history, drags them down in to the muck
and says, "You want a networked opponent? I've got one, he's everywhere, go
find him." It elevates MOOTW -- how we pronounce that acronym -- from crap to
grand strategy, because that's how you're going to shrink that gap.
13:06Some people put these two things together and they call it empire, which I
think is a boneheaded concept. Empire is about the enforcement of not just
minimal rule sets, which you cannot do, but maximum rule sets which you must

do. It's not our system of governance. Never how we've sought to interact with
the outside world. I prefer that phrase System Administration. We enforce the
minimal rule sets for maintaining connectivity to the global economy. Certain bad
things you cannot do. How this impacts the way we think about the future of
war. This is a concept which gets me vilified throughout the Pentagon. It makes
me very popular as well. Everybody's got an opinion.
13:40Going back to the beginning of our country -- historically, defenses meant
protection of the homeland.Security has meant everything else. Written into our
constitution, two different forces, two different functions. Raise an army when
you need it, and maintain a navy for day-to-day connectivity. A Department of
War, a Department of Everything Else. A big stick, a baton stick. Can of whup
ass, the networking force. In 1947 we merged these two things together in the
Defense Department. Our long-term rationale becomes, we're involved in a hair
trigger stand off with the Soviets. To attack America is to risk blowing up the
world. We connected national security to international security with about a
seven minute time delay. That's not our problem now. They can kill three million
in Chicago tomorrow and we don't go to the mattresses with nukes. That's the
scary part.
14:43The question is how do we reconnect American national security with
global security to make the world a lot more comfortable, and to embed and
contextualize our employment of force around the planet?What's happened since
is that bifurcation I described. We talked about this going all the way back to the
end of the Cold War. Let's have a Department of War, and a Department of
Something Else. Some people say, "Hell, 9/11 did it for you." Now we've got a
home game and an away game.
15:14(Laughter)
15:20The Department of Homeland Security is a strategic feel good measure. It's
going to be the Department of Agriculture for the 21st century. TSA -- thousands
standing around.
15:31(Laughter)
15:38Just be grateful Robert Reed didn't shove that bomb up his ass.
15:41(Laughter)
15:55Because we'd all be gay then.
15:58I supported the war in Iraq. He was a bad guy with multiple priors. It's not
like we had to find him actually killing somebody live to arrest him. I knew we'd
kick ass in the war with the Leviathan Force. I knew we'd have a hard time with
what followed. But I know this organization doesn't change until it experiences
failure. What do I mean by these two different forces?

16:21This is the Hobbesian Force. I love this force. I don't want to see it go. That
plus nukes rules out great power war. This is the military the rest of the world
wants us to build. It's why I travel all over the world talking to foreign militaries.
16:32What does this mean? It means you've got to stop pretending you can do
these two very disparate skill sets with the same 19-year-old. Switching back,
morning, afternoon, evening, morning, afternoon, evening. Handing out aid,
shooting back, handing out aid, shooting back. It's too much. The 19-year-olds
get tired from the switching, OK?
16:54(Laughter)
16:56That force on the left, you can train a 19-year-old to do that. That force on
the right is more like a 40-year-old cop. You need the experience. What does this
mean in terms of operations?
17:09The rule is going to be this. That Sys Admin force is the force that never
comes home, does most of your work. You break out that Leviathan Force only
every so often. But here's the promise you make to the American public, to your
own people, to the world. You break out that Leviathan Force, you promise, you
guarantee that you're going to mount one hell of a -- immediately -- follow-on
Sys Admin effort. Don't plan for the war unless you plan to win the peace.
17:35(Applause)
17:41Other differences. Leviathan traditional partners, they all look like the
Brits and their former colonies.
17:47(Laughter)
17:49Including us, I would remind you. The rest -- wider array of
partners. International organizations, non-governmental organizations, private
voluntary organizations, contractors. You're not going to get away from
that. Leviathan Force, it's all about joint operations between the military
services. We're done with that. What we need to do is inter-agency
operations, which frankly Condi Rice was in charge of. And I'm amazed nobody
asked her that question when she was confirmed.
18:12I call the Leviathan Force your dad's military. I like them young, male,
unmarried, slightly pissed off.
18:19(Laughter)
18:26I call the Sys Admin Force your mom's military. It's everything the man's
military hates. Gender balanced much more, older, educated, married with
children. The force on the left, up or out. The force on the right, in and out. The
force on the left respects Posse Comitatus restrictions on the use of force inside
the U.S.The force on the right's going to obliterate it. That's where the National
Guard's going to be. The force on the left is never coming under the purview of
the International Criminal Court. Sys Admin Force has to.Different definitions of

network centricity. One takes down networks, one puts them up. And you've got
to wage war here in such a way to facilitate that.
19:07Do we need a bigger budget? Do we need a draft to pull this off? Absolutely
not. I've been told by the Revolution of Military Affairs crowd for years, we can do
it faster, cheaper, smaller, just as lethal. I say, "Great, I'm going to take the Sys
Admin budget out of your hide."
19:27Here's the larger point. You're going to build the Sys Admin Force inside the
U.S. Military first. But ultimately you're going to civilianize it, probably two
thirds. Inter agency-ize it, internationalize it. So yes, it begins inside the
Pentagon, but over time it's going to cross that river.
19:44(Laughter)
19:47I have been to the mountain top. I can see the future. I may not live long
enough to get you there, but it's going to happen. We're going to have a
Department of Something Else between war and peace.
19:57Last slide. Who gets custody of the kids? This is where the Marines in the
audience get kind of tense.(Laughter) And this is when they think about beating
the crap out of me after the talk.
20:13(Laughter)
20:14Read Max Boon. This is the history of the marines -- small wars, small
arms. The Marines are like my West Highland Terrier. They get up every morning,
they want to dig a hole and they want to kill something.
20:24(Laughter)
20:26I don't want my Marines handing out aid. I want them to be Marines. That's
what keeps the Sys Admin Force from being a pussy force. It keeps it from being
the U.N. You shoot at these people the Marines are going to come over and kill
you.
20:38(Laughter)
20:41(Applause)
20:44Department of Navy, strategic subs go this way, surface combatants are
over there, and the news is they may actually be that small.
20:51(Laughter)
20:54I call it the Smart Dust Navy. I tell young officers, "You may command 500
ships in your career. Bad news is they may not have anybody on them." Carriers
go both ways because they're a swing asset. You'll see the pattern -- airborne,
just like carriers. Armor goes this way. Here's the dirty secret of the Air Force, you
can win by bombing. But you need lots of these guys on the ground to win the
peace. Shinseki was right with the argument. Air force, strategic airlift goes both
ways. Bombers, fighters go over here. Special Operations Command down at

Tampa. Trigger-pullers go this way. Civil Affairs, that bastard child, comes over
here. Return to the Army. The point about the trigger-pullers and Special
Operations Command. No off season, these guys are always active. They drop in,
do their business, disappear. See me now. Don't talk about it later.
21:56(Laughter)
22:00I was never here.
22:02(Laughter)
22:05The world is my playground.
22:07(Laughter)
22:11I want to keep trigger-pullers trigger-happy. I want the rules to be as loose
as possible. Because when the thing gets prevented in Chicago with the three
million dead that perverts our political system beyond all recognition, these are
the guys who are going to kill them first. So it's better off to have them make
some mistakes along the way than to see that.
22:28Reserve component -- National Guard reserves overwhelmingly Sys
Admin. How are you going to get them to work for this force? Most firemen in this
country do it for free. This is not about money. This is about being up front with
these guys and gals.
22:44Last point, intelligence community -- the muscle and the defense agencies
go this way. What should be the CIA, open, analytical, open source should come
over here. The information you need to do this is not secret. It's not secret. Read
that great piece in the New Yorker about how our echo boomers, 19 to 25, over in
Iraq taught each other how to do Sys Admin work, over the Internet in chat
rooms. They said, "Al Qaeda could be listening." They said, "Well, Jesus, they
already know this stuff."
23:13(Laughter)
23:16Take a gift in the left hand. These are the sunglasses that don't scare
people, simple stuff. Censors and transparency, the overheads go in both
directions.
23:27Thanks.
Joseph Nye: Global power shifts
00:11I'm going to talk to you about power in this 21st century. And basically,
what I'd like to tell you is that power is changing, and there are two types of
changes I want to discuss. One is power transition, which is change of power
amongst states. And there the simple version of the message is it's moving from
West to East. The other is power diffusion, the way power is moving from all
states West or East to non-state actors. Those two things are the huge shifts of

power in our century. And I want to tell you about them each separately and then
how they interact and why, in the end, there may be some good news.
01:02When we talk about power transition, we often talk about the rise of Asia. It
really should be called the recovery or return of Asia. If we looked at the world in
1800, you'd find that more than half of the world's people lived in Asia and they
made more than half the world's product. Now fast forward to 1900: half the
world's people -- more than half -- still live in Asia, but they're now making only a
fifth of the world's product. What happened? The Industrial Revolution, which
meant that all of a sudden, Europe and America became the dominant center of
the world. What we're going to see in the 21st century is Asia gradually
returning to being more than half of the world's population and more than half of
the world's product. That's important and it's an important shift. But let me tell
you a little bit about the other shift that I'm talking about, which is power
diffusion.
02:07To understand power diffusion put this in your mind: computing and
communications costs have fallen a thousandfold between 1970 and the
beginning of this century. Now that's a big abstract number. But to make it more
real, if the price of an automobile had fallen as rapidly as the price of computing
power, you could buy a car today for five dollars. Now when the price of any
technology declines that dramatically,the barriers to entry go down. Anybody
can play in the game. So in 1970, if you wanted to communicatefrom Oxford to
Johannesburg to New Delhi to Brasilia and anywhere simultaneously, you could
do it. The technology was there. But to be able to do it, you had to be very rich
-- a government, a multinational corporation, maybe the Catholic Church -- but
you had to be pretty wealthy. Now, anybody has that capacity, which previously
was restricted by price just to a few actors. If they have the price of entry into an
Internet cafe -- the last time I looked, it was something like a pound an hour
-- and if you have Skype, it's free. So capabilities that were once restricted are
now available to everyone. And what that means
03:41is not that the age of the State is over. The State still matters. But the
stage is crowded. The State's not alone. There are many, many actors. Some of
that's good: Oxfam, a great non-governmental actor. Some of it's bad: Al Qaeda,
another non-governmental actor. But think of what it does to how we think in
traditional terms and concepts. We think in terms of war and interstate war. And
you can think back to 1941 when the government of Japan attacked the United
States at Pearl Harbor. It's worth noticing that a non-state actor attacking the
United States in 2001 killed more Americans than the government of Japan did in
1941. You might think of that as the privatization of war. So we're seeing a great
change in terms of diffusion of power.
04:42Now the problem is that we're not thinking about it in very innovative
ways. So let me step back and ask: what's power? Power is simple the ability to
affect others to get the outcomes you want, and you can do it in three ways. You
can do it with threats of coercion, "sticks," you can do it with
payments, "carrots,"or you can do it by getting others to want what you

want. And that ability to get others to want what you want, to get the outcomes
you want without coercion or payment, is what I call soft power. And that soft
power has been much neglected and much misunderstood, and yet it's
tremendously important. Indeed, if you can learn to use more soft power, you
can save a lot on carrots and sticks. Traditionally, the way people thought about
power was primarily in terms of military power. For example, the great Oxford
historian who taught here at this university, A.J.P. Taylor, defined a great
power as a country able to prevail in war. But we need a new narrative if we're to
understand power in the 21st century. It's not just prevailing at war, though war
still persists. It's not whose army wins; it's also whose story wins. And we have to
think much more in terms of narratives and whose narrative is going to be
effective.
06:19Now let me go back to the question of power transition between states and
what's happening there. the narratives that we use now tend to be the rise and
fall of the great powers. And the current narrative is all about the rise of
China and the decline of the United States. Indeed, with the 2008 financial
crisis, many people said this was the beginning of the end of American
power. The tectonic plates of world politics were shifting. And president
Medvedev of Russia, for example, pronounced in 2008 this was the beginning of
the end of United States power. But in fact, this metaphor of decline is often very
misleading. If you look at history, in recent history, you'll see the cycles of
belief in American declinecome and go every 10 or 15 years or so. In 1958, after
the Soviets put up Sputnik, it was "That's the end of America." In 1973, with the
oil embargo and the closing of the gold window, that was the end of America. In
the 1980s, as America went through a transition in the Reagan period, between
the rust belt economy of the midwest to the Silicon Valley economy of
California, that was the end of America. But in fact, what we've seen is none of
those were true. Indeed, people were over-enthusiastic in the early
2000s, thinking America could do anything, which led us into some
disastrous foreign policy adventures,and now we're back to decline again.
08:02The moral of this story is all these narratives about rise and fall and
decline tell us a lot more about psychology than they do about reality. If we try to
focus on the reality, then what we need to focus on is what's really happening in
terms of China and the United States. Goldman Sachs has projected that China,
the Chinese economy, will surpass that of the U.S. by 2027. So we've got,
what, 17 more years to go or so before China's bigger. Now someday, with a
billion point three people getting richer, they are going to be bigger than the
United States. But be very careful about these projections such as the Goldman
Sachs projection as though that gives you an accurate picture of power transition
in this century. Let me mention three reasons why it's too simple. First of all, it's
a linear projection. You know, everything says, here's the growth rate of China,
here's the growth rate of the U.S., here it goes -- straight line. History is not
linear. There are often bumps along the road, accidents along the way. The
second thing is that the Chinese economy passes the U.S. economy in, let's say,
2030, which it may it,that will be a measure of total economic size, but not of per
capita income -- won't tell you about the composition of the economy. China still

has large areas of underdevelopment and per capita income is a better

measure of the sophistication of the economy. And that the Chinese won't catch
up or pass the Americans until somewhere in the latter part, after 2050, of this
century.
09:46The other point that's worth noticing is how one-dimensional this projection
is. You know, it looks at economic power measured by GDP. Doesn't tell you much
about military power, doesn't tell you very much about soft power. It's all very
one-dimensional. And also, when we think about the rise of Asia, or return of
Asia as I called it a little bit earlier, it's worth remembering Asia's not one thing. If
you're sitting in Japan, or in New Delhi, or in Hanoi, your view of the rise of
China is a little different than if you're sitting in Beijing. Indeed, one of the
advantages that the Americans will have in terms of power in Asia is all those
countries want an American insurance policy against the rise of China. It's as
though Mexico and Canadawere hostile neighbors to the United States, which
they're not. So these simple projections of the Goldman Sachs type are not
telling us what we need to know about power transition.
10:53But you might ask, well so what in any case? Why does it matter? Who
cares? Is this just a game that diplomats and academics play? The answer is it
matters quite a lot. Because, if you believe in declineand you get the answers
wrong on this, the facts, not the myths, you may have policies which are very
dangerous. Let me give you an example from history. The Peloponnesian War was
the great conflict in which the Greek city state system tore itself apart two and a
half millennia ago. What caused it?Thucydides, the great historian of the the
Peloponnesian War, said it was the rise in the power of Athensand the fear it
created in Sparta. Notice both halves of that explanation.
11:44Many people argue that the 21st century is going to repeat the 20th
century, in which World War One, the great conflagration in which the European
state system tore itself apart and destroyed its centrality in the world, that that
was caused by the rise in the power of Germany and the fear it created in
Britain. So there are people who are telling us this is going to be reproduced
today, that what we're going to see is the same thing now in this century. No, I
think that's wrong. It's bad history. For one thing, Germany had surpassed
Britain in industrial strength by 1900. And as I said earlier, China has not passed
the United States. But also, if you have this belief and it creates a sense of
fear, it leads to overreaction. And the greatest danger we have of managing this
power transition of the shift toward the East is fear. To paraphrase Franklin
Roosevelt from a different context, the greatest thing we have to fear is fear
itself.We don't have to fear the rise of China or the return of Asia. And if we have
policies in which we take it in that larger historical perspective, we're going to be
able to manage this process.
13:07Let me say a word now about the distribution of power and how it relates to
power diffusion and then pull these two types together. If you ask how is power
distributed in the world today, it's distributed much likea three-dimensional chess
game. Top board: military power among states. The United States is the only

superpower, and it's likely to remain that way for two or three decades. China's
not going to replace the U.S. on this military board. Middle board of this threedimensional chess game: economic power among states. Power is multipolar. There are balancers -- the U.S., Europe, China, Japan can balance each
other. The bottom board of this three-dimensional, the board of transnational
relations, things that cross borders outside the control of governments, things
like climate change, drug trade, financial flows,pandemics, all these things that
cross borders outside the control of governments, there nobody's in charge. It
makes no sense to call this unipolar or multi-polar. Power is chaotically
distributed. And the only way you can solve these problems -- and this is where
many greatest challenges are coming in this century -- is through
cooperation, through working together, which means that soft power becomes
more important, that ability to organize networks to deal with these kinds of
problems and to be able to get cooperation.
14:43Another way of putting it is that as we think of power in the 21st
century, we want to get away from the idea that power's always zero sum -- my
gain is your loss and vice versa. Power can also be positive sum, where your gain
can be my gain. If China develops greater energy security and greater
capacity to deal with its problems of carbon emissions, that's good for us as well
as good for China as well as good for everybody else. So empowering China to
deal with its own problems of carbon is good for everybody,and it's not a zero
sum, I win, you lose. It's one in which we can all gain. So as we think about
power in this century, we want to get away from this view that it's all I win, you
lose. Now I don't mean to be Pollyannaish about this. Wars persist. Power
persists. Military power is important. Keeping balances is important. All this still
persists. Hard power is there, and it will remain. But unless you learn how to
mixhard power with soft power into strategies that I call smart power, you're not
going to deal with the new kinds of problems that we're facing.
16:03So the key question that we need to think about as we look at this is how
do we work together to produce global public goods, things from which all of us
can benefit? How do we define our national interests so that it's not just zero
sum, but positive sum. In that sense, if we define our interests, for example, for
the United States the way Britain defined its interests in the 19th
century, keeping an open trading system, keeping a monetary stability, keeping
freedom of the seas -- those were good for Britain,they were good for others as
well. And in the 21st century, you have to do an analog to that. How do we
produce global public goods, which are good for us, but good for everyone at the
same time? And that's going to be the good news dimension of what we need to
think about as we think of power in the 21st century.
16:54There are ways to define our interests in which, while protecting ourselves
with hard power, we can organize with others in networks to produce, not only
public goods, but ways that will enhance our soft power. So if one looks at the
statements that have been made about this, I am impressed that when Hillary
Clinton described the foreign policy of the Obama administration, she said that
the foreign policy of the Obama administration was going to be smart power, as

she put it, "using all the tools in our foreign policy tool box." And if we're going to
deal with these two great power shifts that I've described, the power shift
represented by transition among states, the power shift represented by diffusion
of power away from all states, we're going to have to develop a new narrative of
power in which we combine hard and soft power into strategies of smart
power. And that's the good news I have. We can do that.
17:57Thank you very much.
17:59(Applause)
Shaffi Mather: A new way to fight corruption
00:11The anger in me against corruption made me to make a big career
change last year, becoming a full-time practicing lawyer. My experiences over
the last 18 months, as a lawyer, has seeded in me a new entrepreneurial
idea, which I believe is indeed worth spreading. So, I share it with all of you here
today,though the idea itself is getting crystallized and I'm still writing up the
business plan. Of course it helps that fear of public failure diminishes as the
number of ideas which have failed increases.
00:53I've been a huge fan of enterprise and entrepreneurship since 1993. I've
explored, experienced, and experimented enterprise and capitalism to my
heart's content. I built, along with my two brothers, the leading real estate
company in my home state, Kerala, and then worked professionally with two of
India's biggest businessmen, but in their startup enterprises. In 2003, when I
stepped out of the pure play capitalistic sector to work on so-called social sector
issues, I definitely did not have any grand strategy or plan to pursue and find forprofit solutions to addressing pressing public issues.
01:40When life brought about a series of death and near-death
experiences within my close circle, which highlighted the need for an emergency
medical response service in India, similar to 911 in USA. To address this, I, along
with four friends, founded Ambulance Access for All, to promote life-support
ambulance services in India. For those from the developing world, there is
nothing, absolutely nothing new in this idea. But as we envisioned it, we had
three key goals: Providing world-class life support ambulance service which is
fully self-sustainable from its own revenue streams, and universally accessible to
anyone in a medical emergency, irrespective of the capability to pay. The service
which grew out of this, Dial 1298 for Ambulance, with one ambulance in
2004, now has a hundred-plus ambulances in three states, and has transported
over 100,000 patients and victims since inception.
02:42The service is -- (Applause) fully self-sustainable from its own
revenues, without accessing any public funds, and the cross-subsidy model
actually works, where the rich pays higher, poor pays lower, and the accident
victim is getting the service free of charge. The service responded effectively and
efficiently,during the unfortunate 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks. And as you can
see from the visuals, the service was responding and rescuing victims from the

incident locations even before the police could cordon off the incident
locations and formally confirm it as a terror strike. We ended up being the first
medical response team in every incident location and transported 125
victims, saving life.
03:41(Applause)
03:46In tribute and remembrance of 26/11 attacks over the last one year, we
have actually helped a Pakistani NGO, Aman Foundation, to set up a selfsustainable life support ambulance service in Karachi, facilitated by Acumen
Fund.
04:10(Applause)
04:16It's a small message from us, in our own small way to the enemies of
humanity, of Islam, of South Asia, of India, and of Pakistan, that humanity will
continue to bloom, irrespective of such dastardly attacks. Since then I've also cofounded two other social enterprises. One is Education Access for All, setting up
schools in small-town India. And the other is Moksha-Yug Access, which is
integrating rural supply chainon the foundations of self-help group-based
microfinance. I guess we seem to be doing at least a few things right. Because
diligent investors and venture funds have committed over 7.5 million dollars in
funding. With the significance being these funds have come in as a QT capital,
not as grant or as philanthropy.
05:09Now I come back to the idea of the new social enterprise that I'm
exploring. Corruption, bribes, and lack of transparency. You may be surprised to
know that eight speakers yesterday actually mentioned these terms in their
talks. Bribes and corruption have both a demand and a supply side, with the
supply side being mostly of greedy corporate unethical businesses and hapless
common man. And the demand side being mostly politicians, bureaucrats and
those who have discretionary power vested with them.
05:42According to World Bank estimate, one trillion dollars is paid in bribes every
year, worsening the condition of the already worse off. Yet, if you analyze the
common man, he or she does not wake up every day and say, "Hmm, let me see
who I can pay a bribe to today." or, "Let me see who I can corrupt today." Often it
is the constraining or the back-to-the-wall situation that the hapless common
man finds himself or herself in that leads him to pay a bribe. In the modern day
world, where time is premium and battle for subsistence is unimaginably
tough, the hapless common man simply gives in and pays the bribe just to get
on with life.
06:26Now, let me ask you another question. Imagine you are being asked to pay
a bribe in your day-to-day life to get something done. What do you do? Of course
you can call the police. But what is the use if the police department is in itself
steeped in corruption? Most definitely you don't want to pay the bribe. But you
also don't have the time, resources, expertise or wherewithal to fight

this. Unfortunately, many of us in this room are supporters of capitalist policies

and market forces.
06:57Yet the market forces around the world have not yet thrown up a service
where you can call in, pay a fee, and fight the demand for a bribe. Like a bribe
buster service, or 1-800-Fight-Bribes, or www.stopbribes.org
or www.preventcorruption.org. Such a service simply do not exist. One image
that has haunted me from my early business days is of a grandmother, 70 plus
years, being harassed by the bureaucrats in the town planning office. All she
needed was permission to build three steps to her house, from ground
level, making it easier for her to enter and exit her house. Yet the officer in
charge would not simply give her the permit for want of a bribe. Even though it
pricked my conscience then, I could not, or rather I did not tend to her or assist
her, because I was busy building my real estate company. I don't want to be
haunted by such images any more.
07:56A group of us have been working on a pilot basis to address individual
instances of demands for bribes for common services or entitlement. And in all
42 cases where we have pushed back such demandsusing existing and
legitimate tools like the Right to Information Act, video, audio, or peer
pressure, we have successfully obtained whatever our clients set out to achieve
without actually paying a bribe. And with the cost of these tools being
substantially lower than the bribe demanded. I believe that these tools that
worked in these 42 pilot cases can be consolidated in standard processes in a
BPO kind of environment, and made available on web, call-center and franchise
physical offices, for a fee, to serve anyone confronted with a demand for a
bribe. The target market is as tempting as it can get. It can be worth up to one
trillion dollars, being paid in bribes every year, or equal to India's GDP. And it is
an absolutely virgin market.
09:02I propose to explore this idea further, to examine the potential of creating a
for-profit, fee-based BPOkind of service to stop bribes and prevent corruption. I
do realize that the fight for justice against corruption is never easy. It never has
been and it never will be. In my last 18 months as a lawyer, battling small- and
large-scale corruption, including the one perpetrated by India's biggest corporate
scamster.Through his charities I have had three police cases filed against
me alleging trespass, impersonation and intimidation. The battle against
corruption exacts a toll on ourselves, our families, our friends, and even our
kids. Yet I believe the price we pay is well worth holding on to our dignity and
making the world a fairer place.
09:54What gives us the courage? As my close friend replied, when told during
the seeding days of the ambulance project that it is an impossible task and the
founders are insane to chalk up their blue-chip jobs, I quote: "Of course we
cannot fail in this, at least in our own minds. For we are insane people, trying to
do an impossible task. And an insane person does not know what an impossible
task is." Thank you.
10:19(Applause)

10:27Chris Anderson: Shaffi, that is a really exciting business idea. Shaffi Mather:
I just have to get through the initial days where I don't get eliminated.
10:36(Laughter)
10:38CA: What's on your mind? I mean, give us a sense of the numbers here -- a
typical bribe and a typical fee. I mean, what's in your head?
10:44SM: So let me ... Let me give you an example. Somebody who had applied
for the passport. The officer was just sitting on it and was demanding around
3,000 rupees in bribes. And he did not want to pay. So we actually used the Right
to Information Act, which is equal to the Freedom of Information Act in the United
States, and pushed back the officers in this particular case. And in all these 42
cases, when we kept pushing them back, there was three kinds of reaction. A set
of people actually say, "Oh, let me just grant it to them, and run away from
it." Some people actually come back and say, "Oh, you want to screw me. Let me
show you what I can do." And he will push us back. So you take the next step, or
use the next tool available in what we are putting together, and then he
relents. By the third time, in all 42 cases, we have achieved success.
11:42CA: But if it's a 3,000-rupee, 70-dollar bribe, what fee would you have to
charge, and can you actually make the business work?
11:51SM: Well, actually the cost that we incurred was less than 200 rupees. So, it
actually works.
12:01CA: That's a high gross margin business. I like it.
12:04(Laughter)
12:06SM: I actually did not want to answer this on the TED stage.
12:09CA: OK, so these are provisional numbers, no pricing guarantee. If you can
pull this off, you will be a global hero. I mean, this could be huge. Thank you so
much for sharing this idea at TED.
12:20(Applause)

Jody Williams:
A realistic vision for world peace
00:11I'm actually here to make a challenge to people. I know there have been many challenges
made to people. The one I'm going to make is that it is time for us to reclaim what peace really
means. Peace is not "Kumbaya, my Lord." Peace is not the dove and the rainbow -- as lovely as
they are. When I see the symbols of the rainbow and the dove, I think of personal serenity. I think
of meditation. I do not thinkabout what I consider to be peace, which is sustainable peace with
justice and equality. It is a sustainable peace in which the majority of people on this planet have
access to enough resources to live dignified lives, where these people have enough access to

education and health care, so that they can live in freedom from want and freedom from
fear. This is called human security. And I am not a complete pacifist like some of my really, really
heavy-duty, non-violent friends, like Mairead McGuire. I understand that humans are so "messed
up" -- to use a nice word, because I promised my mom I'd stop using the F-bomb in public. And
I'm trying harder and harder. Mom, I'm really trying.
01:49We need a little bit of police; we need a little bit of military, but for defense. We need to
redefine what makes us secure in this world. It is not arming our country to the teeth. It is not
getting other countries to arm themselves to the teeth with the weapons that we produce and we
sell them. It is using that money more rationally to make the countries of the world secure, to
make the people of the world secure. I was thinking about the recent ongoings in
Congress, where the president is offering 8.4 billion dollars to try to get the START vote. I
certainly support the START vote. But he's offering 84 billion dollars for the modernizing of
nuclear weapons. Do you know the figure that the U.N. talks about for fulfilling the Millennium
Development Goals is 80 billion dollars? Just that little bit of money, which to me, I wish it was in
my bank account -- it's not, but ... In global terms, it's a little bit of money. But it's going to
modernize weapons we do not need and will not be gotten rid of in our lifetime, unless we get up
off our ... and take action to make it happen, unless we begin to believe that all of the things that
we've been hearing about in these last two days are elements of what come together to make
human security. It is saving the tigers. It is stopping the tar sands. It is having access to medical
equipment that can actually tell who does have cancer. It is all of those things. It is using our
money for all of those things. It is about action.
03:56I was in Hiroshima a couple of weeks ago, and His Holiness -- we're sitting there in front of
thousands of people in the city, and there were about eight of us Nobel laureates. And he's a bad
guy. He's like a bad kid in church. We're staring at everybody, waiting our turn to speak, and he
leans over to me, and he says, "Jody, I'm a Buddhist monk." I said, "Yes, Your Holiness. Your
robe gives it away." (Laughter) He said, "You know that I kind of like meditation, and I pray." I
said, "That's good. That's good. We need that in the world. I don't follow that, but that's cool." And
he says, "But I have become skeptical. I do not believe that meditation and prayer will change this
world. I think what we need is action." His Holiness, in his robes, is my new action hero.
04:58I spoke with Aung Sun Suu Kyi a couple of days ago. As most of you know, she's a hero for
democracy in her country, Burma. You probably also know that she has spent 15 of the last 20
years imprisoned for her efforts to bring about democracy. She was just released a couple of
weeks ago, and we're very concerned to see how long she will be free, because she is already
out in the streets in Rangoon,agitating for change. She is already out in the streets, working with
the party to try to rebuild it. But I talked to her for a range of issues. But one thing that I want to
say, because it's similar to what His Holiness said. She said, "You know, we have a long road to
go to finally get democracy in my country.But I don't believe in hope without endeavor. I don't
believe in the hope of change, unless we take actionto make it so."
05:58Here's another woman hero of mine. She's my friend, Dr. Shirin Ebadi, the first Muslim
woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She has been in exile for the last year and a half. You

ask her where she lives -- where does she live in exile? She says the airports of the world. She is
traveling because she was out of the country at the time of the elections. And instead of going
home, she conferred with all the other women that she works with, who said to her, "Stay out. We
need you out. We need to be able to talk to you out there, so that you can give the message of
what's happening here." A year and a half -- she's out speaking on behalf of the other women in
her country.
06:44Wangari Maathai -- 2004 Peace laureate. They call her the "Tree Lady," but she's more than
the Tree Lady. Working for peace is very creative. It's hard work every day. When she was
planting those trees, I don't think most people understand that, at the same time, she was using
the action of getting people together to plant those trees to talk about how to overcome the
authoritarian government in her country.People could not gather without getting busted and taken
to jail. But if they were together planting trees for the environment, it was okay -- creativity. But it's
not just iconic women like Shirin, like Aung Sun Suu Kyi, like Wangari Maathai -- it is other
women in the world who are also struggling together to change this world.
07:44The Women's League of Burma, 11 individual organizations of Burmese women came
together because there's strength in numbers. Working together is what changes our world. The
Million Signatures Campaign of women inside Burma working together to change human
rights, to bring democracy to that country. When one is arrested and taken to prison, another one
comes out and joins the movement,recognizing that if they work together, they will ultimately
bring change in their own country.
08:17Mairead McGuire in the middle, Betty Williams on the right-hand side -- bringing peace to
Northern Ireland. I'll tell you the quick story. An IRA driver was shot, and his car plowed into
people on the side of the street. There was a mother and three children. The children were killed
on the spot. It was Mairead's sister. Instead of giving in to grief, depression, defeat in the face of
that violence, Mairead hooked up with Betty -- a staunch Protestant and a staunch Catholic
-- and they took to the streets to say, "No more violence." And they were able to get tens of
thousands of, primarily, women, some men, in the streets to bring about change. And they have
been part of what brought peace to Northern Ireland, and they're still working on it, because
there's still a lot more to do.
09:13This is Rigoberta Menchu Tum. She also received the Peace Prize. She is now running for
president. She is educating the indigenous people of her country about what it means to be a
democracy, about how you bring democracy to the country, about educating, about how to vote
-- but that democracy is not just about voting; it's about being an active citizen.
09:35That's what I got stuck doing -- the landmine campaign. One of the things that made this
campaign workis because we grew from two NGOs to thousands in 90 countries around the
world, working together in common cause to ban landmines. Some of the people who worked in
our campaign could only work maybe an hour a month. They could maybe volunteer that
much. There were others, like myself, who were full-time. But it was the actions, together, of all of
us that brought about that change.

10:08In my view, what we need today is people getting up and taking action to reclaim the
meaning of peace.It's not a dirty word. It's hard work every single day. And if each of us who
cares about the different things we care about got up off our butts and volunteered as much time
as we could, we would change this world, we would save this world. And we can't wait for the
other guy. We have to do it ourselves.
10:37Thank you.
10:39(Applause)

James Forbes: Compassion at the dinner table

00:12Compassion: what does it look like? Come with me to 915 South Bloodworth Street in
Raleigh, North Carolina, where I grew up. If you come in you will see us: evening time, at table -set for ten but not always all seats filled -- at the point when dinner is ready to be served. Since
mom had eight kids,sometimes she said she couldn't tell who was who and where they
were. Before we could eat, she would ask, "Are all the children in?" And if someone happened to
be missing, we would have to, we say, "Fix a plate" for that person, put it in the oven, then we
could say grace, and we could eat.
01:08Also, while we were at the table, there was a ritual in our family: when something significant
had happened for any one of us -- whether mom had just been elected as the president of the
PTA, or whether dad had gotten an assignment at the college of our denomination, or whether
someone had won the jabberwocky contest for talent -- the ritual at the family was, once the
announcement is made, we must take five, ten minutes to do what we call "make over" that
person -- that is, to make a fuss over the one who had been honored in some way. For when one
is honored, all are honored.
01:56Also, we had to make a report on our extended "visited" members, that is, extended
members of the family, sick and elderly, shut in. My task was, at least once a week, to visit
Mother Lassiter who lived on East Street, Mother Williamson who lived on Bledsoe Avenue, and
Mother Lathers who lived on Oberlin Road. Why? Because they were old and infirm, and we
needed to go by to see if they needed anything.For mom said, "To be family, is to care and share
and to look out for one another. They are our family."
02:39And, of course, sometimes there was a bonus for going. They would offer sweets or
money. Mom says, "If they ask you what it costs to either go shopping for them, you must always
say, 'Nothing.' And if they insist, say, 'Whatever you mind to give me.'" This was the nature of
being at that table. In fact, she indicated that if we would do that, not only would we have the joy
of receiving the gratitude from the members of the extended family, but she said, "Even God will
smile, and when God smiles, there is peace, and justice, and joy."
03:21So, at the table at 915, I learned something about compassion. Of course, it was a
minister's family, so we had to add God into it. And so, I came to think that mama eternal, mama

eternal, is always wondering: Are all the children in? And if we had been faithful in caring and
sharing, we had the sense that justice and peace would have a chance in the world.
03:56Now, it was not always wonderful at that table. Let me explain a point at which we did not
rise to the occasion. It was Christmas, and at our family, oh, what a morning. Christmas morning,
where we open up our gifts, where we have special prayers, and where we get to the old upright
piano and we would sing carols. It was a very intimate moment. In fact, you could come down to
the tree to get your gifts and get ready to sing, and then get ready for breakfast without even
taking a bath or getting dressed, except that daddy messed it up.
04:31There was a member of his staff who did not have any place on that particular Christmas to
celebrate.And daddy brought Elder Revels to the Christmas family celebration. We thought he
must be out of his mind. This is our time. This is intimate time. This is when we can just be who
we are, and now we have this stuffy brother with his shirt and tie on, while we are still in our
PJs. Why would daddy bring Elder Revels? Any other time, but not to the Christmas celebration.
05:11And mom overheard us and said, "Well, you know what? If you really understand the nature
of this celebration, it is that this is a time where you extend the circle of love. That's what the
celebration is all about. It's time to make space, to share the enjoyment of life in a beloved
community." So, we sucked up. (Laughter)
05:41But growing up at 915, compassion was not a word to be debated; it was a sensibility to
how we are together. We are sisters and brothers united together. And, like Chief Seattle said,
"We did not spin the web of life. We're all strands in it. And whatever we do to the web, we do to
ourselves." Now that's compassion.
06:12So, let me tell you, I kind of look at the world this way. I see pictures, and something says,
"Now, that's compassion." A harvested field of grain, with some grain in the corners, reminding
me of the Hebrew tradition that you may indeed harvest, but you must always leave some on the
edges, just in case there's someone who has not had the share necessary for good nurture. Talk
about a picture of compassion.
06:49I see -- always, it stirs my heart -- a picture of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. walking arm in arm
with Andy Young and Rabbi Heschel and maybe Thich Nhat Hanh and some of the other saints
assembled, walking across the bridge and going into Selma. Just a photograph. Arm in arm for
struggle. Suffering together in a common hope that we can be brothers and sisters without the
accidents of our birth or our ethnicityrobbing us of a sense of unity of being.
07:32So, there's another picture. Here, this one. I really do like this picture. When Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, that day, everybody in my community was upset. You heard
about riots all across the land. Bobby Kennedy was scheduled to bring an inner city message in
Indianapolis. This is the picture. They said, "It's going to be too volatile for you to go." He insisted,
"I must go."

08:11So, sitting on a flatbed truck, the elders of the community are there, and Bobby stands up
and says to the people, "I have bad news for you. Some of you may not have heard that Dr. King
has been assassinated. I know that you are angry, and I know that you would almost wish to
have the opportunityto enter now into activities of revenge. But," he said, "what I really want you
to know is that I know how you feel. Because I had someone dear to me snatched away. I know
how you feel." And he said, "I hope that you will have the strength to do what I did. I allowed my
anger, my bitterness, my grief to simmer a while, and then I made up my mind that I was going to
make a different world, and we can do that together." That's a picture. Compassion? I think I see
it.
09:15I saw it when the Dalai Lama came to the Riverside Church while I was a pastor, and he
invited representatives of faith traditions from all around the world. He asked them to give a
message, and they each read in their own language a central affirmation, and that was some
version of the golden rule: "As you would that others would do unto you, do also unto
them." Twelve in their ecclesiastical or cultural or tribal attire affirming one message. We are so
connected that we must treat each other as if an action toward you is an action toward myself.
10:12One more picture while I'm stinking and thinking about the Riverside Church: 9/11. Last
night at Chagrin Fall, a newspaperman and a television guy said, "That evening, when a service
was held at the Riverside Church, we carried it on our station in this city. It was," he said, "one of
the most powerful moments of life together. We were all suffering. But you invited representatives
of all of the traditions to come, and you invited them. 'Find out what it is in your tradition that tells
us what to do when we have been humiliated, when we have been despised and rejected.' And
they all spoke out of their own traditions, a word about the healing power of solidarity, one with
the other."
11:17I developed a sense of compassion sort of as second nature, but I became a
preacher. Now, as a preacher, I got a job. I got to preach the stuff, but I got to do it too. Or, as
Father Divine in Harlem used to say to folks, "Some people preach the Gospel. I have to
tangibilitate the Gospel." So, the real issue is: How do you tangibilitate compassion? How do you
make it real?
11:50My faith has constantly lifted up the ideal, and challenged me when I fell beneath it. In my
tradition, there is a gift that we have made to other traditions -- to everybody around the world
who knows the story of the "Good Samaritan." Many people think of it primarily in terms of
charity, random acts of kindness. But for those who really study that text a little more
thoroughly, you will discover that a question has been raised that leads to this parable.
12:33The question was: "What is the greatest commandment?" And, according to Jesus, the
word comes forth, "You must love yourself, you must love the Lord your God with all your heart,
mind and soul, and your neighbor as yourself."
12:50And then the person asked, "Well, what do you mean, 'neighbor?'"

12:56And he answered it by telling the story of the man who fell among thieves, and how
religious authorities went the other way, and how their supporters in the congregation went the
other way; but an unsuspecting, despised person came along, saw the man in need, provided oil
and wine for his wounds,put him on his own transportation, and took him to the inn and asked the
innkeeper, "Take care of him."And he said, "Here, this is the initial investment, but if needs
continue, make sure that you provide them.And whatever else is needed, I will provide it and pay
for it when I return."
13:56This always seemed to me to be a deepening of the sense of what it means to be a Good
Samaritan. A Good Samaritan is not simply one whose heart is touched in an immediate act of
care and charity, but one who provides a system of sustained care -- I like that, 'a system of
sustained care ' -- in the inn, take care. I think maybe it's one time when the Bible talks about a
healthcare system and a commitment to do whatever is necessary -- that all God's children would
have their needs cared for, so that we could answer when mommy eternal asks, "In regards to
health, are all the children in?" And we could say yes.
14:39Oh, what a joy it has been to be a person seeking to tangibilitate compassion. I recall that
my work as a pastor has always involved caring for their spiritual needs; being concerned for
housing, for healthcare,for the prisoners, for the infirm, for children -- even the foster care children
for whom no one can even keep a record where they started off, where they are going. To be a
pastor is to care for these individual needs.
15:17But now, to be a Good Samaritan -- and I always say, and to be a good American -- for
me, is not simply to congratulate myself for the individual acts of care. Compassion takes on a
corporate dynamic. I believe that whatever we did around that table at Bloodworth Street must be
done around tables and rituals of faith until we become that family, that family together that
understands the nature of our unity.We are one people together.
15:59So, let me explain to you what I mean when I think about compassion, and why I think it is
so important that right at this point in history. We would decide to establish this charter of
compassion. The reason it's important is because this is a very special time in history. It is the
time that, biblically, we would speak of as the day, or the year, of God's favor. This is a season of
grace. Unusual things are beginning to happen. Please pardon me, as a black man, for
celebrating that the election of Obama was an unusual sign of the fact that it is a year of
favor. And yet, there is so much more that needs to be done. We need to bring health and food
and education and respect for all God's citizens, all God's children,remembering mama eternal.
17:12Now, let me close my comments by telling you that whenever I feel something very
deeply, it usually takes the form of verse. And so I want to close with a little song. I close with this
song -- it's a children's song -- because we are all children at the table of mama eternal. And if
mama eternal has taught us correctly, this song will make sense, not only to those of us who are
a part of this gathering, but to all who sign the charter for compassion. And this is why we do it.

17:53The song says, "I made heaven so happy today, Receiving God's love and giving it
away When I looked up, heaven smiled at me Now, I'm so happy. Can't you see?
I'm happy. Look at me. I'm happy. Can't you see? Sharing makes me happy, makes heaven
happy too I'm happy. Look at me. I'm happy. Can't you see? Let me share my happy
loving smile with you.
18:25That's compassion. (Applause)

John Hunter: Teaching with the World Peace Game

00:11I'm very fortunate to be here. I feel so fortunate. I've been so impressed by the kindness
expressed to me. I called my wife Leslie, and I said, "You know, there's so many good
people trying to do so much good. It feels like I've landed in a colony of angels." It's a true
feeling. But let me get to the talk -- I see the clock is running.
00:35I'm a public school teacher, and I just want to share a story of my superintendent. Her name
is Pam Moran in Albemarle County, Virginia, the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. And she's
a very high-tech superintendent. She uses smart boards, she blogs, she Tweets, she does
Facebook, she does all this sort of high-tech stuff. She's a technology leader and instructional
leader. But in her office, there's this old wooden, weather-worn table, kitchen table -- peeling
green paint, it's kind of rickety. And I said, "Pam, you're such a modern, cutting-edge
person. Why is this old table in your office?"
01:13And she told me, she said, "You know, I grew up in Southwestern Virginia, in the coal mines
and the farmlands of rural Virginia, and this table was in my grandfather's kitchen. And we'd
come in from playing, he'd come in from plowing and working, and we'd sit around that table
every night. And as I grew up, I heard so much knowledge and so many insights and so much
wisdom come out around this table, I began to call it the wisdom table. And when he passed on, I
took this table with me and brought it to my office, and it reminds me of him. It reminds me of
what goes on around an empty space sometimes." The project I'm going to tell you about is
called the World Peace Game, and essentially it is also an empty space. And I'd like to think of
it as a 21st century wisdom table, really.
02:02It all started back in 1977. I was a young man, and I had been dropping in and out of
college. And my parents were very patient, but I had been doing intermittent sojourns to India on
a mystical quest. And I remember the last time I came back from India -- in my long white flowing
robes and my big beard and my John Lennon glasses -- and I said to my father, "Dad, I think I've
just about found spiritual enlightenment." He said, "Well there's one more thing you need to
find." I said, "What is that, dad?" "A job." (Laughter) And so they pleaded with me to get a degree
in something. So I got a degree and it turned out to be education. It was an experimental
education program. It could have been dentistry, but the word "experimental" was in it, and so
that's what I had to go for.

02:57And I went in for a job interview in the Richmond Public Schools in Virginia, the capital
city, bought a three-piece suit -- my concession to convention -- kept my long beard and my
afro and my platform shoes -- at the time it was the '70s -- and I walked in, and I sat down and
had an interview. And I guess they were hard up for teachers because the supervisor, her name
was Anna Aro, said I had the job teaching gifted children. And I was so shocked, so stunned, I
got up and said, "Well, thank you, but what do I do?" (Laughter) Gifted education hadn't really
taken hold too much. There weren't really many materials or things to use. And I said, "What do I
do?" And her answer shocked me. It stunned me. Her answer set the template for the entire
career I was to have after that. She said, "What do you want to do?" And that question cleared
the space. There was no program directive, no manual to follow, no standards in gifted
education in that way. And she cleared such a space that I endeavored from then onto clear a
space for my students, an empty space, whereby they could create and make meaning out of
their own understanding.
04:14So this happened in 1978, and I was teaching many years later, and a friend of mine
introduced me to a young filmmaker. His name is Chris Farina. Chris Farina is here today at his
own cost. Chris, could you stand up and let them see you -- a young, visionary filmmaker who's
made a film. (Applause) This film is called "World Peace and Other 4th Grade Achievements." He
proposed the film to me -- it's a great title.He proposed the film to me, and I said, "Yeah, maybe
it'll be on local TV, and we can say hi to our friends." But the film has really gone places. Now it's
still in debt, but Chris has managed, through his own sacrifice, to get this film out. So we made a
film and it turns out to be more than a story about me,more than a story about one teacher. It's a
story that's a testament to teaching and teachers. And it's a beautiful thing.
05:08And the strange thing is, when I watch the film -- I have the eerie sensation of seeing it -- I
saw myself literally disappear. What I saw was my teachers coming through me. I saw my
geometry teacher in high school, Mr. Rucell's wry smile under his handlebar mustache. That's the
smile I use -- that's his smile. I saw Jan Polo's flashing eyes. And they weren't flashing in
anger, they were flashing in love, intense love for her students. And I have that kind of flash
sometimes. And I saw Miss Ethel J. Banks who wore pearls and high-heels to elementary school
every day. And you know, she had that old-school teacher stare.You know the
one. (Laughter) "And I'm not even talking about you behind me, because I've got eyes in the back
of my head." (Laughter) You know that teacher? I didn't use that stare very often, but I do have it
in my repertoire. And Miss Banks was there as a great mentor for me.
06:17And then I saw my own parents, my first teachers. My father, very inventive, spatial
thinker. That's my brother Malcolm there on the right. And my mother, who taught me in fourth
grade in segregated schools in Virginia, who was my inspiration. And really, I feel as
though, when I see the film -- I have a gesture she does, like this -- I feel like I am a continuation
of her gesture. I am one of her teaching gestures. And the beautiful thing was, I got to teach my
daughter in elementary school, Madeline. And so that gesture of my mother's continues through
many generations. It's an amazing feeling to have that lineage. And so I'm here standing on the
shoulders of many people. I'm not here alone. There are many people on this stage right now.

07:11And so this World Peace Game I'd like to tell you about. It started out like this: it's just a
four-foot by five-foot plywood board in an inner-city urban school, 1978. I was creating a lesson
for students on Africa.We put all the problems of the world there, and I thought, let's let them
solve it. I didn't want to lecture or have just book reading. I wanted to have them be
immersed and learn the feeling of learning through their bodies. So I thought, well they like to
play games. I'll make something -- I didn't say interactive; we didn't have that term in 1978 -- but
something interactive. And so we made the game, and it has since evolvedto a four-foot by fourfoot by four-foot Plexiglass structure. And it has four Plexiglass layers.
07:59There's an outer space layer with black holes and satellites and research satellites and
asteroid mining.There's an air and space level with clouds that are big puffs of cotton we push
around and territorial air spaces and air forces, a ground and sea level with thousands of game
pieces on it -- even an undersea level with submarines and undersea mining. There are four
countries around the board. The kids make up the names of the countries -- some are rich; some
are poor. They have different assets, commercial and military. And each country has a
cabinet. There's a Prime Minister, Secretary of State, Minister of Defenseand a CFO, or
Comptroller. I choose the Prime Minister based on my relationship with them. I offer them the job,
they can turn it down, and then they choose their own cabinet. There's a World Bank, arms
dealers and a United Nations. There's also a weather goddess who controls a random stock
market and random weather.
08:48(Laughter)
08:50That's not all. And then there's a 13-page crisis document with 50 interlocking problems. So
that, if one thing changes, everything else changes. I throw them into this complex matrix, and
they trust me because we have a deep, rich relationship together. And so with all these crises, we
have -- let's see -- ethnic and minority tensions; we have chemical and nuclear spills, nuclear
proliferation. There's oil spills, environmental disasters, water rights disputes, breakaway
republics, famine, endangered species and global warming. If Al Gore is here, I'm going to send
my fourth-graders from Agnor-Hurt and Venable schools to you because they solved global
warming in a week. (Laughter) (Applause) And they've done it several times too.
09:40(Laughter)
09:42So I also have in the game a saboteur -- some child -- it's basically a troublemaker -- and I
have my troublemaker put to use because they, on the surface, are trying to save the world and
their position in the game. But they're also trying to undermine everything in the game. And they
do it secretly through misinformation and ambiguities and irrelevancies, trying to cause everyone
to think more deeply. The saboteur is there, and we also read from Sun Tzu's "The Art of
War." Fourth-graders understand it -- nine years old -- and they handle that and use that to
understand how to, not follow -- at first they do -- the paths to power and destruction, the path to
war. They learn to overlook short-sighted reactions and impulsive thinking, to think in a long-term,
more consequential way.

10:30Stewart Brand is here, and one of the ideas for this game came from him with a
CoEvolution Quarterly article on a peace force. And in the game, sometimes students actually
form a peace force. I'm just a clock watcher. I'm just a clarifier. I'm just a facilitator. The students
run the game. I have no chance to make any policy whatsoever once they start playing. So I'll just
share with you ...
10:54(Video) Boy: The World Peace Game is serious. You're actually getting taught something
like how to take care of the world. See, Mr. Hunter is doing that because he says his time has
messed up a lot, and he's trying to tell us how to fix that problem.
11:07John Hunter: I offered them a -- (Applause) Actually, I can't tell them anything because I
don't know the answer. And I admit the truth to them right up front: I don't know. And because I
don't know, they've got to dig up the answer. And so I apologize to them as well. I say, "I'm so
sorry, boys and girls, but the truth is we have left this world to you in such a sad and terrible
shape, and we hope you can fix it for us, and maybe this game will help you learn how to do
it." It's a sincere apology, and they take it very seriously.
11:39Now you may be wondering what all this complexity looks like. Well when we have the
game start, here's what you see.
11:45(Video) JH: All right, we're going into negotiations as of now. Go. (Chatter)
11:56JH: My question to you is, who's in charge of that classroom? It's a serious question: who is
really in charge? I've learned to cede control of the classroom over to the students over
time. There's a trust and an understanding and a dedication to an ideal that I simply don't have to
do what I thought I had to do as a beginning teacher: control every conversation and response in
the classroom. It's impossible. Their collective wisdom is much greater than mine, and I admit it
to them openly. So I'll just share with you some stories very quickly of some magical things that
have happened.
12:31In this game we had a little girl, and she was the Defense Minister of the poorest
nation. And the Defense Minister -- she had the tank corps and Air Force and so forth. And she
was next door to a very wealthy, oil-rich neighbor. Without provocation, suddenly she attacked,
against her Prime Minister's orders, the next-door neighbor's oil fields. She marched into the oil
field reserves, surrounded it, without firing a shot,and secured it and held it. And that neighbor
was unable to conduct any military operations because their fuel supply was locked up.
13:02We were all upset with her, "Why are you doing this? This is the World Peace Game. What
is wrong with you?" (Laughter) This was a little girl and, at nine years old, she held her pieces
and said, "I know what I'm doing." To her girlfriends she said that. That's a breach there. And we
learned in this, you don't really ever want to cross a nine year-old girl with tanks. (Laughter) They
are the toughest opponents. And we were very upset. I thought I was failing as a teacher. Why
would she do this?

13:32But come to find out, a few game days later -- and there are turns where we take
negotiation from a team -- actually there's a negotiation period with all teams, and each team
takes a turn, then we go back in negotiation, around and around, so each turn around is one
game day. So a few game days later it came to light that we found out this major country was
planning a military offensive to dominate the entire world. Had they had their fuel supplies, they
would have done it. She was able to see the vectors and trend lines and intentions long before
any of us and understand what was going to happen and made a philosophical decision to attack
in a peace game.
14:11Now she used a small war to avert a larger war, so we stopped and had a very good
philosophical discussion about whether that was right, conditional good, or not right. That's the
kind of thinking that we put them in, the situations. I could not have designed that in teaching it. It
came about spontaneously through their collective wisdom.
14:29(Applause)
14:35Another example, a beautiful thing happened. We have a letter in the game. If you're a
military commander and you wage troops -- the little plastic toys on the board -- and you lose
them, I put in a letter. You have to write a letter to their parents -- the fictional parents of your
fictional troops --explaining what happened and offering your condolences. So you have a little bit
more thought before you commit to combat. And so we had this situation come up -- last summer
actually, at Agnor-Hurt School in Albemarle County -- and one of our military commanders got up
to read that letter and one of the other kids said, "Mr. Hunter, let's ask -- there's a parent over
there." There was a parent visiting that day, just sitting in the back of the room. "Let's ask that
mom to read the letter. It'll be more realer if she reads it." So we did, we asked her, and she
gamely picked up the letter. "Sure." She started reading. She read one sentence. She read two
sentences. By the third sentence, she was in tears. I was in tears.Everybody understood that
when we lose somebody, the winners are not gloating. We all lose. And it was an amazing
occurrence and an amazing understanding.
15:44I'll show you what my friend David says about this. He's been in many battles.
15:48(Video) David: We've really had enough of people attacking. I mean, we've been lucky
[most of] the time.But now I'm feeling really weird because I'm living what Sun Tzu said one
week. One week he said,"Those who go into battle and win will want to go back, and those who
lose in battle will want to go back and win." And so I've been winning battles, so I'm going into
battles, more battles. And I think it's sort of weird to be living what Sun Tzu said.
16:22JH: I get chills every time I see that. That's the kind of engagement you want to have
happen. And I can't design that, I can't plan that, and I can't even test that. But it's self-evident
assessment. We know that's an authentic assessment of learning. We have a lot of data, but I
think sometimes we go beyond datawith the real truth of what's going on.
16:46So I'll just share a third story. This is about my friend Brennan. We had played the game
one session after school for many weeks, about seven weeks, and we had essentially solved all

50 of the interlocking crises. The way the game is won is all 50 problems have to be solved and
every country's asset value has to be increased above its starting point. Some are poor, some
are wealthy. There are billions. The World Bank president was a third-grader one time. He says,
"How many zeros in a trillion? I've got to calculate that right away." But he was setting fiscal policy
in that game for high school players who were playing with him.
17:21So the team that was the poorest had gotten even poorer. There was no way they could
win. And we were approaching four o'clock, our cut-off time -- there was about a minute left
-- and despair just settled over the room. I thought, I'm failing as a teacher. I should have gotten it
so they could have won.They shouldn't be failing like this. I've failed them. And I was just feeling
so sad and dejected. And suddenly, Brennan walked over to my chair and he grabbed the bell,
the bell I ring to signal a change or a reconvening of cabinets, and he ran back to his seat, rang
the bell. Everybody ran to his chair: there was screaming; there was yelling, waving of their
dossiers. They get these dossiers full of secret documents.They were gesticulating; they were
running around. I didn't know what they were doing. I'd lost control of my classroom. Principal
walks in, I'm out of a job. The parents were looking in the window.
18:12And Brennan runs back to his seat. Everybody runs back to their seat. He rings the bell
again. He says, "We have" -- and there's 12 seconds left on the clock -- "we have, all nations,
pooled all our funds together. And we've got 600 billion dollars. We're going to offer it as a
donation to this poor country. And if they accept it, it'll raise their asset value and we can win the
game. Will you accept it?" And there are three seconds left on the clock. Everybody looks at this
prime minister of that country, and he says, "Yes." And the game is won. Spontaneous
compassion that could not be planned for, that was unexpected and unpredictable.
18:49Every game we play is different. Some games are more about social issues, some are
more about economic issues. Some games are more about warfare. But I don't try to deny them
that reality of being human. I allow them to go there and, through their own experience, learn, in
a bloodless way, how not to do what they consider to be the wrong thing. And they find out what
is right their own way, their own selves. And so in this game, I've learned so much from it, but I
would say that if only they could pick up a critical thinking tool or creative thinking tool from this
game and leverage something good for the world,they may save us all. If only.
19:39And on behalf of all of my teachers on whose shoulders I'm standing, thank you. Thank
you. Thank you.
19:46(Applause)

Feisal Abdul Rauf: Lose your ego, find your compassion

00:11I'm speaking about compassion from an Islamic point of view, and perhaps my faith is not
very well thought of as being one that is grounded in compassion. The truth of the matter is
otherwise.

00:25Our holy book, the Koran, consists of 114 chapters, and each chapter begins with what we
call the basmala, the saying of "In the name of God, the all compassionate, the all merciful," or,
as Sir Richard Burton -- not the Richard Burton who was married to Elizabeth Taylor, but the Sir
Richard Burton who lived a century before that and who was a worldwide traveler and translator
of many works of literature --translates it. "In the name of God, the compassionating, the
compassionate."
01:02And in a saying of the Koran, which to Muslims is God speaking to humanity, God says to
his prophet Muhammad -- whom we believe to be the last of a series of prophets, beginning with
Adam, including Noah, including Moses, including Abraham, including Jesus Christ, and ending
with Muhammad -- that, "We have not sent you, O Muhammad, except as a 'rahmah,' except as a
source of compassion to humanity."
01:34For us human beings, and certainly for us as Muslims, whose mission, and whose purpose
in following the path of the prophet is to make ourselves as much like the prophet. And the
prophet, in one of his sayings, said, "Adorn yourselves with the attributes of God." And because
God Himself said that the primary attribute of his is compassion -- in fact, the Koran says that
"God decreed upon himself compassion," or, "reigned himself in by compassion" -- therefore, our
objective and our mission must be to be sources of compassion, activators of compassion, actors
of compassion and speakers of compassion and doers of compassion.
02:24That is all well and good, but where do we go wrong, and what is the source of the lack of
compassion in the world? For the answer to this, we turn to our spiritual path. In every religious
tradition, there is the outer path and the inner path, or the exoteric path and the esoteric
path. The esoteric path of Islam is more popularly known as Sufism, or "tasawwuf" in Arabic. And
these doctors or these masters, these spiritual masters of the Sufi tradition, refer to teachings
and examples of our prophet that teach us where the source of our problems lies.
03:15In one of the battles that the prophet waged, he told his followers, "We are returning from
the lesser warto the greater war, to the greater battle."
03:28And they said, "Messenger of God, we are battle-weary. How can we go to a greater
battle?"
03:36He said, "That is the battle of the self, the battle of the ego." The sources of human
problems have to do with egotism, "I."
03:53The famous Sufi master Rumi, who is very well known to most of you, has a story in which
he talks of a man who goes to the house of a friend, and he knocks on the door, and a voice
answers, "Who's there?"
04:11"It's me," or, more grammatically correctly, "It is I," as we might say in English.
04:18The voice says, "Go away."

04:21After many years of training, of disciplining, of search and struggle, he comes back. With
much greater humility, he knocks again on the door.
04:35The voice asks, "Who is there?"
04:38He said, "It is you, O heartbreaker."
04:42The door swings open, and the voice says, "Come in, for there is no room in this house for
two I's," -- two capital I's, not these eyes -- "for two egos."
04:57And Rumi's stories are metaphors for the spiritual path. In the presence of God, there is no
room for more than one "I," and that is the "I" of divinity. In a teaching -- called a "hadith qudsi" in
our tradition -- God says that, "My servant," or "My creature, my human creature, does not
approach me by anything that is dearer to me than what I have asked them to do." And those of
you who are employers know exactly what I mean. You want your employees to do what you ask
them to do, and if they've done that, then they can do extra. But don't ignore what you've asked
them to do.
05:49"And," God says, "my servant continues to get nearer to me, by doing more of what I've
asked them to do" -- extra credit, we might call it -- "until I love him or love her. And when I love
my servant," God says,"I become the eyes by which he or she sees, the ears by which he or she
listens, the hand by which he or she grasps, and the foot by which he or she walks, and the heart
by which he or she understands." It is this merging of our self with divinity that is the lesson and
purpose of our spiritual path and all of our faith traditions.
06:46Muslims regard Jesus as the master of Sufism, the greatest prophet and messenger who
came to emphasize the spiritual path. When he says, "I am the spirit, and I am the way," and
when the prophet Muhammad said, "Whoever has seen me has seen God," it is because they
became so much an instrument of God, they became part of God's team -- so that God's will was
manifest through them, and they were not acting from their own selves and their own
egos. Compassion on earth is given, it is in us.All we have to do is to get our egos out of the
way, get our egotism out of the way.
07:38I'm sure, probably all of you here, or certainly the very vast majority of you, have had what
you might call a spiritual experience, a moment in your lives when, for a few seconds, a minute
perhaps, the boundaries of your ego dissolved. And at that minute, you felt at one with the
universe -- one with that jug of water, one with every human being, one with the Creator -- and
you felt you were in the presence of power, of awe, of the deepest love, the deepest sense of
compassion and mercy that you have ever experienced in your lives.
08:33That is a moment which is a gift of God to us -- a gift when, for a moment, he lifts that
boundary which makes us insist on "I, I, I, me, me, me," and instead, like the person in Rumi's
story, we say, "Oh, this is all you. This is all you. And this is all us. And us, and I, and us are all
part of you. O, Creator! O, the Objective! The source of our being and the end of our journey, you
are also the breaker of our hearts. You are the one whom we should all be towards, for whose

purpose we live, and for whose purpose we shall die, and for whose purpose we shall be
resurrected again to account to God to what extent we have been compassionate beings."
09:41Our message today, and our purpose today, and those of you who are here today, and the
purpose of this charter of compassion, is to remind. For the Koran always urges us to remember,
to remind each other, because the knowledge of truth is within every human being.
10:09We know it all. We have access to it all. Jung may have called it "the
subconscious." Through our subconscious, in your dreams -- the Koran calls our state of sleep
"the lesser death," "the temporary death" -- in our state of sleep we have dreams, we have
visions, we travel even outside of our bodies, for many of us, and we see wonderful things. We
travel beyond the limitations of space as we know it, and beyond the limitations of time as we
know it. But all this is for us to glorify the name of the creator whose primary name is the
compassionating, the compassionate.
11:13God, Bokh, whatever name you want to call him with, Allah, Ram, Om, whatever the name
might be through which you name or access the presence of divinity, it is the locus of absolute
being, absolute love and mercy and compassion, and absolute knowledge and wisdom, what
Hindus call "satchidananda." The language differs, but the objective is the same.
11:50Rumi has another story about three men, a Turk, an Arab and -- and I forget the third
person, but for my sake, it could be a Malay. One is asking for angur -- one is, say, an
Englishman -- one is asking for eneb, and one is asking for grapes. And they have a fight and an
argument because -- "I want grapes." "I want eneb. "I want angur." -- not knowing that the word
that they're using refers to the same reality in different languages.
12:20There's only one absolute reality by definition, one absolute being by definition, because
absolute is, by definition, single, and absolute and singular. There's this absolute concentration of
being, the absolute concentration of consciousness, awareness, an absolute locus of
compassion and love that defines the primary attributes of divinity.
12:55And these should also be the primary attributes of what it means to be human. For what
defines humanity, perhaps biologically, is our physiology, but God defines humanity by our
spirituality, by our nature.
13:20And the Koran says, He speaks to the angels and says, "When I have finished the formation
of Adam from clay, and breathed into him of my spirit, then, fall in prostration to him." The angels
prostrate, not before the human body, but before the human soul. Why? Because the soul, the
human soul, embodies a piece of the divine breath, a piece of the divine soul.
14:00This is also expressed in biblical vocabulary when we are taught that we were created in
the divine image. What is the imagery of God? The imagery of God is absolute being, absolute
awareness and knowledge and wisdom and absolute compassion and love.

14:23And therefore, for us to be human -- in the greatest sense of what it means to be human, in
the most joyful sense of what it means to be human -- means that we too have to be proper
stewards of the breath of divinity within us, and seek to perfect within ourselves the attribute of
being, of being alive, of beingness; the attribute of wisdom, of consciousness, of awareness; and
the attribute of being compassionate and loving beings.
15:02This is what I understand from my faith tradition, and this is what I understand from my
studies of other faith traditions, and this is the common platform on which we must all stand, and
when we stand on this platform as such, I am convinced that we can make a wonderful world.
15:30And I believe, personally, that we're on the verge and that, with the presence and help of
people like you here, we can bring about the prophecy of Isaiah. For he foretold of a period when
people shall transform their swords into plowshares and will not learn war or make war anymore.
16:03We have reached a stage in human history that we have no option: we must, we must lower
our egos,control our egos -- whether it is individual ego, personal ego, family ego, national ego
-- and let all be for the glorification of the one.
16:34Thank you, and God bless you. (Applause)

Philip Zimbardo: The psychology of evil

00:11Philosophers, dramatists, theologians have grappled with this question for centuries: what
makes people go wrong? Interestingly, I asked this question when I was a little kid. I grew up in
the South Bronx, inner-city ghetto in New York, and I was surrounded by evil, as all kids are who
grew up in an inner city. And I had friends who were really good kids, who lived out the Dr. Jekyll
Mr. Hyde scenario -- Robert Louis Stevenson. That is, they took drugs, got in trouble, went to
jail. Some got killed, and some did it without drug assistance.
00:43So when I read Robert Louis Stevenson, that wasn't fiction. The only question is, what was
in the juice?And more importantly, that line between good and evil -- which privileged people like
to think is fixed and impermeable, with them on the good side, the others on the bad side -- I
knew that line was movable, and it was permeable. Good people could be seduced across that
line, and under good and some rare circumstances, bad kids could recover with help, with reform,
with rehabilitation.
01:11So I want to begin with this wonderful illusion by [Dutch] artist M.C. Escher. If you look at it
and focus on the white, what you see is a world full of angels. But let's look more deeply, and as
we do, what appears is the demons, the devils in the world. That tells us several things.
01:27One, the world is, was, will always be filled with good and evil, because good and evil is the
yin and yang of the human condition. It tells me something else. If you remember, God's favorite
angel was Lucifer.Apparently, Lucifer means "the light." It also means "the morning star," in some
scripture. And apparently, he disobeyed God, and that's the ultimate disobedience to

authority. And when he did, Michael, the archangel, was sent to kick him out of heaven along with
the other fallen angels. And so Lucifer descends into hell, becomes Satan, becomes the devil,
and the force of evil in the universe begins.
02:03Paradoxically, it was God who created hell as a place to store evil. He didn't do a good job
of keeping it there though. So, this arc of the cosmic transformation of God's favorite angel into
the Devil, for me, sets the context for understanding human beings who are transformed from
good, ordinary people into perpetrators of evil.
02:23So the Lucifer effect, although it focuses on the negatives -- the negatives that people can
become, not the negatives that people are -- leads me to a psychological definition. Evil is the
exercise of power. And that's the key: it's about power. To intentionally harm people
psychologically, to hurt people physically, to destroy people mortally, or ideas, and to commit
crimes against humanity. If you Google "evil," a word that should surely have withered by
now, you come up with 136 million hits in a third of a second.
02:57A few years ago -- I am sure all of you were shocked, as I was, with the revelation of
American soldiers abusing prisoners in a strange place in a controversial war, Abu Ghraib in
Iraq. And these were men and women who were putting prisoners through unbelievable
humiliation. I was shocked, but I wasn't surprised, because I had seen those same visual
parallels when I was the prison superintendent of the Stanford Prison Study.
03:24Immediately the Bush administration military said what? What all administrations say when
there's a scandal: "Don't blame us. It's not the system. It's the few bad apples, the few rogue
soldiers." My hypothesis is, American soldiers are good, usually. Maybe it was the barrel that was
bad. But how am I going to deal with that hypothesis?
03:42I became an expert witness for one of the guards, Sergeant Chip Frederick, and in that
position, I had access to the dozen investigative reports. I had access to him. I could study him,
have him come to my home, get to know him, do psychological analysis to see, was he a good
apple or bad apple. And thirdly, I had access to all of the 1,000 pictures that these soldiers
took. These pictures are of a violent or sexual nature. All of them come from the cameras of
American soldiers. Because everybody has a digital camera or cell phone camera, they took
pictures of everything, more than 1,000.
04:15And what I've done is I organized them into various categories. But these are by United
States military police, army reservists. They are not soldiers prepared for this mission at all. And
it all happened in a single place, Tier 1-A, on the night shift. Why? Tier 1-A was the center for
military intelligence. It was the interrogation hold. The CIA was there. Interrogators from Titan
Corporation, all there, and they're getting no information about the insurgency. So they're going to
put pressure on these soldiers, military police, to cross the line, give them permission to break
the will of the enemy, to prepare them for interrogation, to soften them up, to take the gloves
off. Those are the euphemisms, and this is how it was interpreted.Let's go down to that dungeon.
05:02(Typewriting)

05:04[Abu Ghraib Iraq Prison Abuses 2008 Military Police Guards' Photos]
05:10[The following images include nudity and graphic depictions of violence]
05:17(Camera shutter sounds)
05:38(Thuds)
05:44(Camera shutter)
05:58(Camera shutter)
06:08(Breathing)
06:16(Bells)
06:46(Bells end)
06:48So, pretty horrific. That's one of the visual illustrations of evil. And it should not have
escaped you that the reason I paired the prisoner with his arms out with Leonardo da Vinci's ode
to humanity is that that prisoner was mentally ill. That prisoner covered himself with shit every
day, they had to roll him in dirt so he wouldn't stink. But the guards ended up calling him "Shit
Boy." What was he doing in that prison rather than in some mental institution?
07:16In any event, here's former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. He comes down and says, "I
want to know, who is responsible? Who are the bad apples?" Well, that's a bad question. You
have to reframe it and ask, "What is responsible?" "What" could be the who of people, but it could
also be the what of the situation, and obviously that's wrongheaded.
07:33How do psychologists try to understand such transformations of human character, if you
believe that they were good soldiers before they went down to that dungeon? There are three
ways. The main way is called dispositional. We look at what's inside of the person, the bad
apples.
07:47This is the foundation of all of social science, the foundation of religion, the foundation of
war. Social psychologists like me come along and say, "Yeah, people are the actors on the
stage, but you'll have to be aware of the situation. Who are the cast of characters? What's the
costume? Is there a stage director?" And so we're interested in what are the external
factors around the individual -- the bad barrel?Social scientists stop there and they miss the big
point that I discovered when I became an expert witness for Abu Ghraib. The power is in the
system. The system creates the situation that corrupts the individuals, and the system is the
legal, political, economic, cultural background. And this is where the power is of the bad-barrel
makers.

08:29If you want to change a person, change the situation. And to change it, you've got to know
where the power is, in the system. So the Lucifer effect involves understanding human character
transformations with these three factors. And it's a dynamic interplay. What do the people bring
into the situation? What does the situation bring out of them? And what is the system that creates
and maintains that situation?
08:51My recent book, "The Lucifer Effect," is about, how do you understand how good people
turn evil? And it has a lot of detail about what I'm going to talk about today. So Dr. Z's "Lucifer
Effect," although it focuses on evil, really is a celebration of the human mind's infinite capacity to
make any of us kind or cruel, caring or indifferent, creative or destructive, and it makes some of
us villains. And the good news that I'm going to hopefully come to at the end is that it makes
some of us heroes. This wonderful cartoon in the New Yorker summarizes my whole talk: "I'm
neither a good cop nor a bad cop, Jerome. Like yourself, I'm a complex amalgam of positive and
negative personality traits that emerge or not, depending on the circumstances."
09:34(Laughter)
09:36There's a study some of you think you know about, but very few people have ever read the
story. You watched the movie. This is Stanley Milgram, little Jewish kid from the Bronx, and he
asked the question, "Could the Holocaust happen here, now?" People say, "No, that's Nazi
Germany, Hitler, you know, that's 1939." He said, "Yeah, but suppose Hitler asked you, 'Would
you electrocute a stranger?' 'No way, I'm a good person.'" He said, "Why don't we put you in a
situation and give you a chance to see what you would do?"
10:03And so what he did was he tested 1,000 ordinary people. 500 New Haven, Connecticut,
500 Bridgeport.And the ad said, "Psychologists want to understand memory. We want to improve
people's memory, because it is the key to success." OK? "We're going to give you five bucks -four dollars for your time.We don't want college students. We want men between 20 and 50." In
the later studies, they ran women.Ordinary people: barbers, clerks, white-collar people.
10:31So, you go down, one of you will be a learner, one will be a teacher. The learner's a genial,
middle-aged guy. He gets tied up to the shock apparatus in another room. The learner could be
middle-aged, could be as young as 20. And one of you is told by the authority, the guy in the lab
coat, "Your job as teacher is to give him material to learn. Gets it right, reward. Gets it wrong, you
press a button on the shock box. The first button is 15 volts. He doesn't even feel it." That's the
key. All evil starts with 15 volts. And then the next step is another 15 volts. The problem is, at the
end of the line, it's 450 volts. And as you go along, the guy is screaming, "I've got a heart
condition! I'm out of here!"
11:10You're a good person. You complain. "Sir, who will be responsible if something happens to
him?" The experimenter says, "Don't worry, I will be responsible. Continue, teacher." And the
question is, who would go all the way to 450 volts? You should notice here, when it gets up to
375, it says, "Danger. Severe Shock." When it gets up to here, there's "XXX" -- the pornography
of power.

11:30So Milgram asks 40 psychiatrists, "What percent of American citizens would go to the
end?" They said only one percent. Because that's sadistic behavior, and we know, psychiatry
knows, only one percent of Americans are sadistic. OK. Here's the data. They could not be more
wrong. Two thirds go all the way to 450 volts. This was just one study. Milgram did more than 16
studies. And look at this. In study 16, where you see somebody like you go all the way, 90
percent go all the way. In study five, if you see people rebel, 90 percent rebel. What about
women? Study 13 -- no different than men. So Milgram is quantifying evil as the willingness of
people to blindly obey authority, to go all the way to 450 volts. And it's like a dial on human
nature. A dial in a sense that you can make almost everybody totally obedient, down to the
majority, down to none.
12:25What are the external parallels? For all research is artificial. What's the validity in the real
world? 912 American citizens committed suicide or were murdered by family and friends in
Guyana jungle in 1978,because they were blindly obedient to this guy, their pastor -- not their
priest -- their pastor, Reverend Jim Jones. He persuaded them to commit mass suicide. And so,
he's the modern Lucifer effect, a man of God who becomes the Angel of Death. Milgram's study
is all about individual authority to control people.Most of the time, we are in institutions, so the
Stanford Prison Study is a study of the power of institutions to influence individual
behavior. Interestingly, Stanley Milgram and I were in the same high school class in James
Monroe in the Bronx, 1954.
13:11I did this study with my graduate students, especially Craig Haney -- and it also began work
with an ad.We had a cheap, little ad, but we wanted college students for a study of prison life. 75
people volunteered, took personality tests. We did interviews. Picked two dozen: the most
normal, the most healthy. Randomly assigned them to be prisoner and guard. So on day one, we
knew we had good apples. I'm going to put them in a bad situation.
13:34And secondly, we know there's no difference between the boys who will be guards and
those who will be prisoners. To the prisoners, we said, "Wait at home. The study will begin
Sunday." We didn't tell themthat the city police were going to come and do realistic arrests.
13:48(Video) (Music)
13:54[Day 1]
14:22Student: A police car pulls up in front, and a cop comes to the front door, and knocks, and
says he's looking for me. So they, right there, you know, they took me out the door, they put my
hands against the car. It was a real cop car, it was a real policeman, and there were real
neighbors in the street, who didn't know that this was an experiment. And there was cameras all
around and neighbors all around. They put me in the car, then they drove me around Palo
Alto. They took me to the basement of the police station.Then they put me in a cell. I was the first
one to be picked up, so they put me in a cell, which was just like a room with a door with bars on
it. You could tell it wasn't a real jail. They locked me in there, in this degrading little outfit. They
were taking this experiment too seriously.

15:20Here are the prisoners, who are going to be dehumanized, they'll become numbers. Here
are the guards with the symbols of power and anonymity. Guards get prisoners to clean the toilet
bowls out with their bare hands, to do other humiliating tasks. They strip them naked. They
sexually taunt them. They begin to do degrading activities, like having them simulate
sodomy. You saw simulating fellatio in soldiers in Abu Ghraib. My guards did it in five days. The
stress reaction was so extreme that normal kids we picked because they were healthy had
breakdowns within 36 hours. The study ended after six days, because it was out of control. Five
kids had emotional breakdowns.
15:57Does it make a difference if warriors go to battle changing their appearance or not? If
they're anonymous, how do they treat their victims? In some cultures, they go to war without
changing their appearance. In others, they paint themselves like "Lord of the Flies." In some, they
wear masks. In many, soldiers are anonymous in uniform. So this anthropologist, John Watson,
found 23 cultures that had two bits of data.Do they change their appearance? 15. Do they kill,
torture, mutilate? 13. If they don't change their appearance, only one of eight kills, tortures or
mutilates. The key is in the red zone. If they change their appearance, 12 of 13 -- that's 90
percent -- kill, torture, mutilate. And that's the power of anonymity.
16:35So what are the seven social processes that grease the slippery slope of evil? Mindlessly
taking the first small step. Dehumanization of others. De-individuation of self. Diffusion of
personal responsibility. Blind obedience to authority. Uncritical conformity to group
norms. Passive tolerance of evil through inaction, or indifference.
16:53And it happens when you're in a new or unfamiliar situation. Your habitual response
patterns don't work.Your personality and morality are disengaged. "Nothing is easier than to
denounce the evildoer; nothing more difficult than understanding him,"
Dostoyevsky. Understanding is not excusing. Psychology is not excuse-ology.
17:11So social and psychological research reveals how ordinary, good people can be
transformed without the drugs. You don't need it. You just need the social-psychological
processes. Real world parallels?Compare this with this. James Schlesinger -- I'm going to end
with this -- says, "Psychologists have attempted to understand how and why individuals and
groups who usually act humanely can sometimes act otherwise in certain circumstances." That's
the Lucifer effect. And he goes on to say, "The landmark Stanford study provides a cautionary
tale for all military operations." If you give people power without oversight, it's a prescription for
abuse. They knew that, and let that happen.
17:50So another report, an investigative report by General Fay, says the system is guilty. In this
report, he says it was the environment that created Abu Ghraib, by leadership failures that
contributed to the occurrence of such abuse, and because it remained undiscovered by higher
authorities for a long period of time.Those abuses went on for three months. Who was watching
the store? The answer is nobody, I think on purpose. He gave the guards permission to do those
things, and they knew nobody was ever going to come down to that dungeon.

18:18So you need a paradigm shift in all of these areas. The shift is away from the medical
model that focuses only on the individual. The shift is toward a public health model that
recognizes situational and systemic vectors of disease. Bullying is a disease. Prejudice is a
disease. Violence is a disease. Since the Inquisition, we've been dealing with problems at the
individual level. It doesn't work. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn says, "The line between good and
evil cuts through the heart of every human being." That means that line is not out there. That's a
decision that you have to make, a personal thing.
18:49So I want to end very quickly on a positive note. Heroism as the antidote to evil, by
promoting the heroic imagination, especially in our kids, in our educational system. We want kids
to think, "I'm a hero in waiting, waiting for the right situation to come along, and I will act
heroically. My whole life, I'm now going to focus away from evil -- that I've been in since I was a
kid -- to understanding heroes.
19:11Banality of heroism. It's ordinary people who do heroic deeds. It's the counterpoint to
Hannah Arendt's "Banality of Evil." Our traditional societal heroes are wrong, because they are
the exceptions. They organize their life around this. That's why we know their names. Our kids'
heroes are also wrong models for them, because they have supernatural talents. We want our
kids to realize most heroes are everyday people, and the heroic act is unusual. This is Joe
Darby. He was the one that stopped those abuses you saw, because when he saw those
images, he turned them over to a senior investigating officer. He was a low-level private, and that
stopped it. Was he a hero? No. They had to put him in hiding, because people wanted to kill
him, and then his mother and his wife. For three years, they were in hiding.
19:52This is the woman who stopped the Stanford Prison Study. When I said it got out of control,
I was the prison superintendent. I didn't know it was out of control. I was totally indifferent. She
saw that madhouse and said, "You know what, it's terrible what you're doing to those
boys. They're not prisoners nor guards, they're boys, and you are responsible." And I ended the
study the next day. The good news is I married her the next year.
20:14(Laughter)
20:17(Applause)
20:24I just came to my senses, obviously.
20:26So situations have the power to do [three things]. But the point is, this is the same
situation that can inflame the hostile imagination in some of us, that makes us perpetrators of
evil, can inspire the heroic imagination in others. It's the same situation and you're on one side or
the other. Most people are guilty of the evil of inaction, because your mother said, "Don't get
involved. Mind your own business." And you have to say, "Mama, humanity is my business."
20:50So the psychology of heroism is -- we're going to end in a moment -- how do we encourage
children in new hero courses, that I'm working on with Matt Langdon -- he has a hero workshop
-- to develop this heroic imagination, this self-labeling, "I am a hero in waiting," and teach them

skills. To be a hero, you have to learn to be a deviant, because you're always going against the
conformity of the group. Heroes are ordinary people whose social actions are extraordinary. Who
act.
21:15The key to heroism is two things. You have to act when other people are passive. B: You
have to act socio-centrically, not egocentrically. And I want to end with a known story about
Wesley Autrey, New York subway hero. Fifty-year-old African-American construction worker
standing on a subway. A white guy falls on the tracks. The subway train is coming. There's 75
people there. You know what? They freeze. He's got a reason not to get involved. He's black, the
guy's white, and he's got two kids. Instead, he gives his kids to a stranger, jumps on the tracks,
puts the guy between the tracks, lays on him, the subway goes over him. Wesley and the guy -20 and a half inches height. The train clearance is 21 inches. A half an inch would have taken his
head off. And he said, "I did what anyone could do," no big deal to jump on the tracks.
21:59And the moral imperative is "I did what everyone should do." And so one day, you will be in
a new situation. Take path one, you're going to be a perpetrator of evil. Evil, meaning you're
going to be Arthur Andersen. You're going to cheat, or you're going to allow bullying. Path two,
you become guilty of the evil of passive inaction. Path three, you become a hero. The point is,
are we ready to take the path to celebrating ordinary heroes, waiting for the right situation to
come along to put heroic imagination into action? Because it may only happen once in your
life, and when you pass it by, you'll always know, I could have been a hero and I let it pass me
by. So the point is thinking it and then doing it.
22:37So I want to thank you. Thank you. Let's oppose the power of evil systems at home and
abroad, and let's focus on the positive. Advocate for respect of personal dignity, for justice and
peace, which sadly our administration has not been doing.
22:49Thanks so much.
22:51(Applause)

Jackie Tabick: The balancing act of compassion

00:12One of my favorite cartoon characters is Snoopy. I love the way he sits and lies on his
kennel and contemplates the great things of life. So when I thought about compassion, my mind
immediately went to one of the cartoon strips, where he's lying there and he says, "I really
understand, and I really appreciatehow one should love one's neighbor as one love's
oneself. The only trouble is the people next door; I can't stand them." This, in a way, is one of the
challenges of how to interpret a really good idea.
00:56We all, I think, believe in compassion. If you look at all the world religions, all the main world
religions,you'll find within them some teaching concerning compassion. So in Judaism, we have,
from our Torah,that you should love your neighbor as you love yourself. And within Jewish
teachings, the rabbinic teachings, we have Hillel, who taught that you shouldn't do to others what

you don't like being done to yourself. And all the main religions have similar teachings. And
again, within Judaism, we have a teaching about God, who is called the compassionate one, Harachaman. After all, how could the world exist without God being compassionate? And we, as
taught within the Torah that we are made in the image of God, so we too have to be
compassionate. But what does it mean? How does it impact on our everyday life? Sometimes, of
course, being compassionate can produce feelings within us that are very difficult to control.
02:07I know there are many times when I've gone and conducted a funeral, or when I have been
sitting with the bereaved, or with people who are dying, and I am overwhelmed by the sadness,
by the difficulty, the challenge that is there for the family, for the person. And I'm touched, so that
tears come to my eyes. And yet, if I just allowed myself to be overwhelmed by these feelings, I
wouldn't be doing my job -- because I have to actually be there for them and make sure that
rituals happen, that practicalities are seen to. And yet, on the other hand, if I didn't feel this
compassion, then I feel that it would be time for me to hang up my robe and give up being a
rabbi.
03:08And these same feelings are there for all of us as we face the world. Who cannot be
touched by compassion when we see the terrible horrors of the results of war, or famine, or
earthquakes, or tsunamis? I know some people who say "Well, you know there's just so much out
there -- I can't do anything, I'm not going to even begin to try." And there are some charity
workers who call this compassion fatigue. There are others who feel they can't confront
compassion anymore, and so they turn off the television and don't watch. In Judaism, though, we
tend to always say, there has to be a middle way.
04:04You have to, of course, be aware of the needs of others, but you have to be aware in such a
way that you can carry on with your life and be of help to people. So part of compassion has to
be an understanding of what makes people tick. And, of course, you can't do that unless you
understand yourself a bit more.
04:31And there's a lovely rabbinic interpretation of the beginnings of creation, which says that
when God created the world, God thought that it would be best to create the world only with the
divine attribute of justice. Because, after all, God is just. Therefore, there should be justice
throughout the world. And then God looked to the future and realized, if the world was created
just with justice, the world couldn't exist.
05:06So, God thought, "Nope, I'm going to create the world just with compassion." And then God
looked to the future and realized that, in fact, if the world were just filled with compassion, there
would be anarchy and chaos. There had to be limits to all things. The rabbis describe this as
being like a king who has a beautiful, fragile glass bowl. If you put too much cold water in, it will
shatter. If you put boiling water in, it will shatter. What do you have to do? Put in a mixture of the
two. And so God put both of these possibilities into the world.
05:57There is something more though that has to be there. And that is the translation of the
feelings that we may have about compassion into the wider world, into action. So, like Snoopy,

we can't just lie there and think great thoughts about our neighbors. We actually have to do
something about it. And so there is also, within Judaism, this notion of love and kindness that
becomes very important: "chesed."
06:32All these three things, then, have to be melded together. The idea of justice, which gives
boundaries to our lives and gives us a feeling of what's right about life, what's right about
living, what should we be doing, social justice. There has to be a willingness to do good
deeds, but not, of course, at the expense of our own sanity. You know, there's no way that you
can do anything for anyone if you overdo things.And balancing them all in the middle is this
notion of compassion, which has to be there, if you like, at our very roots.
07:20This idea of compassion comes to us because we're made in the image of God, who is
ultimately the compassionate one. What does this compassion entail? It entails understanding
the pain of the other. But even more than that, it means understanding one's connection to the
whole of creation: understanding that one is part of that creation, that there is a unity that
underlies all that we see, all that we hear, all that we feel. I call that unity God. And that unity is
something that connects all of creation.
08:09And, of course, in the modern world, with the environmental movement, we're becoming
even more aware of the connectivity of things, that something I do here actually does matter in
Africa, that if I use too much of my carbon allowance, it seems to be that we are causing a great
lack of rain in central and eastern Africa. So there is a connectivity, and I have to understand that
-- as part of the creation, as part of me being made in the image of God. And I have to
understand that my needs sometimes have to be sublimated to other needs.
08:56This "18 minutes" business, I find quite fascinating. Because in Judaism, the number 18, in
Hebrew letters, stands for life -- the word "life." So, in a sense, the 18 minutes is challenging me
to say, "In life, this is what's important in terms of compassion." But, something else as
well: actually, 18 minutes is important. Because at Passover, when we have to eat unleavened
bread, the rabbis say, what is the difference between dough that is made into bread, and dough
that is made into unleavened bread, or "matzah"? And they say "It's 18 minutes." Because that's
how long they say it takes for this dough to become leaven. What does it mean, "dough becomes
leaven"? It means it gets filled with hot air. What's matzah? What's unleavened bread? You don't
get it.
09:54Symbolically, what the rabbis say is that at Passover, what we have to do is try to get rid of
our hot air -- our pride, our feeling that we are the most important people in the whole entire
world, and that everything should revolve round us. So we try and get rid of those, and so doing,
try to get rid of the habits, the emotions, the ideas that enslave us, that make our eyes closed,
give us tunnel vision so we don't see the needs of others -- and free ourselves and free ourselves
from that. And that too is a basis for having compassion, for understanding our place in the world.
10:47Now there is, in Judaism, a gorgeous story of a rich man who sat in synagogue one
day. And, as many people do, he was dozing off during the sermon. And as he was dozing off,

they were reading from the book of Leviticus in the Torah. And they were saying that in the
ancient times in the temple in Jerusalem,the priests used to have bread, which they used to place
into a special table in the temple in Jerusalem.The man was asleep, but he heard the words
bread, temple, God, and he woke up. He said, "God wants bread. That's it. God wants bread. I
know what God wants."
11:38And he rushed home. And after the Sabbath, he made 12 loaves of bread, took them to the
synagogue, went into the synagogue, opened the ark and said, "God, I don't know why you want
this bread, but here you are." And he put it in the ark with the scrolls of the Torah. Then he went
home.
12:00The cleaner came into the synagogue. "Oh God, I'm in such trouble. I've got children to
feed. My wife's ill. I've got no money. What can I do?" He goes into the synagogue. "God, will you
please help me? Ah, what a wonderful smell." He goes to the ark. He opens the ark. "There's
bread! God, you've answered my plea. You've answered my question." Takes the bread and goes
home.
12:27Meanwhile, the rich man thinks to himself, "I'm an idiot. God wants bread? God, the one
who rules the entire universe, wants my bread?" He rushes to the synagogue. "I'll get it out of the
ark before anybody finds it." He goes in there, and it's not there. And he says, "God, you really
did want it. You wanted my bread. Next week, with raisins."
12:52This went on for years. Every week, the man would bring bread with raisins, with all sorts of
good things, put it into the ark. Every week, the cleaner would come. "God you've answered my
plea again." Take the bread. Take it home.
13:06Went on until a new rabbi came. Rabbis always spoil things. The rabbi came in and saw
what was going on. And he called the two of them to his office. And he said, you know, "This is
what's happening."
13:19And the rich man -- oh, dear -- crestfallen. "You mean God didn't want my bread?"
13:29And the poor man said, "And you mean God didn't answer my pleas?"
13:36And the rabbi said, "You've misunderstood me. You've misunderstood totally," he said. "Of
course, what you are doing," he said to the rich man, "is answering God's plea that we should be
compassionate. And God," he said to the poor man, "is answering your plea that people should
be compassionate and give."He looked at the rich man. He held the rich man's hands and
said, "Don't you understand?" He said, "These are the hands of God."
14:18So that is the way I feel: that I can only try to approach this notion of being
compassionate, of understanding that there is a connectivity, that there is a unity in this
world; that I want to try and serve that unity, and that I can try and do that by understanding, I
hope, trying to understand something of the pain of others; but understanding that there are
limits, that people have to bear responsibility for some of the problems that come upon them; and

that I have to understand that there are limits to my energy, to the giving I can give. I have to
reevaluate them, try and separate out the material things and my emotions that may be enslaving
me, so that I can see the world clearly.
15:21And then I have to try to see in what ways I can make these the hands of God. And so try to
bring compassion to life in this world.