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01.THE SECRETS OF LEARNING A NEW LANGUAGE by Lydia Machová
I love learning foreign languages. In fact, I love it so much that I like to learn a new language every two years,
currently working on my eighth one. When people find that out about me, they always ask me, "How do you do
that? What's your secret?" And to be honest, for many years, my answer would be, "I don't know. I simply love
learning languages." But people were never happy with that answer. They wanted to know why they are spending
years trying to learn even one language, never achieving fluency, and here I come, learning one language after
another. They wanted to know the secret of polyglots, people who speak a lot of languages. And that made me
wonder, too, how do actually other polyglots do it? What do we have in common? And what is it that enables us to
learn languages so much faster than other people? I decided to meet other people like me and find that out.

The best place to meet a lot of polyglots is an event where hundreds of language lovers meet in one place to practice
their languages. There are several such polyglot events organized all around the world, and so I decided to go there
and ask polyglots about the methods that they use.

And so I met Benny from Ireland, who told me that his method is to start speaking from day one. He learns a few
phrases from a travel phrasebook and goes to meet native speakers and starts having conversations with them right
away. He doesn't mind making even 200 mistakes a day, because that's how he learns, based on the feedback. And
the best thing is, he doesn't even need to travel a lot today, because you can easily have conversations with native
speakers from the comfort of your living room, using websites.

I also met Lucas from Brazil who had a really interesting method to learn Russian. He simply added a hundred
random Russian speakers on Skype as friends, and then he opened a chat window with one of them and wrote "Hi"
in Russian. And the person replied, "Hi, how are you?" Lucas copied this and put it into a text window with another
person, and the person replied, "I'm fine, thank you, and how are you?" Lucas copied this back to the first person,
and in this way, he had two strangers have a conversation with each other without knowing about it.

And soon he would start typing himself, because he had so many of these conversations that he figured out how the
Russian conversation usually starts. What an ingenious method, right?

And then I met polyglots who always start by imitating sounds of the language, and others who always learn the 500
most frequent words of the language, and yet others who always start by reading about the grammar. If I asked a
hundred different polyglots, I heard a hundred different approaches to learning languages. Everybody seems to have
a unique way they learn a language, and yet we all come to the same result of speaking several languages fluently.

And as I was listening to these polyglots telling me about their methods, it suddenly dawned on me: the one thing
we all have in common is that we simply found ways to enjoy the language-learning process. All of these polyglots
were talking about language learning as if it was great fun. You should have seen their faces when they were
showing me their colorful grammar charts and their carefully handmade flash cards, and their statistics about
learning vocabulary using apps, or even how they love to cook based on recipes in a foreign language. All of them
use different methods, but they always make sure it's something that they personally enjoy.

I realized that this is actually how I learn languages myself. When I was learning Spanish, I was bored with the text in
the textbook. I mean, who wants to read about Jose asking about the directions to the train station. Right? I wanted
to read "Harry Potter" instead, because that was my favorite book as a child, and I have read it many times. So I got
the Spanish translation of "Harry Potter" and started reading, and sure enough, I didn't understand almost anything
at the beginning, but I kept on reading because I loved the book, and by the end of the book, I was able to follow it
almost without any problems. And the same thing happened when I was learning German. I decided to watch
"Friends," my favorite sitcom, in German, and again, at the beginning it was all just gibberish. I didn't know where
one word finished and another one started, but I kept on watching every day because it's "Friends." I can watch it in
any language. I love it so much. And after the second or third season, seriously, the dialogue started to make sense.

I only realized this after meeting other polyglots. We are no geniuses and we have no shortcut to learning languages.
We simply found ways how to enjoy the process, how to turn language learning from a boring school subject into a
pleasant activity which you don't mind doing every day. If you don't like writing words down on paper, you can
always type them in an app. If you don't like listening to boring textbook material, find interesting content on
YouTube or in podcasts for any language. If you're a more introverted person and you can't imagine speaking to
native speakers right away, you can apply the method of self-talk. You can talk to yourself in the comfort of your
room, describing your plans for the weekend, how your day has been, or even take a random picture from your
phone and describe the picture to your imaginary friend. This is how polyglots learn languages, and the best news is,
it's available to anyone who is willing to take the learning into their own hands.

So meeting other polyglots helped me realize that it is really crucial to find enjoyment in the process of learning
languages, but also that joy in itself is not enough. If you want to achieve fluency in a foreign language, you'll also
need to apply three more principles.

First of all, you'll need effective methods. If you try to memorize a list of words for a test tomorrow, the words will
be stored in your short-term memory and you'll forget them after a few days. If you, however, want to keep words
long term, you need to revise them in the course of a few days repeatedly using the so-called space repetition. You
can use apps which are based on this system such as Anki or Memrise, or you can write lists of word in a notebook
using the Goldlist method, which is also very popular with many polyglots. If you're not sure which methods are
effective and what is available out there, just check out polyglots' YouTube channels and websites and get inspiration
from them. If it works for them, it will most probably work for you too.

The third principle to follow is to create a system in your learning. We're all very busy and no one really has time to
learn a language today. But we can create that time if we just plan a bit ahead. Can you wake up 15 minutes earlier
than you normally do? That would be the perfect time to revise some vocabulary. Can you listen to a podcast on
your way to work while driving? Well, that would be great to get some listening experience. There are so many
things we can do without even planning that extra time, such as listening to podcasts on our way to work or doing
our household chores. The important thing is to create a plan in the learning. "I will practice speaking every Tuesday
and Thursday with a friend for 20 minutes. I will listen to a YouTube video while having breakfast." If you create a
system in your learning, you don't need to find that extra time, because it will become a part of your everyday life.

And finally, if you want to learn a language fluently, you need also a bit of patience. It's not possible to learn a
language within two months, but it's definitely possible to make a visible improvement in two months, if you learn in
small chunks every day in a way that you enjoy. And there is nothing that motivates us more than our own success.

I vividly remember the moment when I understood the first joke in German when watching "Friends." I was so happy
and motivated that I just kept on watching that day two more episodes, and as I kept watching, I had more and more
of those moments of understanding, these little victories, and step by step, I got to a level where I could use the
language freely and fluently to express anything. This is a wonderful feeling. I can't get enough of that feeling, and
that's why I learn a language every two years.

So this is the whole polyglot secret. Find effective methods which you can use systematically over the period of some
time in a way which you enjoy, and this is how polyglots learn languages within months, not years.

Now, some of you may be thinking, "That's all very nice to enjoy language learning, but isn't the real secret that you
polyglots are just super talented and most of us aren't?"

Well, there's one thing I haven't told you about Benny and Lucas. Benny had 11 years of Irish Gaelic and five years of
German at school. He couldn't speak them at all when graduating. Up to the age of 21, he thought he didn't have the
language gene and he could not speak another language. Then he started to look for his way of learning languages,
which was speaking to native speakers and getting feedback from them, and today Benny can easily have a
conversation in 10 languages. Lucas tried to learn English at school for 10 years. He was one of the worst students in
class. His friends even made fun of him and gave him a Russian textbook as a joke because they thought he would
never learn that language, or any language. And then Lucas started to experiment with methods, looking for his own
way to learn, for example, by having Skype chat conversations with strangers. And after just 10 years, Lucas is able to
speak 11 languages fluently.

Does that sound like a miracle? Well, I see such miracles every single day. As a language mentor, I help people learn
languages by themselves, and I see this every day. People struggle with language learning for five, 10, even 20 years,
and then they suddenly take their learning into their own hands, start using materials which they enjoy, more
effective methods, or they start tracking their learning so that they can appreciate their own progress, and that's
when suddenly they magically find the language talent that they were missing all their lives.

So if you've also tried to learn a language and you gave up, thinking it's too difficult or you don't have the language
talent, give it another try. Maybe you're also just one enjoyable method away from learning that language fluently.
Maybe you're just one method away from becoming a polyglot.

Thank you.

02. WHAT MAKES YOU SPECIAL? By MARIANA ATENCIO

Thank you so much. I am a journalist. My job is to talk to people from all walks of life, all over the world. Today, I
want to tell you why I decided to do this with my life and what I've learned. My story begins in Caracas, Venezuela, in
South America, where I grew up; a place that to me was, and always will be, filled with magic and wonder. Frоm a
very young age, my parents wanted me to have a wider view of the world. I remember one time when I was around
seven years old, my dad came up to me and said, "Mariana, I'm going to send you and your little sister..." - who was
six at the time - "...to a place where nobody speaks Spanish. I want you to experience different cultures." He went on
and on about the benefits of spending an entire summer in this summer camp in the United States, stressing a little
phrase that I didn't pay too much attention to at the time: "You never know what the future holds." Meanwhile, in
my seven-year-old mind, I was thinking, we were going to get to summer camp in Miami. (Laughter) Maybe it was
going to be even better, and we were going to go a little further north, to Orlando, where Mickey Mouse lived.
(Laughter) I got really excited. My dad, however, had a slightly different plan. Frоm Caracas, he he sent us to
Brainerd, Minnesota. (Laughter) Mickey Mouse was not up there, (Laughter) and with no cell phone, no Snapchat, or
Instagram, I couldn't look up any information. We got there, and one of the first things I noticed was that the other
kids' hair was several shades of blonde, and most of them had blue eyes. Meanwhile, this is what we looked like. The
first night, the camp director gathered everyone around the campfire and said, "Kids, we have a very international
camp this year; the Atencios are here from Venezuela." (Laughter) The other kids looked at us as if we were from
another planet. They would ask us things like, "Do you know what a hamburger is?" Or, "Do you go to school on a
donkey or a canoe?" (Laughter) I would try to answer in my broken English, and they would just laugh. I know they
were not trying to be mean; they were just trying to understand who we were, and make a correlation with the
world they knew. We could either be like them, or like characters out of a book filled with adventures, like Aladdin or
the Jungle Book. We certainly didn't look like them, we didn't speak their language, we were different. When you're
seven years old, that hurts. But I had my little sister to take care of, and she cried every day at summer camp. So I
decided to put on a brave face, and embrace everything I could about the American way of life. We later did what
we called "the summer camp experiment," for eight years in different cities that many Americans haven't even heard
of. What I remember most about these moments was when I finally clicked with someone. Making a friend was a
special reward. Everybody wants to feel valued and accepted, and we think it should happen spontaneously, but it
doesn't. When you're different, you have to work at belonging. You have to be either really helpful, smart, funny,
anything to be cool for the crowd you want to hang out with. Later on, when I was in high school, my dad expanded
on his summer plan, and from Caracas he sent me to Wallingford, Connecticut, for the senior year of high school.
This time, I remember daydreaming on the plane about "the American high school experience" - with a locker. It was
going to be perfect, just like in my favorite TV show: "Saved by the Bell." (Laughter) I get there, and they tell me that
my assigned roommate is eagerly waiting. I opened the door, and there she was, sitting on the bed, with a headscarf.
Her name was Fatima, and she was Muslim from Bahrain, and she was not what I expected. She probably sensed my
disappointment when I looked at her because I didn't do too much to hide it. See, as a teenager, I wanted to fit in
even more, I wanted to be popular, maybe have a boyfriend for prom, and I felt that Fatima just got in the way with
her shyness and her strict dress code. I didn't realize that I was making her feel like the kids at summer camp made
me feel. This was the high school equivalent of asking her, "Do you know what a hamburger is?" I was consumed by
my own selfishness and unable to put myself in her shoes. I have to be honest with you, we only lasted a couple of
months together, because she was later sent to live with a counselor instead of other students. I remember thinking,
"Ah, she'll be okay. She's just different." You see, when we label someone as different, it dehumanizes them in a
way. They become "the other." They're not worthy of our time, not our problem, and in fact, they, "the other," are
probably the cause of our problems. So, how do we recognize our blind spots? It begins by understanding what
makes you different, by embracing those traits. Only then can you begin to appreciate what makes others special. I
remember when this hit me. It was a couple months after that. I had found that boyfriend for prom, made a group of
friends, and practically forgotten about Fatima, until everybody signed on to participate in this talent show for
charity. You needed to offer a talent for auction. It seemed like everybody had something special to offer. Some kids
were going to play the violin, others were going to recite a theater monologue, and I remember thinking, "We don't
practice talents like these back home." But I was determined to find something of value. The day of the talent show
comes, and I get up on stage with my little boom box, and put it on the side and press "Play," and a song by my
favorite emerging artist, Shakira, comes up. And I go, "Whenever, wherever, we're meant to be together," and I said,
"My name is Mariana, and I'm going to auction a dance class." It seemed like the whole school raised their hand to
bid. My dance class really stood out from, like, the 10th violin class offered that day. Going back to my dorm room, I
didn't feel different. I felt really special. That's when I started thinking about Fatima, a person that I had failed to see
as special, when I first met her. She was from the Middle East, just like Shakira's family was from the Middle East.
She could have probably taught me a thing or two about belly dancing, had I been open to it. Now, I want you all to
take that sticker that was given to you at the beginning of our session today, where you wrote down what makes you
special, and I want you to look at it. If you're watching at home, take a piece of paper, and write down what makes
you different. You may feel guarded when you look at it, maybe even a little ashamed, maybe even proud. But you
need to begin to embrace it. Remember, it is the first step in appreciating what makes others special. When I went
back home to Venezuela, I began to understand how these experiences were changing me. Being able to speak
different languages, to navigate all these different people and places, it gave me a unique sensibility. I was finally
beginning to understand the importance of putting myself in other people's shoes. That is a big part of the reason
why I decided to become a journalist. Especially being from a part of the world that is often labeled "the backyard,"
"the illegal aliens," "third-world," "the others," I wanted to do something to change that. It was right around the
time, however, when the Venezuelan government shut down the biggest television station in our country.
Censorship was growing, and my dad came up to me once again and said, "How are you going to be a journalist
here? You have to leave." That's when it hit me. That's what he had been preparing me for. That is what the future
held for me. So in 2008, I packed my bags, and I came to the United States, without a return ticket this time. I was
painfully aware that, at 24 years old, I was becoming a refugee of sorts, an immigrant, the other, once again, and
now for good. I was able to come on a scholarship to study journalism. I remember when they gave me my first
assignment to cover the historic election of President Barack Obama. I felt so lucky, so hopeful. I was, like, "Yes, this
is it. I've come to post-racial America, where the notion of us and them is being eroded, and will probably be
eradicated in my lifetime." Boy, was I wrong, right? Why didn't Barack Obama's presidency alleviate racial tensions in
our country? Why do some people still feel threatened by immigrants, LGBTQ, and minority groups who are just
trying to find a space in this United States that should be for all of us? I didn't have the answers back then, but on
November 8th, 2016, when Donald Trump became our president, it became clear that a large part of the electorate
sees them as "the others." Some see people coming to take their jobs, or potential terrorists who speak a different
language. Meanwhile, minority groups oftentimes just see hatred, intolerance, and narrow-mindedness on the other
side. It's like we're stuck in these bubbles that nobody wants to burst. The only way to do it, the only way to get out
of it is to realize that being different also means thinking differently. It takes courage to show respect. In the words
of Voltaire: "I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will fight to the death to defend your right to say it."
Failing to see anything good on the other side makes a dialogue impossible. Without a dialogue, we will keep
repeating the same mistakes, because we will not learn anything new. I covered the 2016 election for NBC News. It
was my first big assignment in this mainstream network, where I had crossed over from Spanish television. And I
wanted to do something different. I watched election results with undocumented families. Few thought of sharing
that moment with people who weren't citizens, but actually stood the most to lose that night. When it became
apparent that Donald Trump was winning, this eight-year-old girl named Angelina rushed up to me in tears. She
sobbed, and she asked me if her mom was going to be deported now. I hugged her back and I said, "It's going to be
okay," but I really didn't know. This was the photo we took that night, forever ingrained in my heart. Here was this
little girl who was around the same age I was when I went to camp in Brainerd. She already knows she is "the other."
She walks home from school in fear, every day, that her mom can be taken away. So, how do we put ourselves in
Angelina's shoes? How do we make her understand she is special, and not simply unworthy of having her family
together? By giving camera time to her and families like hers, I tried to make people see them as human beings, and
not simply "illegal aliens." Yes, they broke a law, and they should pay a penalty for it, but they've also given
everything for this country, like many other immigrants before them have. I've already told you how my path to
personal growth started. To end, I want to tell you how I hit the worst bump in the road yet, one that shook me to
my very core. The day, April 10th, 2014, I was driving to the studio, and I got a call from my parents. "Are you on the
air?" they asked. I immediately knew something was wrong. "What happened?" I said. "It's your sister; she's been in
a car accident." It was as if my heart stopped. My hands gripped the steering wheel, and I remember hearing the
words: "It is unlikely she will ever walk again." They say your life can change in a split second. Mine did at that
moment. My sister went from being my successful other half, only a year apart in age, to not being able to move her
legs, sit up, or get dressed by herself. This wasn't like summer camp, where I could magically make it better. This was
terrifying. Throughout the course of two years, my sister underwent 15 surgeries, and she spent the most of that
time in a wheelchair. But that wasn't even the worst of it. The worst was something so painful, it's hard to put into
words, even now. It was the way people looked at her, looked at us, changed. People were unable to see a
successful lawyer or a millennial with a sharp wit and a kind heart. Everywhere we went, I realized that people just
saw a poor girl in a wheelchair. They were unable to see anything beyond that. After fighting like a warrior, I can
thankfully tell you that today my sister is walking, and has recovered beyond anyone's expectations. (Applause)
Thank you. But during that traumatic ordeal, I learned there are differences that simply suck, and it's hard to find
positive in them. My sister's not better off because of what happened. But she taught me: you can't let those
differences define you. Being able to reimagine yourself beyond what other people see, that is the toughest task of
all, but it's also the most beautiful. You see, we all come to this world in a body. People with physical or neurological
difficulties, environmentally impacted communities, immigrants, boys, girls, boys who want to dress as girls, girls
with veils, women who have been sexually assaulted, athletes who bend their knee as a sign of protest, black, white,
Asian, Native American, my sister, you, or me. We all want what everyone wants: to dream and to achieve. But
sometimes, society tells us, and we tell ourselves, we don't fit the mold. Well, if you look at my story, from being
born somewhere different, to belly dancing in high school, to telling stories you wouldn't normally see on TV, what
makes me different is what has made me stand out and be successful. I have traveled the world, and talked to
people from all walks of life. You know what I've learned? The single thing every one of us has in common is being
human. So take a stand to defend your race, the human race. Let's appeal to it. Let's be humanists, before and after
everything else. To end, I want you to take that sticker, that piece of paper where you wrote down what makes you
different, and I want you to celebrate it today and every day, shout it from the rooftops. I also encourage you to be
curious and ask, "What is on other people's pieces of paper?" "What makes them different?" Let's celebrate those
imperfections that make us special. I hope that it teaches you that nobody has a claim on the word "normal." We are
all different. We are all quirky, and unique, and that is what makes us wonderfully human. Thank you so much.

03. Mary Roach: 10 things you didn't know about orgasm

Alright. I'm going to show you a couple of images from a very diverting paper in The Journal of Ultrasound in
Medicine. I'm going to go way out on a limb and say that it is the most diverting paper ever published in The Journal
of Ultrasound in Medicine. The title is "Observations of In-Utero Masturbation."

Okay. Now on the left you can see the hand -- that's the big arrow -- and the penis on the right. The hand hovering.
And over here we have, in the words of radiologist Israel Meisner, "The hand grasping the penis in a fashion
resembling masturbation movements." Bear in mind this was an ultrasound, so it would have been moving images.

Orgasm is a reflex of the autonomic nervous system. Now, this is the part of the nervous system that deals with the
things that we don't consciously control, like digestion, heart rate and sexual arousal. And the orgasm reflex can be
triggered by a surprisingly broad range of input. Genital stimulation. Duh. But also, Kinsey interviewed a woman who
could be brought to orgasm by having someone stroke her eyebrow. People with spinal cord injuries, like
paraplegias, quadriplegias, will often develop a very, very sensitive area right above the level of their injury,
wherever that is. There is such a thing as a knee orgasm in the literature.

I think the most curious one that I came across was a case report of a woman who had an orgasm every time she
brushed her teeth.
Something in the complex sensory-motor action of brushing her teeth was triggering orgasm. And she went to a
neurologist, who was fascinated. He checked to see if it was something in the toothpaste, but no -- it happened with
any brand. They stimulated her gums with a toothpick, to see if that was doing it. No. It was the whole, you know,
motion. And the amazing thing to me is that you would think this woman would have excellent oral hygiene.

Sadly -- this is what it said in the journal paper -- "She believed that she was possessed by demons and switched to
mouthwash for her oral care." It's so sad.

When I was working on the book, I interviewed a woman who can think herself to orgasm. She was part of a study at
Rutgers University. You've got to love that. Rutgers. So I interviewed her in Oakland, in a sushi restaurant. And I said,
"So, could you do it right here?" And she said, "Yeah, but you know I'd rather finish my meal if you don't mind."

But afterwards, she was kind enough to demonstrate on a bench outside. It was remarkable. It took about one
minute. And I said to her, "Are you just doing this all the time?"

She said, "No. Honestly, when I get home, I'm usually too tired."

She said that the last time she had done it was on the Disneyland tram.

The headquarters for orgasm, along the spinal nerve, is something called the sacral nerve root, which is back here.
And if you trigger, if you stimulate with an electrode, the precise spot, you will trigger an orgasm. And it is a fact that
you can trigger spinal reflexes in dead people -- a certain kind of dead person, a beating-heart cadaver. Now this is
somebody who is brain-dead, legally dead, definitely checked out, but is being kept alive on a respirator, so that
their organs will be oxygenated for transplantation. Now in one of these brain-dead people, if you trigger the right
spot, you will see something every now and then. There is a reflex called the Lazarus reflex. And this is -- I'll
demonstrate as best I can, not being dead. It's like this. You trigger the spot. The dead guy, or gal, goes... like that.
Very unsettling for people working in pathology labs.

Now, if you can trigger the Lazarus reflex in a dead person, why not the orgasm reflex? I asked this question to a
brain death expert, Stephanie Mann, who was foolish enough to return my emails.

I said, "So, could you conceivably trigger an orgasm in a dead person?" She said, "Yes, if the sacral nerve is being
oxygenated, you conceivably could." Obviously it wouldn't be as much fun for the person. But it would be an orgasm

nonetheless.

There is a researcher at the University of Alabama who does orgasm research. I said to her, "You should do an
experiment. You know? You can get cadavers if you work at a university." I said, "You should actually do this." She
said, "You get the human subjects review board approval for this one."

According to 1930s marriage manual author, Theodoor van De Velde, a slight seminal odor can be detected on the
breath of a woman within about an hour after sexual intercourse. Theodoor van De Velde was something of a semen
connoisseur.

This is a guy writing a book, "Ideal Marriage," you know. Very heavy hetero guy. But he wrote in this book, "Ideal
Marriage" -- he said that he could differentiate between the semen of a young man, which he said had a fresh,
exhilarating smell, and the semen of mature men, whose semen smelled, quote, "Remarkably like that of the flowers
of the Spanish chestnut. Sometimes quite freshly floral, and then again sometimes extremely pungent."

Okay. In 1999, in the state of Israel, a man began hiccupping. And this was one of those cases that went on and on.
He tried everything his friends suggested. Nothing seemed to help. Days went by. At a certain point, the man, still
hiccupping, had sex with his wife. And lo and behold, the hiccups went away. He told his doctor, who published a
case report in a Canadian medical journal under the title, "Sexual Intercourse as a Potential Treatment for Intractable
Hiccups." I love this article because at a certain point they suggested that unattached hiccuppers could try
masturbation.

I love that because there is like a whole demographic: unattached hiccuppers.

Married, single, unattached hiccupper. In the 1900s, early 1900s, a lot of gynecologists believed that when a woman
has an orgasm, the contractions serve to suck the semen up through the cervix and sort of deliver it really quickly to
the egg, thereby upping the odds of conception. It was called the "upsuck" theory.

If you go all the way back to Hippocrates, physicians believed that orgasm in women was not just helpful for
conception, but necessary. Doctors back then were routinely telling men the importance of pleasuring their wives.
Marriage-manual author and semen-sniffer Theodoor van De Velde --

has a line in his book. I loved this guy. I got a lot of mileage out of Theodoor van De Velde. He had this line in his
book that supposedly comes from the Habsburg Monarchy, where there was an empress Maria Theresa, who was
having trouble conceiving. And apparently the royal court physician said to her, "I am of the opinion that the vulva of
your most sacred majesty be titillated for some time prior to intercourse."

It's apparently, I don't know, on the record somewhere.

Masters and Johnson: now we're moving forward to the 1950s. Masters and Johnson were upsuck skeptics, which is
also really fun to say. They didn't buy it. And they decided, being Masters and Johnson, that they would get to the
bottom of it. They brought women into the lab -- I think it was five women -- and outfitted them with cervical caps
containing artificial semen. And in the artificial semen was a radio-opaque substance, such that it would show up on
an X-ray. This is the 1950s. Anyway, these women sat in front of an X-ray device. And they masturbated. And
Masters and Johnson looked to see if the semen was being sucked up. Did not find any evidence of upsuck. You may
be wondering, "How do you make artificial semen?"

I have an answer for you. I have two answers. You can use flour and water, or cornstarch and water. I actually found
three separate recipes in the literature.

My favorite being the one that says -- you know, they have the ingredients listed, and then in a recipe it will say, for
example, "Yield: two dozen cupcakes." This one said, "Yield: one ejaculate."

There's another way that orgasm might boost fertility. This one involves men. Sperm that sit around in the body for a
week or more start to develop abnormalities that make them less effective at head-banging their way into the egg.
British sexologist Roy Levin has speculated that this is perhaps why men evolved to be such enthusiastic and
frequent masturbators. He said, "If I keep tossing myself off I get fresh sperm being made." Which I thought was an
interesting idea, theory. So now you have an evolutionary excuse.

All righty. There is considerable evidence for upsuck in the animal kingdom -- pigs, for instance. In Denmark, the
Danish National Committee for Pig Production found out that if you sexually stimulate a sow while you artificially
inseminate her, you will see a six-percent increase in the farrowing rate, which is the number of piglets produced. So
they came up with this five-point stimulation plan for the sows. There is posters they put in the barn, and they have
a DVD. And I got a copy of this DVD.

This is my unveiling, because I am going to show you a clip.

So, okay. Now, here we go, la la la, off to work. It all looks very innocent. He's going to be doing things with his hands
that the boar would use his snout, lacking hands. Okay.

This is it. The boar has a very odd courtship repertoire.

This is to mimic the weight of the boar.

You should know, the clitoris of the pig is inside the vagina. So this may be sort of titillating for her. Here we go.

And the happy result.

I love this video. There is a point in this video, towards the beginning, where they zoom in for a close up of his hand
with his wedding ring, as if to say, "It's okay, it's just his job. He really does like women."

Okay. When I was in Denmark, my host was named Anne Marie. And I said, "So why don't you just stimulate the
clitoris of the pig? Why don't you have the farmers do that? That's not one of your five steps." I have to read you
what she said, because I love it. She said, "It was a big hurdle just to get farmers to touch underneath the vulva. So
we thought, let's not mention the clitoris right now."

Shy but ambitious pig farmers, however, can purchase a -- this is true -- a sow vibrator, that hangs on the sperm
feeder tube to vibrate. Because, as I mentioned, the clitoris is inside the vagina. So possibly, you know, a little more
arousing than it looks. And I also said to her, "Now, these sows. I mean, you may have noticed there. The sow
doesn't look to be in the throes of ecstasy." And she said, you can't make that conclusion, because animals don't
register pain or pleasure on their faces in the same way that we do. Pigs, for example, are more like dogs. They use
the upper half of the face; the ears are very expressive. So you're not really sure what's going on with the pig.

Primates, on the other hand, we use our mouths more. This is the ejaculation face of the stump-tailed macaque.

And, interestingly, this has been observed in female macaques, but only when mounting another female.

Masters and Johnson. In the 1950s, they decided, okay, we're going to figure out the entire human sexual response
cycle, from arousal, all the way through orgasm, in men and women -- everything that happens in the human body.
Okay, with women, a lot of this is happening inside. This did not stop Masters and Johnson. They developed an
artificial coition machine. This is basically a penis camera on a motor. There is a phallus, clear acrylic phallus, with a
camera and a light source, attached to a motor that is kind of going like this. And the woman would have sex with it.
That is what they would do. Pretty amazing. Sadly, this device has been dismantled. This just kills me, not because I
wanted to use it -- I wanted to see it.

One fine day, Alfred Kinsey decided to calculate the average distance traveled by ejaculated semen. This was not idle
curiosity. Doctor Kinsey had heard -- and there was a theory going around at the time, this being the 1940s -- that
the force with which semen is thrown against the cervix was a factor in fertility. Kinsey thought it was bunk, so he
got to work. He got together in his lab 300 men, a measuring tape, and a movie camera.

And in fact, he found that in three quarters of the men the stuff just kind of slopped out. It wasn't spurted or thrown
or ejected under great force. However, the record holder landed just shy of the eight-foot mark, which is impressive.

Yes. Exactly.

Sadly, he's anonymous. His name is not mentioned.

In his write-up of this experiment in his book, Kinsey wrote, "Two sheets were laid down to protect the oriental
carpets."

Which is my second favorite line in the entire oeuvre of Alfred Kinsey. My favorite being, "Cheese crumbs spread
before a pair of copulating rats will distract the female, but not the male."

Thank you very much.

04. Grit: The power of passion and perseverance

When I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more
demanding: teaching. I went to teach seventh graders math in the New York City public schools. And like any
teacher, I made quizzes and tests. I gave out homework assignments. When the work came back, I calculated grades.

What struck me was that IQ was not the only difference between my best and my worst students. Some of my
strongest performers did not have stratospheric IQ scores. Some of my smartest kids weren't doing so well. And that
got me thinking. The kinds of things you need to learn in seventh grade math, sure, they're hard: ratios, decimals,
the area of a parallelogram. But these concepts are not impossible, and I was firmly convinced that every one of my
students could learn the material if they worked hard and long enough.

After several more years of teaching, I came to the conclusion that what we need in education is a much better
understanding of students and learning from a motivational perspective, from a psychological perspective. In
education, the one thing we know how to measure best is IQ. But what if doing well in school and in life depends on
much more than your ability to learn quickly and easily?
So I left the classroom, and I went to graduate school to become a psychologist. I started studying kids and adults in
all kinds of super challenging settings, and in every study my question was, who is successful here and why? My
research team and I went to West Point Military Academy. We tried to predict which cadets would stay in military
training and which would drop out. We went to the National Spelling Bee and tried to predict which children would
advance farthest in competition. We studied rookie teachers working in really tough neighborhoods, asking which
teachers are still going to be here in teaching by the end of the school year, and of those, who will be the most
effective at improving learning outcomes for their students? We partnered with private companies, asking, which of
these salespeople is going to keep their jobs? And who's going to earn the most money? In all those very different
contexts, one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success. And it wasn't social intelligence. It wasn't
good looks, physical health, and it wasn't IQ. It was grit.

Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future, day
in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working really hard to make that future a
reality. Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint.

A few years ago, I started studying grit in the Chicago public schools. I asked thousands of high school juniors to take
grit questionnaires, and then waited around more than a year to see who would graduate. Turns out that grittier kids
were significantly more likely to graduate, even when I matched them on every characteristic I could measure, things
like family income, standardized achievement test scores, even how safe kids felt when they were at school. So it's
not just at West Point or the National Spelling Bee that grit matters. It's also in school, especially for kids at risk for
dropping out.

To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows, about building it. Every
day, parents and teachers ask me, "How do I build grit in kids? What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic? How do
I keep them motivated for the long run?" The honest answer is, I don't know.

What I do know is that talent doesn't make you gritty. Our data show very clearly that there are many talented
individuals who simply do not follow through on their commitments. In fact, in our data, grit is usually unrelated or
even inversely related to measures of talent.

So far, the best idea I've heard about building grit in kids is something called "growth mindset." This is an idea
developed at Stanford University by Carol Dweck, and it is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed, that it can
change with your effort. Dr. Dweck has shown that when kids read and learn about the brain and how it changes and
grows in response to challenge, they're much more likely to persevere when they fail, because they don't believe
that failure is a permanent condition.

So growth mindset is a great idea for building grit. But we need more. And that's where I'm going to end my remarks,
because that's where we are. That's the work that stands before us. We need to take our best ideas, our strongest
intuitions, and we need to test them. We need to measure whether we've been successful, and we have to be willing
to fail, to be wrong, to start over again with lessons learned.

In other words, we need to be gritty about getting our kids grittier.

Thank you.

05. How to gain control of your free time by Laura Vanderkam

When people find out I write about time management, they assume two things. One is that I'm always on time, and
I'm not. I have four small children, and I would like to blame them for my occasional tardiness, but sometimes it's
just not their fault. I was once late to my own speech on time management.

We all had to just take a moment together and savor that irony.

The second thing they assume is that I have lots of tips and tricks for saving bits of time here and there. Sometimes
I'll hear from magazines that are doing a story along these lines, generally on how to help their readers find an extra
hour in the day. And the idea is that we'll shave bits of time off everyday activities, add it up, and we'll have time for
the good stuff. I question the entire premise of this piece, but I'm always interested in hearing what they've come up
with before they call me. Some of my favorites: doing errands where you only have to make right-hand turns --
Being extremely judicious in microwave usage: it says three to three-and-a-half minutes on the package, we're
totally getting in on the bottom side of that. And my personal favorite, which makes sense on some level, is to DVR
your favorite shows so you can fast-forward through the commercials. That way, you save eight minutes every half
hour, so in the course of two hours of watching TV, you find 32 minutes to exercise.

Which is true. You know another way to find 32 minutes to exercise? Don't watch two hours of TV a day, right?

Anyway, the idea is we'll save bits of time here and there, add it up, we will finally get to everything we want to do.
But after studying how successful people spend their time and looking at their schedules hour by hour, I think this
idea has it completely backward. We don't build the lives we want by saving time. We build the lives we want, and
then time saves itself.

Here's what I mean. I recently did a time diary project looking at 1,001 days in the lives of extremely busy women.
They had demanding jobs, sometimes their own businesses, kids to care for, maybe parents to care for, community
commitments -- busy, busy people. I had them keep track of their time for a week so I could add up how much they
worked and slept, and I interviewed them about their strategies, for my book.

One of the women whose time log I studied goes out on a Wednesday night for something. She comes home to find
that her water heater has broken, and there is now water all over her basement. If you've ever had anything like this
happen to you, you know it is a hugely damaging, frightening, sopping mess. So she's dealing with the immediate
aftermath that night, next day she's got plumbers coming in, day after that, professional cleaning crew dealing with
the ruined carpet. All this is being recorded on her time log. Winds up taking seven hours of her week. Seven hours.
That's like finding an extra hour in the day.

But I'm sure if you had asked her at the start of the week, "Could you find seven hours to train for a triathlon?"
"Could you find seven hours to mentor seven worthy people?" I'm sure she would've said what most of us would've
said, which is, "No -- can't you see how busy I am?" Yet when she had to find seven hours because there is water all
over her basement, she found seven hours. And what this shows us is that time is highly elastic. We cannot make
more time, but time will stretch to accommodate what we choose to put into it.

And so the key to time management is treating our priorities as the equivalent of that broken water heater. To get at
this, I like to use language from one of the busiest people I ever interviewed. By busy, I mean she was running a small
business with 12 people on the payroll, she had six children in her spare time. I was getting in touch with her to set
up an interview on how she "had it all" -- that phrase. I remember it was a Thursday morning, and she was not
available to speak with me. Of course, right?

But the reason she was unavailable to speak with me is that she was out for a hike, because it was a beautiful spring
morning, and she wanted to go for a hike. So of course this makes me even more intrigued, and when I finally do
catch up with her, she explains it like this. She says, "Listen Laura, everything I do, every minute I spend, is my
choice." And rather than say, "I don't have time to do x, y or z," she'd say, "I don't do x, y or z because it's not a
priority." "I don't have time," often means "It's not a priority." If you think about it, that's really more accurate
language. I could tell you I don't have time to dust my blinds, but that's not true. If you offered to pay me $100,000
to dust my blinds, I would get to it pretty quickly.

Since that is not going to happen, I can acknowledge this is not a matter of lacking time; it's that I don't want to do it.
Using this language reminds us that time is a choice. And granted, there may be horrible consequences for making
different choices, I will give you that. But we are smart people, and certainly over the long run, we have the power to
fill our lives with the things that deserve to be there.

So how do we do that? How do we treat our priorities as the equivalent of that broken water heater?

Well, first we need to figure out what they are. I want to give you two strategies for thinking about this. The first, on
the professional side: I'm sure many people coming up to the end of the year are giving or getting annual
performance reviews. You look back over your successes over the year, your "opportunities for growth." And this
serves its purpose, but I find it's more effective to do this looking forward. So I want you to pretend it's the end of
next year. You're giving yourself a performance review, and it has been an absolutely amazing year for you
professionally. What three to five things did you do that made it so amazing? So you can write next year's
performance review now.

And you can do this for your personal life, too. I'm sure many of you, like me, come December, get cards that contain
these folded up sheets of colored paper, on which is written what is known as the family holiday letter.

Bit of a wretched genre of literature, really, going on about how amazing everyone in the household is, or even more
scintillating, how busy everyone in the household is. But these letters serve a purpose, which is that they tell your
friends and family what you did in your personal life that mattered to you over the year. So this year's kind of done,
but I want you to pretend it's the end of next year, and it has been an absolutely amazing year for you and the
people you care about. What three to five things did you do that made it so amazing? So you can write next year's
family holiday letter now. Don't send it.

Please, don't send it. But you can write it. And now, between the performance review and the family holiday letter,
we have a list of six to ten goals we can work on in the next year.

And now we need to break these down into doable steps. So maybe you want to write a family history. First, you can
read some other family histories, get a sense for the style. Then maybe think about the questions you want to ask
your relatives, set up appointments to interview them. Or maybe you want to run a 5K. So you need to find a race
and sign up, figure out a training plan, and dig those shoes out of the back of the closet. And then -- this is key -- we
treat our priorities as the equivalent of that broken water heater, by putting them into our schedules first. We do
this by thinking through our weeks before we are in them.

I find a really good time to do this is Friday afternoons. Friday afternoon is what an economist might call a "low
opportunity cost" time. Most of us are not sitting there on Friday afternoons saying, "I am excited to make progress
toward my personal and professional priorities right now."

But we are willing to think about what those should be. So take a little bit of time Friday afternoon, make yourself a
three-category priority list: career, relationships, self. Making a three-category list reminds us that there should be
something in all three categories. Career, we think about; relationships, self -- not so much. But anyway, just a short
list, two to three items in each. Then look out over the whole of the next week, and see where you can plan them in.

Where you plan them in is up to you. I know this is going to be more complicated for some people than others. I
mean, some people's lives are just harder than others. It is not going to be easy to find time to take that poetry class
if you are caring for multiple children on your own. I get that. And I don't want to minimize anyone's struggle. But I
do think that the numbers I am about to tell you are empowering.

There are 168 hours in a week. Twenty-four times seven is 168 hours. That is a lot of time. If you are working a full-
time job, so 40 hours a week, sleeping eight hours a night, so 56 hours a week -- that leaves 72 hours for other
things. That is a lot of time. You say you're working 50 hours a week, maybe a main job and a side hustle. Well, that
leaves 62 hours for other things. You say you're working 60 hours. Well, that leaves 52 hours for other things. You
say you're working more than 60 hours. Well, are you sure?

There was once a study comparing people's estimated work weeks with time diaries. They found that people
claiming 75-plus-hour work weeks were off by about 25 hours.

You can guess in which direction, right? Anyway, in 168 hours a week, I think we can find time for what matters to
you. If you want to spend more time with your kids, you want to study more for a test you're taking, you want to
exercise for three hours and volunteer for two, you can. And that's even if you're working way more than full-time
hours.

So we have plenty of time, which is great, because guess what? We don't even need that much time to do amazing
things. But when most of us have bits of time, what do we do? Pull out the phone, right? Start deleting emails.
Otherwise, we're puttering around the house or watching TV.

But small moments can have great power. You can use your bits of time for bits of joy. Maybe it's choosing to read
something wonderful on the bus on the way to work. I know when I had a job that required two bus rides and a
subway ride every morning, I used to go to the library on weekends to get stuff to read. It made the whole
experience almost, almost, enjoyable. Breaks at work can be used for meditating or praying. If family dinner is out
because of your crazy work schedule, maybe family breakfast could be a good substitute.

It's about looking at the whole of one's time and seeing where the good stuff can go. I truly believe this. There is
time. Even if we are busy, we have time for what matters. And when we focus on what matters, we can build the
lives we want in the time we've got.

Thank you.

06.