Every time you've heard someone say they saw a ghost or an angel every story you've ever heard about vampires, werewolves or aliens is the system assimilating some program:

I'm sorry to ask this, but... do you ever talk to your wife?

Fitz, have you ever heard of an 0-8-4 being a person?

When I was born, my mom says I looked around the whole hospital room with a stare that said, "This? I've done this before."

From time to time, one hears Christians telling the story of how God organized things for them, so that everything worked out all right -- some difficulty overcome, some illness cured, some trouble averted, a parking space found at a crucial time.

We were standing out in the desert all alone and, thinking about my house, he said, "Did it ever occur to you if you built stuff more permanent, somewhere in 2000 years somebody's going to like it?"

And in Germany, if you would like to donate your organs -- God forbid something really bad happens to you -- when you get your driving license or an I.D., you check the box saying, "I would like to donate my organs."

(Music) (Laughter) Which is, are you talking about the thing with the singing cats? Like, is that the thing you think is going to be good for society?

I yearned to be more, to be whole, and I didn't think that I could do that if I looked at another person and reduced him to one thing he did one day and made evil the sum of its parts.

There's all these things that I've done with my life that I have no recollection of unless someone brings it up, and sometimes I think, "Oh yeah, that's something that I did."

But before that, what actually happened was, I used to think about it as, you could take care of your health, or you could take care of obligations, and one always came at the cost of the other.

I'm a little nervous, because my wife Yvonne said to me, she said, "Geoff, you watch the TED Talks."

And I say, "No, it's not brave at all, because if you ask for something that Derek doesn't know, you're invited to come and sing it first, and then he'll pick it up." (Laughter) So just be thoughtful before you suggest something too outlandish.

(Laughter) Mainstreaming Arabs was much, much easier than conquering the challenge against the stigma against disability.

You know, I'm up here bagging out inspiration, and you're thinking, "Jeez, Stella, aren't you inspired sometimes by some things?"

On January 4, 1934, a young man delivered a report to the United States Congress that 80 years on, still shapes the lives of everyone in this room today, still shapes the lives of everyone on this planet.

I have yet to hear of a guy come in, and raise his hand, and be like, "There's this really great opportunity for us, bystanders, to intervene."

The idea of finding someone different to mentor, someone who doesn't come from the same background as you, whatever that background is, is about opening doors for people who couldn't even get to the damn hallway.

And even more so than that, as you see people, especially today, who inspire you, who are doing things where you say "Oh God, what Jeff is doing, I want to be like him."

It means being able to send your children to school, go to university, or just find work to be able to provide for yourself and the ones you love.

We're much more likely to do things like yell at our spouse or kids when we're stressed out or tired, even though we know it's not going to be helpful.

Telling this same story at a family dinner, my aunt tells me, "But no, Andrés, I've been there. I've swum in that river."

So I told her that she wasn't alone and that it wasn't right what had happened to her, and then she asked me if I had ever peed in my pants before.

(Laughter) (Applause) But in the middle of all this excitement, the Rational Decision-Maker seemed to have something else on his mind.

Tell them you received it, tell them what you're working on, and invite them to visit your lab, because that visit may be even more gratifying for you than it is for them.

There were a lot of problems that I saw in my own family, problems caused sometimes by a lack of money, problems caused sometimes by a lack of access to resources and social capital that really affected my life.

Each box must contain at least two rubies and one of the boxes must contain exactly six more rubies than another— but you won’t know which boxes those are.

I could take the easy way out and just choose not to say anything to her, and instead just kind of simmer in my frustration, or I could ask her to learn more about her motivations.

I mean, we're facing some rather significant problems in the world just at present, what does it really matter if I can't get a job, or you're stuck watching "Transformer 17, " right?

I started talking to other women and asking - the women I knew, older women, younger women, women I met - saying, "Have you ever experienced anything like this?"

And we never hear about that. And the latest infraction against these people is, as part of Plan Colombia, we're spraying Paraquat or Round Up, whatever it is -- we're defoliating thousands of acres of the Ecuadorian Amazon in our war on drugs.

That is vengeance, that is not our mission, that's a different game so we level up to level three, where the objective is to change the action, also known as "calling the police is not your only option OMG, what is wrong with you people!"

Now, just to pause here: if this idea sounds familiar to you, that there are a few elites who control the world and a lot of them happen to be rich Jews, that's because it is one of the most anti-Semitic tropes in existence.

And it might be that because of her history, she's writing a singular story of betrayal, but there's probably something else that she's not willing to let me, in her letter, or maybe even herself, to see.