So for example, in June 2008, I was watching TV in Paris, and then I heard about this terrible thing that happened in Rio de Janeiro -- the first favela of Brazil named Providencia.
I don't know if I can change the world yet, because I don't know that much about it -- and I don't know that much about reincarnation either, but if you make me laugh hard enough, sometimes I forget what century I'm in.
And he explained to me that, when I shave, I have little black dots on the left side of my face where the hair is, but on the right side of my face I was badly burned so I have no hair, and this creates lack of symmetry.
Which meant that if you fielded average content, you got a third of the U.S. public for free -- tens of millions of users for simply doing something that wasn't too terrible.
I was pretty sick, I had a chest cold, and I was in the hospital for a few days, and I was secluded from all of the aspects of my life that I felt made me, me, that kind of gave me my identity.
Now he's really pretty sick. He needs help eating, he needs help getting dressed, he doesn't really know where he is or when it is, and it's been really, really hard.
And he looked at me and laughed and said, "Adam, sounds like a really novel idea, but we're an ultraconservative organization." (Laughter) I've heard this before. I know how it goes.
And I said, "Well, I have to see." It was 2004 which was the beginning of the incredibly bloody time in Iraq, "I have to see, I have to see what is happening here.
I'm not the only kid who grew up this way, surrounded by people who used to say that rhyme about sticks and stones, as if broken bones hurt more than the names we got called, and we got called them all.
It started off quite small, for example, pull out three strands of hair, but gradually it grew more extreme, culminating in commands to harm myself, and a particularly dramatic instruction: "You see that tutor over there?
But then I was very disappointed at my profession as an architect, because we are not helping, we are not working for society, but we are working for privileged people, rich people, government, developers.
And in a study done in Canada, researchers planted the false memory that when you were a kid, something as awful as being attacked by a vicious animal happened to you, succeeding with about half of their subjects.
So I run home, I call my mother, I call my sister, and as I do, at the end of each one of these terrible, terrible dates, I regale them with the details.
And he said, "[Without] that -- even if you get a high-tech flat on the 100th floor of a super-modern and comfortable building, if you are deeply unhappy within, all you are going to look for is a window from which to jump."
It's a bit disgusting. Indeed, for the pick-up artists, falling in love with someone is a waste of time, it's squandering your seduction capital, so it must be eliminated like a disease, like an infection.
Well, of course it's happening at the edge, because in the middle, everybody's updating Facebook, or worse still, they're trying to understand Facebook's privacy settings.
And if you're in Canada, because of the cold winters here in B.C., there's about 720, 730 different types of spiders and there's one -- one -- that is venomous, and its venom isn't even fatal, it's just kind of like a nasty sting.
I wrote all through childhood, all through adolescence, by the time I was a teenager I was sending my very bad stories to The New Yorker, hoping to be discovered.
I spoke with Jason's parents that evening, and I suppose that, when I was speaking with them, that I didn't sound as if I was doing very well, because that very next day, their family rabbi called to check on me.
I use the term "disabled people" quite deliberately, because I subscribe to what's called the social model of disability, which tells us that we are more disabled by the society that we live in than by our bodies and our diagnoses.
So, this is a terrible form of diarrhea where you have to go up to 20 times a day, and these people have failed antibiotic therapy for two years before they're eligible for this trial.
But though these Martian vistas resemble the deserts of our own home world, places that are tied in our imagination to ideas about pioneering and frontiers, compared to Earth Mars is a pretty terrible place to live.
So 95 percent of us will say that it is terribly wrong for our partner to lie about having an affair, but just about the same amount of us will say that that's exactly what we would do if we were having one.
Now, this building had to receive two and a half thousand really highly strung thoroughbred horses that were coming off long-haul flights, highly jet-lagged, not feeling their finest.
And nowhere are the effects of bad design more heartbreaking or the opportunity for good design more compelling than at the end of life, where things are so distilled and concentrated.
And the media wrote about this slight woman, and couldn't imagine how she could survive all this time under such conditions in that sea, and still save another life.
And they include terrible things -- debilitating muscle and joint pain, gastrointestinal distress -- but now you're thinking, "Five percent, not very likely it's going to happen to me, I'll still take the drug."
In the '70s we invested in national parks, and that kept us away from the deeply flawed logic of growth, growth, growth at any cost that you see others embracing, especially in the developing world.
On the other end of the spectrum, some were so sick they had to live in complete darkness, unable to tolerate the sound of a human voice or the touch of a loved one.
This tendency to compare to the past is causing people to pass up the better deal. In other words, a good deal that used to be a great deal is not nearly as good as an awful deal that was once a horrible deal.
I mean, when I first got my violin and tried to play around on it, it was actually really bad, because it didn't sound the way I'd heard from other kids -- it was so horrible and so scratchy.
[Everything was better back when everything was worse.] The reason that everything was better back when everything was worse is that when everything was worse, it was actually possible for people to have experiences that were a pleasant surprise.
(Laughter) But not too uncomfortable, because there's something unthreatening about seeing a political perspective, versus being told or forced to listen to one.
Most people have ten to fifteen really bad ones. 