To those who have lost the wondrous vision of childhood eyes, submitted here is the story of a little boy and a magical Christmas wish that changed his life forever.

And, on top of that, you allowed Amy's parents... her friends, all the people in your hometown... believe you were a loving husband, desperate to find his missing wife.

The FBI conducts a two-year manhunt, finds its suspect, and brings him back, but instead of a trial by his peers, he is given a government job with benefits.

Look, you may have all of these people fooled, but you and I both know that you are sketchier than a 2:00 a.m. waffle house.

Sweetheart, I don't mean to pressure you, but the Caesars people have offered me a roulette pit of my own in Atlantic City.

But I'll just close what I've been talking about by leaving you with this message: May you find an excuse to reach out to some long-lost pal, or to that college roommate, or to some person you may have turned away from.

But what a liberating thing to realize that our problems, in fact, are probably our richest sources for rising to this ultimate virtue of compassion, towards bringing compassion towards the suffering and joys of others.

My aim is to give a voice to the silent people, to show the hidden lights behind the curtain of the great game, the small worlds ignored by the media and the prophets of a global conflict.

A father came out of his house to tell his teenage son and his five friends that it was time for them to stop horsing around on the front lawn and on the sidewalk, to get home, finish their schoolwork, and prepare themselves for bed.

So we talked to some sources in Hama who we had been back and forth with on Twitter, and we asked them about this, and the bridge was interesting to us because it was something we could identify.

And I was mentioning Abed and myself, noting deliberately that I was here in peace, to the people in this town, when I met Mohamed outside a post office at noon.

The third thing -- and I was at a meeting recently with some people from Finland, actual Finnish people, and somebody from the American system was saying to the people in Finland, "What do you do about the drop-out rate in Finland?"

They find the body too messy, too unreliable to guarantee eternal life, and so they set their hopes on the third, more spiritual immortality story, the idea that we can leave our body behind and live on as a soul.

These objects, it seemed to me, were quintessentially the kind that I and my liberal left friends in London had always seen as summing up something deplorable about the French aristocracy in the 18th century.

What I'll use is the second row this time, and I'll get four of you to each yell out a two-digit number, and if you would square the first number, and if you would square the second, the third and the fourth, I will try and race you to the answer. OK?

And so, many of my early memories involved intricate daydreams where I would walk across borders, forage for berries, and meet all kinds of strange people living unconventional lives on the road.

I want to live in a world where we don't have such low expectations of disabled people that we are congratulated for getting out of bed and remembering our own names in the morning.

That understanding today leads to innovative medicine after innovative medicine, and although there's still so much work to do, we're already surrounded by people who have been cured of cancers that were considered untreatable a generation ago.

Because to a veteran aid worker, the idea of putting cold, hard cash into the hands of the poorest people on Earth doesn't sound crazy, it sounds really satisfying.

The more cash we give to the poor, and the more evidence we have that it works, the more we have to reconsider everything else we give.

People that we trained in this strategy, we told them to focus their attention on the finish line, to avoid looking around, to imagine a spotlight was shining on that goal, and that everything around it was blurry and perhaps difficult to see.

Now, I could talk about something that I'm known for, something that would be particularly appropriate for many of the more technically minded people here, or I could talk about something I really care about.

We see the same people over and over again, but that's because we're not really exploring the full depth and breadth of the city.

(Laughter) But I will tell you this: Being in jail and being in prison, I came across some of the most intelligent, brilliant, and talented people that I would ever meet.

We can commit these small acts of bravery and hope that our choices trickle upward to the people in power -- editors, movie and music producers, CEOs, lawmakers -- the people who can make bigger, braver choices to create lasting, meaningful change.

I started talking to people about this and inevitably, I was surprised, because the conversation would turn from curiosity: "Really? This happens here?"

Lastly, I want you to applaud the people who actually create the future, Yash Mulgaonkar, Sikang Liu and Giuseppe Loianno, who are responsible for the three demonstrations that you saw.

For example, during the Great Depression, they created the Hoover Dam, which in turn, created Lake Mead and made it possible for the cities of Las Vegas and Phoenix and Los Angeles to provide water for people who lived in a really dry place.

After much pressure from human rights groups, the dictator reluctantly agrees to let you visit the island and speak to the prisoners under the following conditions: you may only make one statement, and you cannot tell them any new information.

He landed his helicopter in between some surviving villagers and American soldiers and he trained his machine guns on his fellow Americans, and said, "If you don't stop the killing, I will mow you down."

(Laughter) But for those of you who share the blood type O with me, what this means is that we have this chemical structure on the surface of our blood cells: three simple sugars linked together to make a more complex sugar.

They didn't believe they had anything to offer the great-great-grandchildren of Mungo Park -- the owners of "apple" in "A is for apple."

I was also fortunate enough to be cherished and encouraged by some strong male role models as well, including my father, my brother, uncles and grandfathers.

And he urged the people in that meeting, in that community, to devote themselves to closing the gap between those two ideas, to work together to try to make the world as it is and the world as it should be, one and the same.

I would like to invite all of you to please share this game with young people, anywhere in the world, particularly in developing areas, who might benefit from coming together to try to start to imagine their own social enterprises to save the world.

Imagine you have a few million dollars that you've raised -- maybe you're a politician in a developing country and you have a budget to spend. You want to spend it on the poor: How do you go about it?