(Laughter) Three days later, I got a nice, long, handwritten letter from my friend and partner and colleague Bill Clinton, saying, "Congratulations on the new restaurant, Al!"
And the last was they had connection, and -- this was the hard part -- as a result of authenticity, they were willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be who they were, which you have to absolutely do that for connection.
And so you have to be careful about leaving your front lawn open, which is basically your Facebook wall, so that people don't write on it in the middle of the night -- because it's very much the equivalent.
But then, as the viewership kept growing and kept growing, I started getting letters from people, and it was starting to become clear that it was more than just a nice-to-have.
And yes, that means catching all of those miseries and hurt, but it also means that when beautiful, amazing things just fall out of the sky, I'm ready to catch them.
The example I have here is a chair that came out of the year in Bali -- clearly influenced by local manufacturing and culture, not being stuck behind a single computer screen all day long and be here and there.
Did you know that 80 percent of the information we receive comes through our eyes, and if you compare light energy to musical scales, it would only be one octave that the naked eye could see, which is right in the middle?
It's almost as though either you accept the doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you're living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.
It's not as though, as I try to suggest, it's not as though either you have religion and then you have to accept all sorts of things, or you don't have religion and then you're cut off from all these very good things.
I started receiving secrets in my home mailbox, not just with postmarks from Washington, D.C., but from Texas, California, Vancouver, New Zealand, Iraq.
It took me four years longer than my peers, and I convinced someone, my angel advisor, Susan Fiske, to take me on, and so I ended up at Princeton, and I was like, I am not supposed to be here.
I live in New York, and last year, of the 140, 000 teenagers that were stopped and frisked, 86% of them were black and Latino, and most of them were young men.
I promise you there are several people listening to me right now who are currently being abused or who were abused as children or who are abusers themselves.
(Applause) When I returned to Afghanistan, my grandfather, the one exiled from his home for daring to educate his daughters, was among the first to congratulate me.
I've been so lucky, received so much help and inspiration in my life, so I want to help give aspiring North Koreans a chance to prosper with international support.
And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the same rock up a hill, and when he almost got to the end, the rock would roll over, and he would have to start again.
When she gives birth to the second daughter, she is shocked, and in the expectation of a son, when she gives birth to a third daughter, she feels guilty like a criminal.
Those men would eventually be convicted of placing a van filled with 1, 500 pounds of explosives into the sub-level parking lot of the World Trade Center's North Tower, causing an explosion that killed six people and injured over 1, 000 others.
Inspiration can often come from an unexpected place, and the fact that a Jewish comedian had done more to positively influence my worldview than my own extremist father is not lost on me.
Or to make that a bit larger, what would the world be like if we were creating sound consciously and consuming sound consciously and designing all our environments consciously for sound?
Now, if we compare this score, the average score, to how many messages a selection of people receive, you can begin to get a sense of how attractiveness links to popularity on an online dating website.
And you know, what shocked me -- although it shouldn't have -- was other research last year that determined humiliation was a more intensely felt emotion than either happiness or even anger.
The World Bank estimates that if we have a worldwide flu epidemic, global wealth will go down by over three trillion dollars and we'd have millions and millions of deaths.
And to be really, really honest about it, not be in denial about any results that you see, because if you have something you love, you want to push it forward, but you have to be very, very honest about that factor on timing.
People who are more isolated than they want to be from others find that they are less happy, their health declines earlier in midlife, their brain functioning declines sooner and they live shorter lives than people who are not lonely.
And I definitely know that, in my case -- in my situation -- it would be very dangerous for me to start sort of leaking down that dark path of assumption, particularly given the circumstance that I'm in right now in my career.
If people took seriously that finding, I mean, it seems to turn upside down everything we believe about, like for example, taxation policy and so forth.
The traits the word "childish" addresses are seen so often in adults, that we should abolish this age-discriminatory word, when it comes to criticizing behavior associated with irresponsibility and irrational thinking.
But if, and only if, [the poorest] get out of poverty, they get education, they get improved child survival, they can buy a bicycle and a cell phone and come [to live] here, then population growth will stop in 2050.
And the national TV station was injuncted five minutes before it went on air, like out of a movie: injunction landed on the news desk, and the news reader was like, "This has never happened before. What do we do?"
Well, in 1994, when Pete Best was interviewed -- yes, he's still a drummer; yes, he's a studio musician -- he had this to say: "I'm happier than I would have been with the Beatles."
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(Laughter) Three days later, I got a nice, long, handwritten letter from my friend and partner and colleague Bill Clinton, saying, "Congratulations on the new restaurant, Al!" 