Thankfully, I met Reda Girgis, who is dry as toast, but he and his team at Johns Hopkins didn't just want me to survive, they wanted me to live a meaningful life.
And this is the question I want everyone to ask yourself every single day when you come up with something you feel that needs to be done: if not now, then when? And if not me, then who?
Rather than try to figure them out, I'm going to ask you to consider for a moment the intuitions and the gut instincts that are going through your head and your heart as you look at them.
You can do lots of market research and do focus groups and figure out what people really want, or you can just kind of go for it and make the book you want and hope other people like it.
The day after, when really it became a lot of talking, I said to myself, and my wife said to me, I also want a poster, so this is her. (Laughter) Because it's working, put me in a poster now.
I say, "Now listen. In the army, when we want you to pay attention, we have a command. It's called 'at ease.' It means everybody be quiet and pay attention. Listen up.
There was a group of children, mixed Hutus and Tutsis, and a group of women who were adopting them, and they lined up and one was just given to the next.
So she could be rewarded, not by what her body was doing but for every correct step of the robot on the other side of the planet controlled by her brain activity.
On Saturday I tweeted for this crate and hat, because I did not want to schlep them from the East Coast, and they showed up care of this dude, Chris, from Newport Beach, who says hello.
And we just -- you know, there weren't really people working on that before, so we wanted people to try to -- all the best brains in the world to start thinking about that, and also to try to extract the methane out of the Earth's atmosphere as well.
And we want all Internet users or Internet site owners to make their sites compatible so that we persons without vision can have a level playing field.
It also allows us to go to the store and allows us to get milk and eggs and cheese when what we're really looking for is Red Bull and bacon. (Laughter) Gotta make sure we're getting what we're looking for.
I'm McKenna Pope. I'm 14 years old, and when I was 13, I convinced one of the largest toy companies, toymakers, in the world, Hasbro, to change the way that they marketed one of their most best-selling products.
You obviously heard what happened, what the treatment that Bradley Manning got, Chelsea Manning as now is, and there was a story in Buzzfeed saying that there are people in the intelligence community who want you dead.
And so as they get older and we are teaching them -- they have been to so many countries around the world — they're saying, we do want people to know that we believe in what you're doing, Mom and Dad, and it is okay to show us more.
So what I'm asking today is that you envision a world where men and women aren't held hostage to their pasts, where misdeeds and mistakes don't define you for the rest of your life.
I couldn't use my locker for weeks because the bolt on the lock reminded me of the one I had put on my lips when the homeless man on the corner looked at me with eyes up merely searching for an affirmation that he was worth seeing.
It is true that as human beings, we're social animals, which means we have a need for other people to know what we're doing and saying and thinking, which is why we voluntarily publish information about ourselves online.
JK: Yeah. And so one day pretty soon, when the colors start going up on these walls, we hope more people will join us, and join this big dream, and maybe one day, the whole of Vila Cruzeiro will be painted.
Third, if you do do drugs, there's some things I want you to know, because my bottom line as your parent is, come home safely at the end of the night and grow up and lead a healthy and good adulthood.
(Applause) So okay, after all of this ice, we know that it was much more than just pouring buckets of ice water over your head, and I really would like to leave you with a couple of things that I'd like you to remember.
We were thrilled to have put together ImageNet, and we wanted the whole research world to benefit from it, so in the TED fashion, we opened up the entire data set to the worldwide research community for free.
I don't want the poetry of the calligraphy to be broken, as it's art and you can appreciate it without knowing the meaning, as you can enjoy any music from other countries.
(Laughter) But what I have instead is the chance to make the choice to love someone, and the hope that he will choose to love me back, and it is terrifying, but that's the deal with love.
I started it as one in a series of many projects I had done at the time for myself, partly because I needed the end result, but even more because I just enjoyed programming.
We get an insight into how clients and banks and lawyers go to companies like Mossack Fonseca and say, "OK, we want an anonymous company, can you give us one?"
You need to understand that when 200 young people from Brownsville visited Harvard, they now understood that a college of their choice was a real possibility.
So I show up in classes and I conduct observations to give feedback, because I want my teachers to be just as successful as the name Mott Hall Bridges Academy.
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.
So, would you like to have an extra 100, 000 dollars when you're 65 is a question that's very different than, imagine who you'll be when you're 65: will you be living, what will you look like, how much hair will you have, who will you be living with.
So what I would encourage on an individual level to do, is to explore backwards as far as you can go to the most clear, joyful, playful image that you have, whether it's with a toy, on a birthday or on a vacation.
And so, what I'd like to do with you today is sort of take you on a journey through the ethnosphere, a brief journey through the ethnosphere, to try to begin to give you a sense of what in fact is being lost.
And there are, fortunately now, dozens of companies -- we need it to be hundreds -- who, likewise, if their science goes well, if the funding for their pilot plants goes well, that they can compete for this.
I'd rather die drunk, broke at 34 and have people talk about me, than live to be rich and sober at 90 and nobody remember who I was. 