(Applause) At age 28, I was introduced to the sport of hand-cycling, and then triathlon, and by luck, I met Jason Fowler, an Ironman World Champion, at a camp for athletes with disabilities.

And I was there looking at the larger scale of buildings and finding that the buildings that were around me and that were being designed and that were there in the publications I was seeing felt soulless and cold.

Now suppose you live in a certain part of a certain remote place and you have a loved one who has blockages in two coronary arteries and your family doctor refers that loved one to a cardiologist who's batting 200 on angioplasties.

There is this magazine called Make that sort of gathered all these people and sort of put them together as a community, and you see a very technical project explained in a very simple language, beautifully typeset.

I'm not sure that's the most progressive or 21st-century of job titles, but I've spent more than two percent now of my entire life living in a tent inside the Arctic Circle, so I get out of the house a fair bit.

I was referred to a psychiatrist, who likewise took a grim view of the voice's presence, subsequently interpreting everything I said through a lens of latent insanity.

Surely, the technologies that we're talking about here this last week, surely some of these can perhaps help Africa grow even faster?

Indeed, the person we call Fibonacci was actually named Leonardo of Pisa, and these numbers appear in his book "Liber Abaci, " which taught the Western world the methods of arithmetic that we use today.

While they're coming up, I should let you know, this game was invented 10 years ago by an artists' collective in Austria named Monochrom.

And let me illustrate what I mean by understanding or engaging sites of conflict as harboring creativity, as I briefly introduce you to the Tijuana-San Diego border region, which has been the laboratory to rethink my practice as an architect.

Now, if you saw a picture of this as it was published in Architectural Record -- they didn't show the context, so you would think, "God, what a pushy guy this is."

While the narrative runs to over 17, 000 lines, it's apparently unfinished, as the prologue ambitiously introduces 29 pilgrims and promises four stories apiece, and the innkeeper never crowns a victor.

Speaking of waste, allow me to point out an interesting paradox that is threatening our economies as we speak.

In 2012, the Republican National Convention highlighted a new technology it was planning to use, facial recognition, to identify people who were going to be in the crowd who might be activists or troublemakers and to stop them ahead of time.

And when he got out, he got a job with Fortune Society, where many executives are people who have been formerly incarcerated.

(Laughter) But in any case, what I’m going to do in my little bit of time is take you on a quick tour of some of the things that we talk about and we think about.

But the granddaddy of all the Chinese American dishes we probably ought to talk about is chop suey, which was introduced around the turn of the 20th century.

I wish to share three lessons today, three lessons from water-poor countries and how they survived and even thrived despite their water crisis.

Back then, if your record wasn't getting played on mainstream radio, if you weren't in jukeboxes or if you weren't invited to play on TV, the odds were completely against you.