When I was 13, I lost my grandfather to a silent heart attack. What happened to be more shocking was that at 75, grandpa was really normal, healthy and energetic, but he was diabetic. Learning all of this was so painful that I decided to go out on a war against this deadly killer and see what could be done. It was shocking to discover the results of recent studies that have shown an estimate of nearly eight million people who die from heart attacks every year. Heart attacks occur for many reasons, but most often, they occur when arteries get clogged, blood flow is cut off and oxygen-starved cells in the heart muscles start to die. You may know the common symptoms of a heart attack: chest pain, arm pain, shortness of breath, fatigue, et cetera ... but there is a type of heart attack that is quite common, just as deadly, but harder to detect because the symptoms are silent. People having silent heart attacks just don't realize what's happening, so they're not seeking medical attention, which means they're less likely to receive the treatment that they need at the critical moment. And even if they do get to the hospital by chance, either before or after they are struck by a heart attack, they might have to go through one or more of these time-consuming, expensive tests and treatments, which are currently considered the gold standards of heart-attack diagnosis. The greater concern, however, is that these silent heart attacks account for nearly 45 percent of all heart attacks. Patients with diabetes and similar disorders suffer from nerve damage that prevents them from feeling the sort of pain that usually signals to someone that he or she may be having a heart attack. Which means they suffer the damage of a heart attack without even knowing or feeling anything. These already at-risk patients suffer from nerve damage, and they do not get immediate medical care. They do not know anything before an unlikely event is about to occur. My grandfather was an at-risk patient, too. I probed this issue further -- read as much as I could to understand the heart, met researchers and worked across labs in India. And finally, after three long years of persistent research, what I have to share with the world today is a promising solution. A noninvasive device that is inexpensive, portable, wearable by at-risk patients at all times. It greatly reduces the need for a blood test and works 24/7, collecting and analyzing data at preset intervals. And all this data is collected for a single purpose: detecting heart attacks as they occur. This is a very promising solution that might help us in the future. You may not know how intelligent your heart really is. It tries to communicate to your body multiple times before failing, by indicating symptoms like chest pain. These symptoms are triggered when the heart loses out on oxygen-rich blood flow. But remember I told you about the nerve damage. It silences these symptoms before a silent heart attack, which makes it even deadlier. And you may not even know the common symptoms. Meanwhile, the heart also sends out certain biomarkers -- cardiac biomarkers or proteins that are SOS messages -- in the form of SOS messages -- into your bloodstream, indicating that the heart bmcmillan@example.com. As it gets riskier and riskier, the concentrations of these cardiac biomarker proteins keep increasing abysmally. My device solely relies on this data. The key is that these cardiac biomarkers are found in one of the earliest stages of a heart attack, when someone is almost sure to survive if he or she gets prompt care. And my device is solely based on that basis. And here's how my device works. A silicon patch is worn around your wrist or placed near your chest. Without having to prick your skin for a biomarker blood test, this patch can spot, isolate and track a heart-attack specific biomarker called H-FABP, and alerts you if and when it reaches a critical level in your bloodstream -- a process that's much simpler, easier and cheaper than conventional methods of heart-attack diagnosis. By checking on biomarker concentration data, a system like this, with advanced research in the future, could significantly reduce the need for an at-risk patient to go to a doctor for a biomarker blood test, because the device could be worn at all times, sensing biomarker elevations in real time. Thus, if the device senses the biomarker levels going beyond the critical point, the at-risk patient could be warned of an impending cardiac arrest and that he or she needs immediate medical attention. Although the device may not be able to provide the patient with the complete analysis of the cardiac injury, it might be of immense help in actually indicating that the patient is in danger, so that the patient can be alarmed and know that immediate care is crucial. Every at-risk patient will now receive more time to survive and reach out for medical help. Consequently, they don't have to go for expensive and invasive medical treatments that would otherwise be necessary after a heart attack. When I got my device tested on at-risk patients under observation, results from the clinical validation tests certified close to a 96 percent accuracy and sensitivity. I intend to make my device available to people in two variants: one which gives digital analysis of the biomarker levels and a simpler version for the people in rural areas which simply vibrates when the biomarker levels go beyond the critical point. When we look at our progress in cardiac health care today, it is more of sick care than preventative self-care and technology. We literally wait for the heart attack to occur and put our vast majority of resources into post-care treatment. But by then, irreversible damage will already be done. I firmly believe it's time for us to rethink medicine. We must establish proactive health-care technologies. A change must be brought out not 10 years from now, not five years from now, but today. And so, hopefully, one day, with the help of these devices, someone else won't lose his or her grandfather just like I did. Thank you so much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. You might be wondering why I'm wearing sunglasses, and one answer to that is, because I'm here to talk about glamour. So, we all think we know what glamour is. Here it is. It's glamorous movie stars, like Marlene Dietrich. And it comes in a male form, too -- very glamorous. Not only can he shoot, drive, drink -- you know, he drinks wine, there actually is a little wine in there -- and of course, always wears a tuxedo. But I think that glamour actually has a much broader meaning -- one that is true for the movie stars and the fictional characters, but also comes in other forms. A magazine? Well, it's certainly not this one. This is the least glamorous magazine on the newsstand -- it's all about sex tips. Sex tips are not glamorous. And Drew Barrymore, for all her wonderful charm, is not glamorous either. But there is a glamour of industry. This is Margaret Bourke-White's -- one of her pictures she did. Fantastic, glamorous pictures of steel mills and paper mills and all kinds of glamorous industrial places. And there's the mythic glamour of the garage entrepreneur. This is the Hewlett-Packard garage. We know everyone who starts a business in a garage ends up founding Hewlett-Packard. There's the glamour of physics. What could be more glamorous than understanding the entire universe, grand unification? And, by the way, it helps if you're Brian Greene -- he has other kinds of glamour. And there is, of course, this glamour. This is very, very glamorous: the glamour of outer space -- and not the alien-style glamour, but the nice, clean, early '60s version. So what do we mean by glamour? Well, one thing you can do if you want to know what glamour means is you can look in the dictionary. And it actually helps a lot more if you look in a very old dictionary, in this case the 1913 dictionary. Because for centuries, glamour had a very particular meaning, and the word was actually used differently from the way we think of it. You had "a" glamour. It wasn't glamour as a quality -- you "cast a glamour." Glamour was a literal magic spell. Not a metaphorical one, the way we use it today, but a literal magic spell associated with witches and gypsies and to some extent, Celtic magic. And over the years, around the turn of the 20th century, it started to take on this other kind of deception -- this definition for any artificial interest in, or association with, an object through which it appears delusively magnified or glorified. But still, glamour is an illusion. Glamour is a magic spell. And there's something dangerous about glamour throughout most of history. When the witches cast a magic spell on you, it was not in your self-interest -- it was to get you to act against your interest. Well of course, in the 20th century, glamour came to have this different meaning associated with Hollywood. And this is Hedy Lamarr. Hedy Lamarr said, "Anyone can look glamorous, all you have to do is sit there and look stupid." (Laughter) But in fact, with all due respect to Hedy -- about whom we'll hear more later -- there's a lot more to it. There was a tremendous amount of technical achievement associated with creating this Hollywood glamour. There were scores of retouchers and lighting experts and make-up experts. You can go to the museum of Hollywood history in Hollywood and see Max Factor's special rooms that he painted different colors depending on the complexion of the star he was going to make up. So you've got this highly stylized portrait of something that was not entirely of this earth -- it was a portrait of a star. And actually, we see glamorized photos of stars all the time -- they call them false color. Glamour is a form of falsification, but falsification to achieve a particular purpose. It may be to illuminate the star; it may be to sell a film. And it involves a great deal of technique. It's not -- glamour is not something -- you don't wake up in the morning glamorous. I don't care who you are. Even Nicole Kidman doesn't wake up in the morning glamorous. There is a process of "idealization, glorification and dramatization," and it's not just the case for people. Glamour doesn't have to be people. Architectural photography -- Julius Schulman, who has talked about transfiguration, took this fabulous, famous picture of the Kauffman House. Architectural photography is extremely glamorous. It puts you into this special, special world. This is Alex Ross's comic book art, which appears to be extremely realistic, as part of his style is he gives you a kind of realism in his comic art. Except that light doesn't work this way in the real world. When you stack people in rows, the ones in the background look smaller than the ones in the foreground -- but not in the world of glamour. What glamour is all about -- I took this from a blurb in the table of contents of New York magazine, which was telling us that glamour is back -- glamour is all about transcending the everyday. And I think that that's starting to get at what the core that combines all sorts of glamour is. This is Filippino Lippi's 1543 portrait of Saint Apollonia. And I don't know who she is either, but this is the [16th] century equivalent of a supermodel. It's a very glamorous portrait. Why is it glamorous? It's glamorous, first, because she is beautiful -- but that does not make you glamorous, that only makes you beautiful. She is graceful, she is mysterious and she is transcendent, and those are the central qualities of glamour. You don't see her eyes; they're looking downward. She's not looking away from you exactly, but you have to mentally imagine her world. She's encouraging you to contemplate this higher world to which she belongs, where she can be completely tranquil while holding the iron instruments of her death by torture. Mel Gibson's "Passion Of The Christ" -- not glamorous. That's glamour: that's Michelangelo's "Pieta," where Mary is the same age as Jesus and they're both awfully happy and pleasant. Glamour invites us to live in a different world. It has to simultaneously be mysterious, a little bit distant -- that's why, often in these glamour shots, the person is not looking at the audience, it's why sunglasses are glamorous -- but also not so far above us that we can't identify with the person. In some sense, there has to be something like us. So as I say, in religious art, you know, God is not glamorous. God cannot be glamorous because God is omnipotent, omniscient -- too far above us. And yet you will see in religious art, saints or the Virgin Mary will often be portrayed -- not always -- in glamorous forms. As I said earlier, glamour does not have to be about people, but it has to have this transcendent quality. What is it about Superman? Aside from Alex Ross's style, which is very glamorous, one thing about Superman is he makes you believe that a man can fly. Glamour is all about transcending this world and getting to an idealized, perfect place. And this is one reason that modes of transportation tend to be extremely glamorous. The less experience we have with them, the more glamorous they are. So you can do a glamorized picture of a car, but you can't do a glamorized picture of traffic. You can do a glamorized picture of an airplane, but not the inside. The notion is that it's going to transport you, and the story is not about, you know, the guy in front of you in the airplane, who has this nasty little kid, or the big cough. The story is about where you're arriving, or thinking about where you're arriving. And this sense of being transported is one reason that we have glamour styling. This sort of streamlining styling is not just glamorous because we associate it with movies of that period, but because, in it's streamlining, it transports us from the everyday. The same thing -- arches are very glamorous. Arches with stained glass -- even more glamorous. Staircases that curve away from you are glamorous. I happen to find that particular staircase picture very glamorous because, to me, it captures the whole promise of the academic contemplative life -- but maybe that's because I went to Princeton. Anyway, skylines are super glamorous, city streets -- not so glamorous. You know, when you get, actually to this town it has reality. The horizon, the open road, is very, very glamorous. There are few things more glamorous than the horizon -- except, possibly, multiple horizons. Of course, here you don't feel the cold, or the heat -- you just see the possibilities. In order to pull glamour off, you need this Renaissance quality of sprezzatura, which is a term coined by Castiglione in his book, "The Book Of The Courtier." There's the not-glamorous version of what it looks like today, after a few centuries. And sprezzatura is the art that conceals art. It makes things look effortless. You don't think about how Nicole Kidman is maneuvering that dress -- she just looks completely natural. And I remember reading, after the Lara Croft movies, how Angelina Jolie would go home completely black and blue. Of course, they covered that with make-up, because Lara Croft did all those same stunts -- but she doesn't get black and blue, because she has sprezzatura. "To conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort": And this is one of the critical aspects of glamour. Glamour is about editing. How do you create the sense of transcendence, the sense of evoking a perfect world? The sense of, you know, life could be better, I could join this -- I could be a perfect person, I could join this perfect world. We don't tell you all the grubby details. Now, this was kindly lent to me by Jeff Bezos, from last year. This is underneath Jeff's desk. This is what the real world of computers, lamps, electrical appliances of all kinds, looks like. But if you look in a catalog -- particularly a catalog of modern, beautiful objects for your home -- it looks like this. There are no cords. Look next time you get these catalogs in your mail -- you can usually figure out where they hid the cord. But there's always this illusion that if you buy this lamp, you will live in a world without cords. (Laughter) And the same thing is true of, if you buy this laptop or you buy this computer -- and even in these wireless eras, you don't get to live in the world without cords. You have to have mystery and you have to have grace. And there she is -- Grace. This is the most glamorous picture, I think, ever. Part of the thing is that, in "Rear Window," the question is, is she too glamorous to live in his world? And the answer is no, but of course it's really just a movie. Here's Hedy Lamarr again. And, you know, this kind of head covering is extremely glamorous because, like sunglasses, it conceals and reveals at the same time. Translucence is glamorous -- that's why all these people wear pearls. It's why barware is glamorous. Glamour is translucent -- not transparent, not opaque. It invites us into the world but it doesn't give us a completely clear picture. And I think if Grace Kelly is the most glamorous person, maybe a spiral staircase with glass block may be the most glamorous interior shot, because a spiral staircase is incredibly glamorous. It has that sense of going up and away, and yet you never think about how you would really trip if you were -- particularly going down. And of course glass block has that sense of translucence. So, this session's supposed to be about pure pleasure but glamour's really partly about meaning. All individuals and all cultures have ideals that cannot possibly be realized in reality. They have contradictions, they uphold principles that are incommensurable with each other -- whatever it is -- and yet these ideals give meaning and purpose to our lives as cultures and as individuals. And the way we deal with that is we displace them -- we put them into a golden world, an imagined world, an age of heroes, the world to come. And in the life of an individual, we often associate that with some object. The white picket fence, the perfect house. The perfect kitchen -- no bills on the counter in the perfect kitchen. You know, you buy that Viking range, this is what your kitchen will look like. The perfect love life -- symbolized by the perfect necklace, the perfect diamond ring. The perfect getaway in your perfect car. This is an interior design firm that is literally called Utopia. The perfect office -- again, no cords, as far as I can tell. And certainly, no, it doesn't look a thing like my office. I mean, there's no paper on the desk. We want this golden world. And some people get rich enough, and if they have their ideals -- in a sort of domestic sense, they get to acquire their perfect world. Dean Koontz built this fabulous home theater, which is -- I don't think accidentally -- in Art Deco style. That symbolizes this sense of being safe bmcmillan@example.com. This is not always good, because what is your perfect world? What is your ideal, and also, what has been edited out? Is it something important? "The Matrix" is a movie that is all about glamour. I could do a whole talk on "The Matrix" and glamour. It was criticized for glamorizing violence, because, look -- sunglasses and those long coats, and, of course, they could walk up walls and do all these kinds of things that are impossible in the real world. This is another Margaret Bourke-White photo. This is from Soviet Union. Attractive. I mean, look how happy the people are, and good-looking too. You know, we're marching toward Utopia. I'm not a fan of PETA, but I think this is a great ad. Because what they're doing is they're saying, your coat's not so glamorous, what's been edited out is something important. But actually, what's even more important than remembering what's been edited out is thinking, are the ideals good? Because glamour can be very totalitarian and deceptive. And it's not just a matter of glamorizing cleaning your floor. This is from "Triumph Of The Will" -- brilliant editing to cut together things. There's a glamour shot. National Socialism is all about glamour. It was a very aesthetic ideology. It was all about cleaning up Germany, and the West, and the world, and ridding it of anything unglamorous. So glamour can be dangerous. I think glamour has a genuine appeal, has a genuine value. I'm not against glamour. But there's a kind of wonder in the stuff that gets edited away in the cords of life. And there is both a way to avoid the dangers of glamour and a way to broaden your appreciation of it. And that's to take Isaac Mizrahi's advice and confront the manipulation of it all, and sort of admit that manipulation is something that we enjoy, but also enjoy how it happens. And here's Hedy Lamarr. She's very glamorous but, you know, she invented spread-spectrum technology. So she's even more glamorous if you know that she really wasn't stupid, even though she thought she could look stupid. David Hockney talks about how the appreciation of this very glamorous painting is heightened if you think about the fact that it takes two weeks to paint this splash, which only took a fraction of a second to happen. There is a book out in the bookstore -- it's called "Symphony In Steel," and it's about the stuff that's hidden under the skin of the Disney Center. And that has a fascination. It's not necessarily glamorous, but unveiling the glamour has an appeal. There's a wonderful book called "Crowns" that's all these glamour pictures of black women in their church hats. And there's a quote from one of these women, and she talks about, "As a little girl, I'd admire women at church with beautiful hats. They looked like beautiful dolls, like they'd just stepped out of a magazine. But I also knew how hard they worked all week. Sometimes under those hats there's a lot of joy and a lot of sorrow." And, actually, you get more appreciation for glamour when you realize what went into creating it. Thank you. (Music) Sometimes when I'm on a long plane flight, I gaze out at all those mountains and deserts and try to get my head around how vast our Earth is. And then I remember that there's an object we see every day that would literally fit one million Earths inside it. The sun seems impossibly big, but in the great scheme of things, it's a pinprick, one of about 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which you can see on a clear night as a pale, white mist stretched across the sky. And it gets worse. There are maybe 100 billion galaxies detectable by our telescopes, so if each star was the size of a single grain of sand, just the Milky Way has enough stars to fill a 30 foot by 30 foot stretch of beach three feet deep with sand. And the entire Earth doesn't have enough beaches to represent the stars in the overall universe. Such a beach would continue for literally hundreds of millions of miles. Holy Stephen Hawking, that is a lot of stars. But he and other physicists now believe in a reality that is unimaginably bigger still. I mean, first of all, the 100 billion galaxies within range of our telescopes are probably a minuscule fraction of the total. Space itself is expanding at an accelerating pace. The vast majority of the galaxies are separating from us so fast that light from them may never reach us. Still, our physical reality here on Earth is intimately connected to those distant, invisible galaxies. We can think of them as part of our universe. They make up a single, giant edifice, obeying the same physical laws and all made from the same types of atoms, electrons, protons, quarks, neutrinos that make up you and me. However, recent theories in physics, including one called string theory, are now telling us there could be countless other universes, built on different types of particles, with different properties, obeying different laws. Most of these universes could never support life, and might flash in and out of existence in a nanosecond, but nonetheless, combined they make up a vast multiverse of possible universes. in up to 11 dimensions, featuring wonders beyond our wildest imagination. And the leading version of string theory predicts a multiverse made of up to 10 to the 500 universes. That's a one followed by 500 zeroes, a number so vast that if every atom in our observable universe had its own universe and all of the atoms in all of those universes each had their own universe, and you repeated that for two more cycles, you'd still be at a tiny fraction of the total -- namely, one trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillionth. But even that number is minuscule compared to another number: infinity. Some physicists think the space-time continuum is literally infinite, and that it contains an infinite number of so-called pocket universes with varying properties. How's your brain doing? But quantum theory adds a whole new wrinkle. I mean, the theory's been proven true beyond all doubt, but interpreting it is baffling. And some physicists think you can only un-baffle it if you imagine that huge numbers of parallel universes are being spawned every moment, and many of these universes would actually be very like the world we're in, would include multiple copies of you. In one such universe, you'd graduate with honors and marry the person of your dreams. In another, not so much. There are still some scientists who would say, hogwash. The only meaningful answer to the question of how many universes there are is one, only one universe. And a few philosophers and mystics might argue that even our own universe is an illusion. So, as you can see, right now there is no agreement on this question, not even close. All we know is, the answer is somewhere between zero and infinity. Well, I guess we know one other thing: This is a pretty cool time to be studying physics. We just might be undergoing the biggest paradigm shift in knowledge that humanity has ever seen. I'm going to share with you a paradigm-shifting perspective on the issues of gender violence: sexual assault, domestic violence, relationship abuse, sexual harassment, sexual abuse of children. That whole range of issues that I'll refer to in shorthand as "gender violence issues," they've been seen as women's issues that some good men help out with, but I have a problem with that frame and I don't accept it. I don't see these as women's issues that some good men help out with. In fact, I'm going to argue that these are men's issues, first and foremost. Now obviously -- (Applause) Obviously, they're also women's issues, so I appreciate that, but calling gender violence a women's issue is part of the problem, for a number of reasons. The first is that it gives men an excuse not to pay attention, right? A lot of men hear the term "women's issues" and we tend to tune it out, and we think, "I'm a guy; that's for the girls," or "that's for the women." And a lot of men literally don't get beyond the first sentence as a result. It's almost like a chip in our brain is activated, and the neural pathways take our attention in a different direction when we hear the term "women's issues." This is also true, by the way, of the word "gender," because a lot of people hear the word "gender" and they think it means "women." So they think that gender issues is synonymous with women's issues. There's some confusion about the term gender. And let me illustrate that confusion by way of analogy. So let's talk for a moment about race. In the US, when we hear the word "race," a lot of people think that means African-American, Latino, Asian-American, Native American, South Asian, Pacific Islander, on and on. A lot of people, when they hear the word "sexual orientation" think it means gay, lesbian, bisexual. And a lot of people, when they hear the word "gender," think it means women. In each case, the dominant group doesn't get paid attention to. As if white people don't have some sort of racial identity or belong to some racial category or construct, as if heterosexual people don't have a sexual orientation, as if men don't have a gender. This is one of the ways that dominant systems maintain and reproduce themselves, which is to say the dominant group is rarely challenged to even think about its dominance, because that's one of the key characteristics of power and privilege, the ability to go unexamined, lacking introspection, in fact being rendered invisible, in large measure, in the discourse about issues that are primarily about us. And this is amazing how this works in domestic and sexual violence, how men have been largely erased from so much of the conversation about a subject that is centrally about men. And I'm going to illustrate what I'm talking about by using the old tech. I'm old school on some fundamental regards. I make films and I work with high tech, but I'm still old school as an educator, and I want to share with you this exercise that illustrates on the sentence-structure level how the way that we think, literally the way that we use language, conspires to keep our attention off of men. This is about domestic violence in particular, but you can plug in other analogues. This comes from the work of the feminist linguist Julia Penelope. It starts with a very basic English sentence: "John beat Mary." That's a good English sentence. John is the subject, beat is the verb, Mary is the object, good sentence. Now we're going to move to the second sentence, which says the same thing in the passive voice. "Mary was beaten by John." And now a whole lot has happened in one sentence. We've gone from "John beat Mary" to "Mary was beaten by John." We've shifted our focus in one sentence from John to Mary, and you can see John is very close to the end of the sentence, well, close to dropping off the map of our psychic plain. The third sentence, John is dropped, and we have, "Mary was beaten," and now it's all about Mary. We're not even thinking about John, it's totally focused on Mary. Over the past generation, the term we've used synonymous with "beaten" is "battered," so we have "Mary was battered." And the final sentence in this sequence, flowing from the others, is, "Mary is a battered woman." So now Mary's very identity -- Mary is a battered woman -- is what was done to her by John in the first instance. But we've demonstrated that John has long ago left the conversation. Those of us who work in the domestic and sexual violence field know that victim-blaming is pervasive in this realm, which is to say, blaming the person to whom something was done rather than the person who did it. And we say: why do they go out with these men? Why are they attracted to them? Why do they keep going back? What was she wearing at that party? What a stupid thing to do. Why was she drinking with those guys in that hotel room? This is victim blaming, and there are many reasons for it, but one is that our cognitive structure is set up to blame victims. This is all unconscious. Our whole cognitive structure is set up to ask questions about women and women's choices and what they're doing, thinking, wearing. And I'm not going to shout down people who ask questions about women. It's a legitimate thing to ask. But's let's be clear: Asking questions about Mary is not going to get us anywhere in terms of preventing violence. We have to ask a different set of questions. The questions are not about Mary, they're about John. They include things like, why does John beat Mary? Why is domestic violence still a big problem in the US and all over the world? What's going on? Why do so many men abuse physically, emotionally, verbally, and other ways, the women and girls, and the men and boys, that they claim to love? What's going on with men? Why do so many adult men sexually abuse little girls and boys? Why is that a common problem in our society and all over the world today? Why do we hear over and over again about new scandals erupting in major institutions like the Catholic Church or the Penn State football program or the Boy Scouts of America, on and on and on? And then local communities all over the country and all over the world. We hear about it all the time. The sexual abuse of children. What's going on with men? Why do so many men rape women in our society and around the world? Why do so many men rape other men? What is going on with men? And then what is the role of the various institutions in our society that are helping to produce abusive men at pandemic rates? Because this isn't about individual perpetrators. That's a naive way to understanding what is a much deeper and more systematic social problem. The perpetrators aren't these monsters who crawl out of the swamp and come into town and do their nasty business and then retreat into the darkness. That's a very naive notion, right? Perpetrators are much more normal than that, and everyday than that. So the question is, what are we doing here in our society and in the world? What are the roles of various institutions in helping to produce abusive men? What's the role of religious belief systems, the sports culture, the pornography culture, the family structure, economics, and how that intersects, and race and ethnicity and how that intersects? How does all this work? And then, once we start making those kinds of connections and asking those important and big questions, then we can talk about how we can be transformative, in other words, how can we do something differently? How can we change the practices? How can we change the socialization of boys and the definitions of manhood that lead to these current outcomes? These are the kind of questions that we need to be asking and the kind of work that we need to be doing, but if we're endlessly focused on what women are doing and thinking in relationships or elsewhere, we're not going to get to that piece. I understand that a lot of women who have been trying to speak out about these issues, today and yesterday and for years and years, often get shouted down for their efforts. They get called nasty names like "male-basher" and "man-hater," and the disgusting and offensive "feminazi", right? And you know what all this is about? It's called kill the messenger. It's because the women who are standing up and speaking out for themselves and for other women as well as for men and boys, it's a statement to them to sit down and shut up, keep the current system in place, because we don't like it when people rock the boat. We don't like it when people challenge our power. You'd better sit down and shut up, basically. And thank goodness that women haven't done that. Thank goodness that we live in a world where there's so much women's leadership that can counteract that. But one of the powerful roles that men can play in this work is that we can say some things that sometimes women can't say, or, better yet, we can be heard saying some things that women often can't be heard saying. Now, I appreciate that that's a problem, it's sexism, but it's the truth. So one of the things that I say to men, and my colleagues and I always say this, is we need more men who have the courage and the strength to start standing up and saying some of this stuff, and standing with women and not against them and pretending that somehow this is a battle between the sexes and other kinds of nonsense. We live in the world together. And by the way, one of the things that really bothers me about some of the rhetoric against feminists and others who have built the battered women's and rape crisis movements around the world is that somehow, like I said, that they're anti-male. What about all the boys who are profoundly affected in a negative way by what some adult man is doing against their mother, themselves, their sisters? What about all those boys? What about all the young men and boys who have been traumatized by adult men's violence? You know what? The same system that produces men who abuse women, produces men who abuse other men. And if we want to talk about male victims, let's talk about male victims. Most male victims of violence are the victims of other men's violence. So that's something that both women and men have in common. We are both victims of men's violence. So we have it in our direct self-interest, not to mention the fact that most men that I know have women and girls that we care deeply about, in our families and our friendship circles and every other way. So there's so many reasons why we need men to speak out. It seems obvious saying it out loud, doesn't it? Now, the nature of the work that I do and my colleagues do in the sports culture and the US military, in schools, we pioneered this approach called the bystander approach to gender-violence prevention. And I just want to give you the highlights of the bystander approach, because it's a big thematic shift, although there's lots of particulars, but the heart of it is, instead of seeing men as perpetrators and women as victims, or women as perpetrators, men as victims, or any combination in there. I'm using the gender binary. I know there's more than men and women, there's more than male and female. And there are women who are perpetrators, and of course there are men who are victims. There's a whole spectrum. But instead of seeing it in the binary fashion, we focus on all of us as what we call bystanders, and a bystander is defined as anybody who is not a perpetrator or a victim in a given situation, so in other words friends, teammates, colleagues, coworkers, family members, those of us who are not directly involved in a dyad of abuse, but we are embedded in social, family, work, school, and other peer culture relationships with people who might be in that situation. What do we do? How do we speak up? How do we challenge our friends? How do we support our friends? But how do we not remain silent in the face of abuse? Now, when it comes to men and male culture, the goal is to get men who are not abusive to challenge men who are. And when I say abusive, I don't mean just men who are beating women. We're not just saying a man whose friend is abusing his girlfriend needs to stop the guy at the moment of attack. That's a naive way of creating a social change. It's along a continuum, we're trying to get men to interrupt each other. So, for example, if you're a guy and you're in a group of guys playing poker, talking, hanging out, no women present, and another guy says something sexist or degrading or harassing about women, instead of laughing along or pretending you didn't hear it, we need men to say, "Hey, that's not funny. that could be my sister you're talking about, and could you joke about something else? Or could you talk about something else? I don't appreciate that kind of talk." Just like if you're a white person and another white person makes a racist comment, you'd hope, I hope, that white people would interrupt that racist enactment by a fellow white person. Just like with heterosexism, if you're a heterosexual person and you yourself don't enact harassing or abusive behaviors towards people of varying sexual orientations, if you don't say something in the face of other heterosexual people doing that, then, in a sense, isn't your silence a form of consent and complicity? Well, the bystander approach is trying to give people tools to interrupt that process and to speak up and to create a peer culture climate where the abusive behavior will be seen as unacceptable, not just because it's illegal, but because it's wrong and unacceptable in the peer culture. And if we can get to the place where men who act out in sexist ways will lose status, young men and boys who act out in sexist and harassing ways towards girls and women, as well as towards other boys and men, will lose status as a result of it, guess what? We'll see a radical diminution of the abuse. Because the typical perpetrator is not sick and twisted. He's a normal guy in every other way, isn't he? Now, among the many great things that Martin Luther King said in his short life was, "In the end, what will hurt the most is not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends." In the end, what will hurt the most is not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends. There's been an awful lot of silence in male culture about this ongoing tragedy of men's violence against women and children, hasn't there? There's been an awful lot of silence. And all I'm saying is that we need to break that silence, and we need more men to do that. Now, it's easier said than done, because I'm saying it now, but I'm telling you it's not easy in male culture for guys to challenge each other, which is one of the reasons why part of the paradigm shift that has to happen is not just understanding these issues as men's issues, but they're also leadership issues for men. Because ultimately, the responsibility for taking a stand on these issues should not fall on the shoulders of little boys or teenage boys in high school or college men. It should be on adult men with power. Adult men with power are the ones we need to be holding accountable for being leaders on these issues, because when somebody speaks up in a peer culture and challenges and interrupts, he or she is being a leader, really. But on a big scale, we need more adult men with power to start prioritizing these issues, and we haven't seen that yet, have we? Now, I was at a dinner a number of years ago, and I work extensively with the US military, all the services. And I was at this dinner and this woman said to me -- I think she thought she was a little clever -- she said, "So how long have you been doing sensitivity training with the Marines?" And I said, "With all due respect, I don't do sensitivity training with the Marines. I run a leadership program in the Marine Corps." Now, I know it's a bit pompous, my response, but it's an important distinction, because I don't believe that what we need is sensitivity training. We need leadership training, because, for example, when a professional coach or a manager of a baseball team or a football team -- and I work extensively in that realm as well -- makes a sexist comment, makes a homophobic statement, makes a racist comment, there will be discussions on the sports blogs and in sports talk radio. And some people will say, "He needs sensitivity training." Other people will say, "Well, get off it. That's political correctness run amok, he made a stupid statement, move on." My argument is, he doesn't need sensitivity training. He needs leadership training, because he's being a bad leader, because in a society with gender diversity and sexual diversity -- (Applause) and racial and ethnic diversity, you make those kind of comments, you're failing at your leadership. If we can make this point that I'm making to powerful men and women in our society at all levels of institutional authority and power, it's going to change the paradigm of people's thinking. You know, for example, I work a lot in college and university athletics throughout North America. We know so much about how to prevent domestic and sexual violence, right? There's no excuse for a college or university to not have domestic and sexual violence prevention training mandated for all student athletes, coaches, administrators, as part of their educational process. We know enough to know that we can easily do that. But you know what's missing? The leadership. But it's not the leadership of student athletes. It's the leadership of the athletic director, the president of the university, the people in charge who make decisions about resources and who make decisions about priorities in the institutional settings. That's a failure, in most cases, of men's leadership. Look at Penn State. Penn State is the mother of all teachable moments for the bystander approach. You had so many situations in that realm where men in powerful positions failed to act to protect children, in this case, boys. It's unbelievable, really. But when you get into it, you realize there are pressures on men. There are constraints within peer cultures on men, which is why we need to encourage men to break through those pressures. And one of the ways to do that is to say there's an awful lot of men who care deeply about these issues. I know this, I work with men, and I've been working with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of men for many decades now. It's scary, when you think about it, how many years. But there's so many men who care deeply about these issues, but caring deeply is not enough. We need more men with the guts, with the courage, with the strength, with the moral integrity to break our complicit silence and challenge each other and stand with women and not against them. By the way, we owe it to women. There's no question about it. But we also owe it to our sons. We also owe it to young men who are growing up all over the world in situations where they didn't make the choice to be a man in a culture that tells them that manhood is a certain way. They didn't make the choice. We that have a choice, have an opportunity and a responsibility to them as well. I hope that, going forward, men and women, working together, can begin the change and the transformation that will happen so that future generations won't have the level of tragedy that we deal with on a daily basis. I know we can do it, we can do better. Thank you very much. I am guilty of stacking my dishes in the sink and leaving them there for hours. I fact-checked this with my boyfriend. He says it's less like hours and more like days, but that's not the point. The point is sometimes I don't finish the job until the stack has gotten high enough that it's peaking over the lip of the sink and my inner clean freak loses it. This charming habit developed when I was in college, and I had tons of excuses. "I'm running to class!" "What's one more dirty dish in the sink?" Or my favorite,