Video: Narrator: An event seen from one point of view gives one impression.
Seen from another point of view, it gives quite a different impression.
But it's only when you get the whole picture you can fully understand what's going on.
Sasha Vucinic: It's a great clip, isn't it?
And I found that in 29 seconds, it tells more about the power of, and importance of, independent media than I could say in an hour.
So I thought that it will be good to start with it.
And also start with a little bit of statistics.
According to relevant researchers, 83 percent of the population of this planet lives in the societies without independent press.
Think about that number: 83 percent of the population on the whole planet does not really know what is going on in their countries.
The information they get gets filtered through somebody who either twists that information, or colors that information, does something with it.
So they're deprived of understanding their reality.
That is just to understand how big and important this problem is.
Now those of you who are lucky enough to live in those societies that represent 17 percent, I think should enjoy it until it lasts.
You know, Sunday morning, you flick the paper, get your cappuccino.
Enjoy it while it lasts.
Because as we heard yesterday, countries can lose stars from their flags, but they can also lose press freedom, as I guess Americans among us can tell us more about.
But that's totally another and separate topic.
So I can go back to my story.
My story starts -- the story I want to share -- starts in 1991.
At that time I was running B92, the only independent, for that matter the only electronic media, in the country.
And I guess we were sharing -- we had that regular life of the only independent media in the country, operating in hostile environment, where government really wants to make your life miserable.
And there are different ways.
Yeah, it was the usual cocktail: a little bit of threats, a little bit of friendly advice, a little bit of financial police, a little bit of text control, so you always have somebody who never leaves your office.
But what they really do, which is very powerful, and that is what governments in the late '90s started doing if they don't like independent media companies -- you know, they threaten your advertisers.
Once they threaten your advertisers, market forces are actually, you know, destroyed, and the advertisers do not want to come -- no matter how much does it make sense for them -- do not want to come and advertise.
And you have a problem making ends meet.
At that time at the beginning of the '90s, we had that problem, which was, you know, survival below one side, but what was really painful for me was, remember, the beginning of the '90s, Yugoslavia is falling apart.
We were sitting over there with a country in a downfall, in a slow-motion downfall.
And we all had all of that on tapes.
We had the ability to understand what was going on.
We were actually recording history.
The problem was that we had to re-tape that history a week later; because if we did not, we could not afford enough tapes to keep archives of that history.
So if I gave you that picture, I don't want to go too long on that.
In that context a gentleman came to my office at that time.
It was still 1991.
He was running a media systems organization which is still in business, the gentleman is still in business.
And what did I know at that time about media systems?
I would think media systems were organizations, which means they should help you.
So I prepared two plans for that meeting, two strategic plans: the small one and the big one.
The small one was, I just wanted him to help us get those damn tapes, so we can keep that archive for the next 50 years.
The big plan was to ask him for a 1,000,000-dollar loan.
Because I thought, I still maintain, that serious and independent media companies are great business.
And I thought that B92 will survive and be a great company once Milosevic is gone, which turned out to be true.
It's now probably either the biggest or the second biggest media company in the country.
And I thought that the only thing that we needed at that time was 1,000,000-dollar loan to take us through those hard times.
To make a long story short, the gentleman comes into the office, great suit and tie.
I gave him what I thought was a brilliant explanation of the political situation and explained how hard and difficult the war will be.
Actually, I underestimated the atrocities, I have to admit.
Anyway, after that whole, big, long explanation, the only question he had for me -- and this is not a joke -- is, are we paying royalties after we broadcast music of Michael Jackson?
That was really the only question he had.
He left, and I remember being actually very angry at myself because I thought there must be an institution in the world that is providing loans to media companies.
It's so obvious, straight in your face, and somebody must have thought of it.
Somebody must have started something like that.
And I thought, I'm just dumb and I cannot find it.
You know, in my defense, there was no Google at that time; you could not just Google in '91.
So I thought that that's actually my problem.
Now we go from here, fast forward to 1995.
I have -- I left the country, I have a meeting with George Soros, trying for the third time to convince him that his foundation should invest in something that should operate like a media bank.
And basically what I was saying is very simple.
You know, forget about charity; it doesn't work.
Forget about handouts; 20,000 dollars do not help anybody.
What you should do is you should treat media companies as a business.
It's business anywhere.
Media business, or any other business, it needs to be capitalized.
And what these guys need, actually, is access to capital.
So third meeting, arguments are pretty well exercised.
At the end of the meeting he says, look, it is not going to work; you will never see your money back; but my foundations will put 500,000 dollars so you can test the idea.
See that it will not work.
He said, I'll give you a rope to hang yourself.
(Laughter) I knew two things after that meeting.
First, under no circumstances I want to hang myself.
And second, that I have no idea how to make it work.
You see, at the level of a concept, it was a great concept.
But it's one thing to have a concept; it's a totally separate thing to actually make it work.
So I had absolutely no idea how that could actually work.
Had the wrong idea; I thought that we can be a bank.
You see banks -- I don't know if there are any bankers over here; I apologize in advance -- but it's the best job in the world.
You know, you find somebody who is respectable and has a lot of money.
You give them more money; they repay you that over a time.
You collect interest and do nothing in between.
So I thought, why don't we get into that business?
(Laughter) So here we are having our first client, brilliant.
First independent newspaper in Slovakia.
The government cutting them off from all the printing facilities in Bratislava.
So here's the daily newspaper that has to be printed 400 kilometers away from the capital.
It's a daily newspaper with a deadline of 4 p.m.
That means that they have no sports; they have no latest news; circulation goes down.
It's a kind of very nice, sophisticated way how to economically strangle a daily newspaper.
They come to us with a request for a loan.
They want to -- the only way for them to survive is to get a printing press.
And we said, that's fine; let's meet; you'll bring us your business plan, which eventually they did.
We start the meeting.
I get these two pieces of paper, not like this, A4 format, so it's much bigger.
A lot of numbers there.
A lot of numbers.
But however you put it, you know, the numbers do not make any sense.
And that's the best they could do.
We were the best that they could do.
So that is how we understood what our method is.
It's not a bank.
We had to actually go into these companies and earn our return by fixing them -- by establishing management systems, by providing all that knowledge, how do you run a business on one side -- while they all know how to run, how to create content.
Just quickly on the results.
Over these 10 years, 40 million dollars in affordable financing, average interest rate five percent to six percent.
Lately we are going wild, charging seven percent from time to time.
We do it in 17 countries of the developing world.
And here is the most stunning number.
Return rate -- the one that Soros was so worried about -- 97 percent.
97 percent of all the scheduled repayments came back to us on time.
What do we typically finance?
We finance anything that a media company would need, from printing presses to transmitters.
What is most important is we do it either in form of loans, equities, lease -- whatever is appropriate for, you know, supporting anybody.
But what is most important here is, who do we finance?
We believe that in the last 10 years companies that we've financed are actually the best media companies in the developing world.
That is a "Who is Who" list.
And I could spend hours talking about them, because they're all kind of heroes.
And I can, but I'll give you just, maybe one, and depending on time I may give you two examples who we work with.
You see we started working in Eastern and Central Europe, and moved to Russia.
Our first loan in Russia was in Chelyabinsk.
I'll bet half of you have never heard of that place.
In the south of Russia there's a guy called Boris Nikolayevich Kirshin, who is running an independent newspaper there.
The city was closed until early '90s because, of all things, they were producing glass for Tupolev planes.
Anyway, he's running independent newspaper there.
After two years working with us, he becomes the most respected newspaper in that small place.
Governor comes to him one day, actually invites him to come to his office.
He goes and sees the governor.
The governor says, Boris Nikolayevich, I understand you are doing a great job, and you are the most respected newspaper in our district.
And I want to offer you a deal.
Can you please give me your newspaper for the next nine months, because I have elections -- there are elections coming up in nine months.
I will not run, but it's very important for me who is going to succeed me.
So give me the paper for nine months.
I'll give it back to you.
I have no interest in being in media business.
How much would that cost?
Boris Nikolayevich says, "It's not for sale."
The governor says, "We will close you."
Boris Nikolayevich says, "No, you cannot do it."
Six months later the newspaper was closed.
Luckily, we had enough time to help Boris Nikolayevich take all the assets out of that company and bring him into a new one, to get all the subscription lists, rehire staff.
So what the governor got was an empty shell.
But that is what happens if you're in business of independent media, and if you are a banker for independent media.
So it sounds like a great story.
Somewhere down the road we opened a media management center.
We started our media lab, sounds like a real great story.
But there is a second angle to that.
The second angle, like in this clip.
If you take the camera above, you start thinking about these numbers again.
40 million dollars over 10 years spread over 17 countries.
That is not too much, is it?
It's actually just a drop in the sea.
Because when you think about the importance, some of the issues that we were talking about last night -- this last session we had about Africa and his hypothetical 50 billion dollars destined for Africa.
All of those, not all, half of those problems mentioned last night -- government accountability, corruption, how do you fight corruption, giving voice to unheard, to poor -- it's why independent media is in business.
And it's why it was invented.
So from that perspective, what we did is just really one drop in the sea of that need that we can identify.
Now ours is just one story.
I'm sure that in this room there are, like, 15 other wonderful stories of nonprofits doing spectacular work.
Here is where the problem is, and I'll explain to you as well as I can what the problem is.
And it's called fundraising.
Imagine that this third of this room is filled with people who represent different foundations.
Imagine two thirds over here running excellent organizations, doing very important work.
Now imagine that every second person over here is deaf, does not hear, and switch the lights off.
Now that is how difficult it is to match people from this side of the room with people of that side of the room.
So we thought that some kind of a big idea is needed to reform, to totally rethink fundraising.
You know, instead of people running in this dark, trying to find their own match, who will be willing, who has the same goals.
Instead of all of that we thought there is -- something new needs to be invented.
And we came up with this idea of issuing bonds, press freedom bonds.
If there are investors willing to finance U.S. government budget deficit, why wouldn't we find investors willing to finance press freedom deficit?
We've decided to do it this fall; we will issue them, probably in denominations of 1,000 dollars.
I don't want to advertise them too much; that's not the point.
But the point is, if we ever survive to actually issue them, find enough investors that this can be considered a success, there's nothing stopping the next organization to start to issue bonds next spring.
And those can be environmental bonds.
And then two weeks later, Iqbal Quadir can issue his electricity in Bangladesh bonds.
And before you know it, any social cause can be actually financed in this way.
Now we do daydreaming in 11:30 with 55 seconds left.
But let's take the idea further.
You do it, you start it in the States, because it's, you know, concepts are very, very close to American minds.
But you can actually bring it to Europe, too.
You can bring it to Asia.
You can, once you have all of those different points, you can make it easy for investors.
Put all of those bonds at one place and they sit down and click.
Once you have more than 10 of them you have to develop some kind of a matrix.
What do investors get?
On one side financial, on the other side social.
So that brings the idea of some kind of rating agency, Morningstar type.
It says, you know, social impact over here is spectacular, five stars.
Financial, they give you one percent, only one star.
Now take it to the last step.
Once you have all of that put together, there's not one reason why you couldn't actually have a marketplace for all of that, where you cannot dispose of all of those bonds in a pretty quick way.
And in that way you organize the financing so there are no dark rooms, no blind people running around to find each other.
Thank you.
I'm a marine biologist and an explorer-photographer with National Geographic, but I want to share a secret.
This image is totally incorrect, totally incorrect.
I see a couple of people crying in the back that I've blown their idea of mermaids.
All right, the mermaid is indeed real, but anyone who's gone on a dive will know that the ocean looks more like this.
It's because the ocean is this massive filter, and as soon as you start going underwater, you're going to lose your colors, and it's going to get dark and blue very quickly.
But we're humans -- we're terrestrial mammals.
And we've got trichromatic vision, so we see in red, green and blue, and we're just complete color addicts.
We love eye-popping color, and we try to bring this eye-popping color underwater with us.
So there's been a long and sordid history of bringing color underwater, and it starts 88 years ago with Bill Longley and Charles Martin, who were trying to take the first underwater color photograph.
And they're in there with old-school scuba suits, where you're pumping air down to them, and they've got a pontoon of high-explosive magnesium powder, and the poor people at the surface are not sure when they're going to pull the string when they've got their frame in focus, and -- boom! -- a pound of high explosives would go off so they could put a little bit of light underwater and get an image like this beautiful hogfish.
I mean, it's a gorgeous image, but this is not real.
They're creating an artificial environment so we can satisfy our own addiction to color.
And looking at it the other way, what we've been finding is that instead of bringing color underwater with us, that we've been looking at the blue ocean, and it's a crucible of blue, and these animals living there for millions of years have been evolving all sorts of ways to take in that blue light and give off other colors.
And here's just a little sample of what this secret world looks like.
It's like an underwater light show.
(Music) Again, what we're seeing here is blue light hitting this image.
These animals are absorbing the blue light and immediately transforming this light.
So if you think about it, the ocean is 71 percent of the planet, and blue light can extend down to almost a 1,000 meters.
As we go down underwater, after about 10 meters, all the red is gone.
So if you see anything under 10 meters that's red, it's an animal transforming and creating its own red.
This is the largest single monochromatic blue environment on our planet.
And my gateway into this world of biofluorescence begins with corals.
And I want to give a full TED Talk on corals and just how cool these things are.
One of the things that they do, one of their miraculous feats, is they produce lots of these fluorescent proteins, fluorescent molecules.
And in this coral, it could be making up to 14 percent of its body mass -- could be this fluorescent protein.
So you wouldn't be making, like, 14 percent muscle and not using it, so it's likely doing something that has a functional role.
And for the last 10, 15 years, this was so special to me, because this molecule has turned out to be one of the most revolutionary tools in biomedical science, and it's allowing us to better see inside ourselves.
So, how do I study this?
In order to study biofluorescence, we cgeorge@example.com.
And when I started out, I was just using these blue duct-tape filters over my strobe, so I could make sure I'm actually seeing the light that's being transformed by the animals.
We're making an exhibit for the Museum of Natural History, and we're trying to show off how great the fluorescent corals are on the reef, and something happened that just blew me away: this.
In the middle of our corals, is this green fluorescent fish.
It's the first time we've ever seen a green fluorescent fish or any vertebrate for that matter.
And we're rubbing our eyes, checking the filters, thinking that somebody's maybe playing a joke on us with the camera, but the eel was real.
It was the first green fluorescent eel that we found, and this just changed my trajectory completely.
So I had to put down my corals and team up with a fish scientist, John Sparks, and begin a search around the world to see how prevalent this phenomenon is.
And fish are much more interesting than corals, because they have really advanced vision, and some of the fish even have, the way that I was photographing it, they have lenses in their eyes that would magnify the fluorescence.
So I wanted to seek this out further.
So we designed a new set of gear and we're scouring the reefs around the world, looking for fluorescent life.
And it's a bit like "E.T. phone home."
We're out there swimming with this blue light, and we're looking for a response, for animals to be absorbing the light and transferring this back to us.
And eventually, we found our photobombing Kaupichphys eel.
It's a really shy, reclusive eel that we know almost nothing about.
They're only about the size of my finger, and they spend about 99.9 percent of their time hidden under a rock.
But these eels do come out to mate under full-moon nights, and that full-moon night translates underwater to blue.
Perhaps they're using this as a way to see each other, quickly find each other, mate, go back into their hole for the next long stint of time.
But then we started to find other fluorescent marine life, like this green fluorescent bream, with its, like, racing stripes along its head and its nape, and it's almost camouflaged and fluorescing at the same intensity as the fluorescent coral there.
After this fish, we were introduced to this red fluorescent scorpionfish cloaked and hidden on this rock.
The only time we've ever seen this, it's either on red fluorescent algae or red fluorescent coral.
Later, we found this stealthy green fluorescent lizardfish.
These lizardfish come in many varieties, and they look almost exactly alike under white light.
But if you look at them under fluorescent light, you see lots of patterns, you can really see the differences among them.
And in total -- we just reported this last year -- we found over 200 species of biofluorescent fish.
One of my inspirations is French artist and biologist Jean Painlevé.
He really captures this entrepreneuring, creative spirit in biology.
He would design his own gear, make his own cameras, and he was fascinated with the seahorse, Hippocampus erectus, and he filmed for the first time the seahorse giving birth.
So this is the male seahorse.
They were one of the first fish to start swimming upright with their brain above their head.
The males give birth, just phenomenal creatures.
So he stayed awake for days.
He even put this electrical visor on his head that would shock him, so he could capture this moment.
Now, I wish I could have shown Painlevé the moment where we found biofluorescent seahorses in the exact same species that he was studying.
And here's our footage.
(Music) They're the most cryptic fish.
You could be swimming right on top of them and not see the seahorse.
They would blend right into the algae, which would also fluoresce red, but they've got great vision, and they go through this long mating ritual, and perhaps they're using it in that effect.
But things got pretty edgy when we found green fluorescence in the stingray, because stingrays are in the Elasmobranch class, which includes ...
sharks.
So I'm, like, a coral biologist.
Somebody's got to go down and check to see if the sharks are fluorescent.
And there I am.
(Laughter) And I was like, "Maybe I should go back to corals."
(Laughter) It turns out that these sharks are not fluorescent.
And then we found it.
In a deep, dark canyon off the coast of California, we found the first biofluorescent swellshark, right underneath all the surfers.
Here it is.
They're just about a meter long.
It's called a swellshark.
And they call them a swellshark because if they're threatened, they can gulp down water and blow up like an inner tube, about twice their size, and wedge themselves under a rock, so they don't get eaten by a predator.
And here is our first footage of these biofluorescent swellsharks.
Just magnificent -- I mean, they're showing these distinct patterns, and there are areas that are fluorescent and areas that are not fluorescent, but they've also got these twinkling spots on them that are much brighter than other parts of the shark.
But this is all beautiful to see.
I was like, this is gorgeous.
But what does it mean to the shark?
Can they see this?
And we looked in the literature, and nothing was known about this shark's vision.
So I took this shark to eye specialist Ellis Loew at Cornell University, and we found out that this shark sees discretely and acutely in the blue-green interface, probably about 100 times better than we can see in the dark, but they only see blue-green.
So what it's doing is taking this blue world and it's absorbing the blue, creating green.
It's creating contrast that they can indeed see.
So we have a model, showing that it creates an ability for them to see all these patterns.
And males and females also have, we're finding, distinct patterns among them.
But our last find came really just a few miles from where we are now, in the Solomon Islands.
Swimming at night, I encountered the first biofluorescent sea turtle.
So now it's going from fish and sharks into reptiles, which, again, this is only one month old, but it shows us that we know almost nothing about this hawksbill turtle's vision.
And it makes me think about how much more there is to learn.
And here in the Solomon Islands, there's only a few thousand breeding females of this species left, and this is one of the hotspots for them.
So it shows us how much we need to really protect these animals while they're still here, and understand them.
In thinking about biofluorescence, I wanted to know, how deep does it go?
Does this go all the way to the bottom of the ocean?
So we started using submarines, and we equipped them with special blue lights on the front here.
And we dropped down, and we noticed one important thing -- that as we get down to 1,000 meters, it drops off.
There's no biofluorescent marine life down there, below 1,000 meters -- almost nothing, it's just darkness.
So it's mainly a shallow phenomenon.
And below 1,000 meters, we encountered the bioluminescent zone, where nine out of 10 animals are actually making their own lights and flashing and blinking.
As I try to get deeper, this is slapping on a one-person submarine suit -- some people call this my "Jacques Cousteau meets Woody Allen" moment.
(Laughter) But as we explore down here, I was thinking about: How do we interact with life delicately?
Because we're entering a new age of exploration, where we have to take great care, and we have to set examples how we explore.
So I've teamed up with roboticist Rob Wood at Harvard University, and we've been designing squishy underwater robot fingers, so we can delicately interact with the marine life down there.
The idea is that most of our technologies to explore the deep ocean come from oil and gas and military, who, you know, they're not really caring to be gentle.
Some corals could be 1,000 years old.
You don't want to just go and crush them with a big claw.
So my dream is something like this.
At night, I'm in a submarine, I have force-feedback gloves, and I could delicately set up a lab in the front of my submarine, where the squishy robot fingers are delicately collecting and putting things in jars, and we can conduct our research.
Back to the powerful applied applications.
Here, you're looking at a living brain that's using the DNA of fluorescent marine creatures, this one from jellyfish and corals, to illuminate the living brain and see its connections.
It's funny that we're using RGB just to kind of satisfy our own human intuition, so we can see our brains better.
And even more mind-blowing, is my close colleague Vincent Pieribone at Yale, who has actually designed and engineered a fluorescent protein that responds to voltage.
So he could see when a single neuron fires.
You're essentially looking at a portal into consciousness that was designed by marine creatures.
So this brings me all back to perspective and relationship.
From deep space, our universe looks like a human brain cell, and then here we are in the deep ocean, and we're finding marine creatures and cells that can illuminate the human mind.
And it's my hope that with illuminated minds, we could ponder the overarching interconnectedness of all life, and fathom how much more lies in store if we keep our oceans healthy.
Thank you.
(Applause)