I'd like to speak about technology trends, which is something that many of you follow -- but we also follow, for related reasons.
Obviously, being a technology magazine, technology trends are something that we write about and need to know about.
But also it's part of being any monthly magazine -- you live in the future.
And we have a long lead-time.
We have to plan issues many months in advance; we have to guess at what public appetites are going to be six months, nine months down the road.
So we're in the forecasting business.
We also, like a lot of companies, create a product that's based on technology trends.
In this case, ours is about ideas and information, and, if we're lucky, some entertainment.
But the concept's quite the same.
And so we have to understand not only why tech's important, where it's going, but also, very importantly, when -- the timing is everything.
And it's interesting, when you look at the predictions made during the peak of the boom in the 1990s, about e-commerce, or Internet traffic, or broadband adoption, or Internet advertising, they were all right -- they were just wrong in time.
Almost every one of those has come true just a few years later.
But the difference of a few years on stock-market valuations is obviously extreme.
And that's why timing is everything.
You've probably seen something like this before.
This is the classic Gartner Hype Curve, which talks about kind of the trajectory of a technology's lifespan.
And just for fun, we put a bunch of technologies on it, to show whether they were kind of rising for the first high peak, or whether they were about to crash into the trough of disillusionment, or rise back in the slope of enlightenment, etc.
And this is one way to do technology forecasting: get a sense of where technology is and then anticipate the next upturn.
We tend to do any technology that we think is sufficiently important; we'll typically do it twice.
Once, we want to do it first.
We want to be the first to do it, for the geeks who appreciate that, we'll catch it right there at the technology-trigger.
You can see in 1997, we put Linux on the cover.
But then it comes back.
And sufficiently big technologies are going to hit the mainstream, and they're going to burst out.
And then it's time to do it again.
Last year.
And that's one way that we try to time technology trends.
I'd like to talk about a way of thinking about technology trends that I call my "grand unified theory of predicting the future," but it's closer to a petite unified theory of predicting the future.
It's based on the presumption, the observation even, that all important technologies go through four stages in their life -- at least one of the four stages, sometimes all four of the stages.
And at each one of these stages, can be seen as a collision -- a collision with something else -- for example, a critical price-line that changes both the technology and also changes its effect on the world.
It's an inflection point.
And these are the inflection points that tell you what the next chapter in that technology's life is going to be, and maybe how you can do something about it.
The first is the critical price.
The first stage in a technology's advance is that it'll fall below a critical price.
After it falls below a critical price, it will tend, if it's successful, to rise above a critical mass, a penetration.
Many technologies, at that point, displace another technology, and that's another important point.
And then finally, a lot of technologies commoditize.
Towards the end of their life, they become nearly free.
Each one of those is an opportunity to do something about it; it's an opportunity for the technology to change.
And even if you missed, you know, the first boom of Wi-Fi -- you know, Wi-Fi did the critical price, it did the critical mass, but hasn't done displacement yet, and hasn't done free yet -- there's still more opportunity in that.
I'd like to demonstrate what I mean by this by telling the story of the DVD, which is a technology which has done all of these.
The DVD, as you know, was introduced in the mid-1990s and it was quite expensive.
But you can see that by 1998, it had fallen below 400 dollars, and 400 dollars was a psychological threshold.
And it started to take off.
And you can see that the units started to trend up, the hidden inflection point -- it was taking off.
The next thing it hit, a year later, was critical mass.
In this case, 20 percent is often a good proxy for critical mass in a household.
And what's interesting here is that something else took off along with it: home-theater units.
Suddenly you have a DVD in the house; you've got high-quality digital video; you have a reason to have a big-screen television; you have a reason for Dolby 5.1 surround-sound.
And maybe you have reasons for starting to connect them, and bring the rest of your entertainment in.
What's interesting also is -- note that Netflix was founded in 1999.
Reed Hastings is here.
He clearly saw that that was a moment, that was an inflection point that he could do something with.
The next phase it hit was displacement.
You can see around 2001 it finally out-sold the VCR.
And here too, you can see the implications in the perezdonald@example.net.
Netflix was right -- the Netflix model could capitalize on the DVD in a way that the video-rental stores couldn't.
Among the DVD's many assets is that it's very small; you can stick it in the mailer and post it cheaply.
That gave an advantage; that was an implication of the technology's rise that wasn't obvious to everybody.
And then finally, DVDs are approaching free.
There's a company called Apex, a no-name Chinese firm, who has, several times in the past year, been the number-one DVD seller in America.
Their average price, for last year, was 48 dollars.
You're aware of the perhaps apocryphal Wal-Mart stampede over the 30-dollar DVD.
But they're getting very, very cheap, and look at the interesting implication of it.
As they get cheaper, the premium brands, the Sonys and such, are losing market share, and the no-names, the Apexes, are gaining them.
They're being commodified, and that's what happens when things go to zero.
It's a tough market out there.
(Laughter) Now they've introduced these four ways of looking at technology, these four stages of technology's life.
I'd like to talk about some other technologies out there, just technologies on our radar -- and I'll use this lens, these four, as a way to kind of tell you where each one of those technologies is in its development.
They're not necessarily the top-10 technologies out there -- they're just examples of technologies that are in each one of these periods.
But I think that the implications of them approaching these crossovers, these intersections, are interesting to think about.
Start with gene sequencing.
As you probably know, gene sequencing -- in a large part, because it's built on computers -- is falling in price at a kind of a Moore's Law-like level.
It is now possible -- will be possible, and if Craig Venter indeed comes today, he may tell you something about this -- to sequence the human genome for 40 million dollars by the end of this year.
That's as opposed to billions just a few years ago.
You know, our ability to capture the tools of creation is getting closer and closer.
What's interesting is that at the same time, the number of genes that we're discovering is rising very quickly.
Each one of these genes has potential diagnostic test.
There will come a day when you can have hundreds of thousands of tests done, very cheaply, if you want to know.
You can learn about your own mosaic.
Here's another technology that's approaching a critical price.
This is a fascinating research from WHO that shows the effect of generic drugs on anti-retroviral drug compounds and cocktails.
In January 2000, the price was 10,000 dollars, or 27 dollars a day.
The generics came in, first in Brazil and elsewhere, and the effect was just dramatic on pricing.
Today it's less than 50 cents a day.
And what's interesting is if you look at the price elasticity, if you look at the correlation between these two, as the anti-retrovirals come down, the number of people you can treat goes radically up.
And the Clinton Foundation and WHO believe that they can treat three million people worldwide by 2005 -- two million in sub-Saharan Africa.
And the falling price of drugs has a lot to do with that.
Linux is another good example.
Now we've switched to critical mass.
These are now technologies that are hitting critical mass.
If you look here, here's Linux in red, and it's hit 20 percent.
Interestingly, it's done a crossover before, but not the crossovers that matter.
The crossover that's going to matter is the one with the blue.
But you can look and see the direction those lines are going, you can see that at the 20 percent, it's now taken seriously.
It's not just for the geeks any more.
That is, I imagine, what people in Redmond wake up in the middle of the night thinking about.
(Laughter) Another technology that we see all around us out here is hybrid cars.
I don't know whether anybody has a Prius 2004, but they're fantastic.
And if you look at the trends here, by about 2008 -- and I don't think this is a crazy forecast -- they'll be two percent of auto sales.
Two percent isn't 20 percent, but in the car business, which is slow moving, that's huge; that's arrival.
At two percent, you start seeing them on the roads everywhere.
And what's interesting about the hybrids taking off is you've now introduced electric motors to the automobile industry.
It's the first radical change in automobile technology in 100 years.
And once you have electric motors, you can do anything: you can change the structure of the car in any way you want.
You can have regenerative braking; you can have drive-by-wire; you can have replaceable body shapes -- it's a little thing that starts with a hybrid, but it can lead to a whole new era of the car.
Voice Over IP is something you may have heard something about.
Again, it's kind of coming out of nowhere; it's a little hard to use right now.
There's a company created by the Kazaa founders called Skype.
Look at these numbers.
They launched it in August of last year; they already have nearly four million registered users -- that's critical mass.
And the same thing's happening on the carrier side.
You're looking at IP taking over from some of the traditional telecom standards.
This is a tipping point -- if Malcolm's here, forgive me -- and it's going to change the economics, and the speed, and the players in the industry.
It's going to look a little bit like that.
And finally, free.
Free is really, really interesting.
Free is something that comes with digital, because the reproduction costs are essentially free.
It comes with IP, because it's such an efficient protocol.
It comes with fiber optics, because there's so much bandwidth.
Free is really, you know, the gift of Silicon Valley to the world.
It's an economic force; it's a technical force.
It's a deflationary force, if not handled right.
It is abundance, as opposed to scarcity.
Free is probably the most interesting thing.
And here you have just the number of songs that can be stored on a hard drive.
You know, there could be a film's [unclear] there, but it's basically, every song ever made could be stored on 400 dollars worth of storage by 2008.
It takes that entire element, the physical element, of songs off the table.
And you've seen the numbers.
I mean, you know, the music industry is imploding in front of our very eyes, and Hollywood's worried as well.
They're facing a force that they haven't faced before.
And their response is draconian, and not necessarily the one that's going to get them out of this.
And finally, I'll give you one last example of free -- perhaps the most powerful of all.
I mentioned fiber optics -- their abundance tends to make things free.
This is the price of a phone call to India per minute.
And what's interesting is that it was just 1990 when it was more than two dollars a minute.
India had, still has, a regulated phone system and so did we.
It was surprisingly non-innovative, moved very slowly, but then there was just so much fiber out there, you couldn't hold back, and look how quickly the price fell.
It's seven cents a minute, in many cases.
And the consequence of cheap phone calling, free phone calling, to India, is the pissed-off programmer, is the outsourcing.
It is probably one of the most dramatic shifts in globalization and one of the most powerful economic tools that we're seeing in our world today.
The force of India, and then China, and any other country that can contact our markets and will work with our companies -- because the communications are free -- is just beginning to be felt.
And I think that's probably one of the most important technology trends that we're perezdonald@example.net.
Thank you.
In the third act of "Swan Lake," the Black Swan pulls off a seemingly endless series of turns, bobbing up and down on one pointed foot and spinning around, and around, and around 32 times.
It's one of the toughest sequences in ballet, and for those thirty seconds or so, she's like a human top in perpetual motion.
Those spectacular turns are called fouettés, which means "whipped" in French, describing the dancer's incredible ability to whip around without stopping.
But while we're marveling at the fouetté, can we unravel its physics?
The dancer starts the fouetté by pushing off with her foot to generate torque.
But the hard part is maintaining the rotation.
As she turns, friction between her pointe shoe and the floor, and somewhat between her body and the air, reduces her momentum.
So how does she keep turning?
Between each turn, the dancer pauses for a split second and faces the audience.
Her supporting foot flattens, and then twists as it rises back onto pointe, pushing against the floor to generate a tiny amount of new torque.
At the same time, her arms sweep open to help her keep her balance.
The turns are most effective if her center of gravity stays constant, and a skilled dancer will be able to keep her turning axis vertical.
The extended arms and torque-generating foot both help drive the fouetté.
But the real secret and the reason you hardly notice the pause is that her other leg never stops moving.
During her momentary pause, the dancer's elevated leg straightens and moves from the front to the side, before it folds back into her knee.
By staying in motion, that leg is storing some of the momentum of the turn.
When the leg comes back in towards the body, that stored momentum gets transferred back to the dancer's body, propelling her around as she rises back onto pointe.
As the ballerina extends and retracts her leg with each turn, momentum travels back and forth between leg and body, keeping her in motion.
A really good ballerina can get more than one turn out of every leg extension in one of two ways.
First, she can extend her leg sooner.
The longer the leg is extended, the more momentum it stores, and the more momentum it can return to the body when it's pulled back in.
More angular momentum means she can make more turns before needing to replenish what was lost to friction.
The other option is for the dancer to bring her arms or leg in closer to her body once she returns to pointe.
Why does this work?
Like every other turn in ballet, the fouetté is governed by angular momentum, which is equal to the dancer's angular velocity times her rotational inertia.
And except for what's lost to friction, that angular momentum has to stay constant while the dancer is on pointe.
That's called conservation of angular momentum.
Now, rotational inertia can be thought of as a body's resistance to rotational motion.
It increases when more mass is distributed further from the axis of rotation, and decreases when the mass is distributed closer to the axis of rotation.
So as she brings her arms closer to her body, her rotational inertia shrinks.
In order to conserve angular momentum, her angular velocity, the speed of her turn, has to increase, allowing the same amount of stored momentum to carry her through multiple turns.
You've probably seen ice skaters do the same thing, spinning faster and faster by drawing in their arms and legs.
In Tchaikovsky's ballet, the Black Swan is a sorceress, and her 32 captivating fouettés do seem almost supernatural.
But it's not magic that makes them possible.
It's physics.
What keeps us healthy and happy as we go through life?
If you were going to invest now in your future best self, where would you put your time and your energy?
There was a recent survey of millennials asking them what their most important life goals were, and over 80 percent said that a major life goal for them was to get rich.
And another 50 percent of those same young adults said that another major life goal was to become famous.
(Laughter) And we're constantly told to lean in to work, to push harder and achieve more.
We're given the impression that these are the things that we need to go after in order to have a good life.
Pictures of entire lives, of the choices that people make and how those choices work out for them, those pictures are almost impossible to get.
Most of what we know about human life we know from asking people to remember the past, and as we know, hindsight is anything but 20/20.
We forget vast amounts of what happens to us in life, and sometimes memory is downright creative.
But what if we could watch entire lives as they unfold through time?
What if we could study people from the time that they were teenagers all the way into old age to see what really keeps people happy and healthy?
We did that.
The Harvard Study of Adult Development may be the longest study of adult life that's ever been done.
For 75 years, we've tracked the lives of 724 men, year after year, asking about their work, their home lives, their health, and of course asking all along the way without knowing how their life stories were going to turn out.
Studies like this are exceedingly rare.
Almost all projects of this kind fall apart within a decade because too many people drop out of the study, or funding for the research dries up, or the researchers get distracted, or they die, and nobody moves the ball further down the field.
But through a combination of luck and the persistence of several generations of researchers, this study has survived.
About 60 of our original 724 men are still alive, still participating in the study, most of them in their 90s.
And we are now beginning to study the more than 2,000 children of these men.
And I'm the fourth director of the study.
Since 1938, we've tracked the lives of two groups of men.
The first group started in the study when they were sophomores at Harvard College.
They all finished college during World War II, and then most went off to serve in the war.
And the second group that we've followed was a group of boys from Boston's poorest neighborhoods, boys who were chosen for the study specifically because they were from some of the most troubled and disadvantaged families in the Boston of the 1930s.
Most lived in tenements, many without hot and cold running water.
When they entered the study, all of these teenagers were interviewed.
They were given medical exams.
We went to their homes and we interviewed their parents.
And then these teenagers grew up into adults who entered all walks of life.
They became factory workers and lawyers and bricklayers and doctors, one President of the United States.
Some developed alcoholism.
A few developed schizophrenia.
Some climbed the social ladder from the bottom all the way to the very top, and some made that journey in the opposite direction.
The founders of this study would never in their wildest dreams have imagined that I would be standing here today, 75 years later, telling you that the study still continues.
Every two years, our patient and dedicated research staff calls up our men and asks them if we can send them yet one more set of questions about their lives.
Many of the inner city Boston men ask us, "Why do you keep wanting to study me?
My life just isn't that interesting."
The Harvard men never ask that question.
(Laughter) To get the clearest picture of these lives, we don't just send them questionnaires.
We interview them in their living rooms.
We get their medical records from their doctors.
We draw their blood, we scan their brains, we talk to their children.
We videotape them talking with their wives about their deepest concerns.
And when, about a decade ago, we finally asked the wives if they would join us as members of the study, many of the women said, "You know, it's about time."
(Laughter) So what have we learned?
What are the lessons that come from the tens of thousands of pages of information that we've generated on these lives?
Well, the lessons aren't about wealth or fame or working harder and harder.
The clearest message that we get from this 75-year study is this: Good relationships keep us happier and healthier.
Period.
We've learned three big lessons about relationships.
The first is that social connections are really good for us, and that loneliness kills.
It turns out that people who are more socially connected to family, to friends, to community, are happier, they're physically healthier, and they live longer than people who are less well connected.
And the experience of loneliness turns out to be toxic.
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 the sad fact is that at any given time, more than one in five Americans will report that they're lonely.
And we know that you can be lonely in a crowd and you can be lonely in a marriage, so the second big lesson that we learned is that it's not just the number of friends you have, and it's not whether or not you're in a committed relationship, but it's the quality of your close relationships that matters.
It turns out that living in the midst of conflict is really bad for our health.
High-conflict marriages, for example, without much affection, turn out to be very bad for our health, perhaps worse than getting divorced.
And living in the midst of good, warm relationships is protective.
Once we had followed our men all the way into their 80s, we wanted to look back at them at midlife and to see if we could predict who was going to grow into a happy, healthy octogenarian and who wasn't.
And when we gathered together everything we knew about them at age 50, it wasn't their middle age cholesterol levels that predicted how they were going to grow old.
It was how satisfied they were in their relationships.
The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80.
And good, close relationships seem to buffer us from some of the slings and arrows of getting old.
Our most happily partnered men and women reported, in their 80s, that on the days when they had more physical pain, their mood stayed just as happy.
But the people who were in unhappy relationships, on the days when they reported more physical pain, it was magnified by more emotional pain.
And the third big lesson that we learned about relationships and our health is that good relationships don't just protect our bodies, they protect our brains.
It turns out that being in a securely attached relationship to another person in your 80s is protective, that the people who are in relationships where they really feel they can count on the other person in times of need, those people's memories stay sharper longer.
And the people in relationships where they feel they really can't count on the other one, those are the people who experience earlier memory decline.
And those good relationships, they don't have to be smooth all the time.
Some of our octogenarian couples could bicker with each other day in and day out, but as long as they felt that they could really count on the other when the going got tough, those arguments didn't take a toll on their memories.
So this message, that good, close relationships are good for our health and well-being, this is wisdom that's as old as the hills.
Why is this so hard to get and so easy to ignore?
Well, we're human.
What we'd really like is a quick fix, something we can get that'll make our lives good and keep them that way.
Relationships are messy and they're complicated and the hard work of tending to family and friends, it's not sexy or glamorous.
It's also lifelong.
It never ends.
The people in our 75-year study who were the happiest in retirement were the people who had actively worked to replace workmates with new playmates.
Just like the millennials in that recent survey, many of our men when they were starting out as young adults really believed that fame and wealth and high achievement were what they needed to go after to have a good life.
But over and over, over these 75 years, our study has shown that the people who fared the best were the people who leaned in to relationships, with family, with friends, with community.
So what about you?
Let's say you're 25, or you're 40, or you're 60.
What might leaning in to relationships even look like?
Well, the possibilities are practically endless.
It might be something as simple as replacing screen time with people time or livening up a stale relationship by doing something new together, long walks or date nights, or reaching out to that family member who you haven't spoken to in years, because those all-too-common family feuds take a terrible toll on the people who hold the grudges.
I'd like to close with a quote from Mark Twain.
More than a century ago, he was looking back on his life, and he wrote this: "There isn't time, so brief is life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account.
There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that."
The good life is built with good relationships.
Thank you.
(Applause)