June 8, 2010, Russell Wilson, fourth-round pick to the Colorado Rockies baseball.
I'm fired up, one of the highest moments of my life.
Every kid's dream to be drafted by a Major League Baseball team.
June 8, 2010.
June 9, 2010 -- (Imitating flatline sound) The line goes flat.
My dad passes away.
The highest of the high to the lowest of the low.
Just like that.
My dad laying in his deathbed, just tears running down my face, you know, what do I do next?
My mind racing, memories, flashbacks, moments, early mornings, getting up, taking grounders and throwing, speed outs and deep post routes to my brother and my dad, to early morning car rides to AAU baseball, to my dad being the third-base coach.
Fast-forward to the championship high of winning a Super Bowl, holding up the Lombardi Trophy and the emotions and the excitement of it all, blue and green confetti all over the place and knowing that you just won the Super Bowl, to a year later, the pressure of the game, the ball on the one-yard line, and this is the chance to win the game, and it doesn't work.
And however many millions and millions of people all over the world watching.
And having to walk to the media, and what do I say next, what do I do, what do I think?
Being married at a young age and just coming out of college and everything else, to, you know, shortly after, marriage not working out and realizing, you know what?
Life happens.
Life happens, life happens to all of us.
Loss of family members, divorce, fear, pain, depression, concerns, worries.
When you think about being superpositive -- yes, I'm positive by nature, but positivity, you know, it doesn't always work, because when you're down 16-nothing in an NFC championship game, and people are like, "Russ, we're not going to be able to win this game, man, it's not a great situation right now," or when you're facing cancer, or when you have things you have to deal with or finances and this and that, like, how do we deal with it?
It's hard to be positive in the midst of it all.
And what I definitely knew was this: that negativity works 100 percent of the time.
Negativity was going to get me nowhere.
I started saying to myself, "New are his mercies every morning," new beginnings, new starts.
And despite hardship and pain and worries and wanting to get through it and "How do I do this?", I started thinking about a car.
You know how when you drive a car, you've got stick shift and you want to shift to neutral?
You go from first gear to second gear, all the way to fifth?
You've got to know how to shift to neutral.
And I needed to shift to neutral immediately, before I crashed.
Sitting there after the Super Bowl, I had a decision to make: Will I let this define my career?
Will I let it define my life?
Hell, no.
What I found out was this: that mindset is a skill.
It can be taught and learned.
I started 10 years ago, training my mind, with this guy named Trevor Moawad, my mental conditioning coach.
He's been with me for 10 years, and we've been best friends and partners ever since.
As athletes, we train the body, we train ourselves to be able to run fast, throw farther, jump higher and do these different things, but why don't we train our mind?
What do you want your life to look like?
Write it out, talk about it, say it.
What's our language, what does it look like, watch these highlights, Russell, when you're in your best moments.
What does that look like?
And be that, live that, sound like that.
The best free throw shooters, they don't worry about the shot they just missed.
They think about this shot, this putt, this throw, this first down.
Then I met this kid Milton Wright, 19 years old, he had cancer three different times.
This day when I went to see him, he was frustrated, "Russ, I'm done, I don't want to do this anymore, it's my time to go."
I started telling him this story about my dad, how he used to say, "Son, why not you?
Why don't you graduate early, play pro football and pro baseball?
Why not you, why not you?"
I said, "Milton, why not you?
If you tried T-cell therapy, and you try this and it doesn't work, you won't remember it."
So Milton got a smile on his face and said, "You're exactly right.
Yes, I do have cancer, Russ.
But I can either let this kill me, not just physically, but I can also let it kill me emotionally and mentally.
And I have a choice right now, in the midst of the problem, in the midst of the storm, to decide to overcome."
One of the questions I always get asked about neutral thinking is this: "Does that mean I don't have any emotion?"
And I always say, absolutely not.
Yeah, we have emotions, we have real-life situations, we have things to deal with.
But what you have to be able to do is to stay focused on the moment and to not be superemotional.
It's OK to have emotions, but don't be emotional.
When people look at me, they see that I'm the highest-paid player in the NFL, they see that I have the girl and Ciara, that I have the family and this and that.
But I still have real-life situations.
We all do.
We all have, you know, sadness and loss and depression and worries and fear.
I didn't just get here.
What's the truth, and how do I come through this better?
And that's really, kind of, how my mind started shifting.
It was not just on the success of it all or the failure of it, it was on the process, like: What is the next step, how do I do this right here, right now?
We have a choice to make in life.
And for me, when I was young and I didn't have much, I made a choice.
I made a choice that I was going to believe that great things were going to happen, that I was going to have my mindset right, and I was going to have the right language and the right things to think about, which helped prepare me for today.
Because I'm just human.
I just have the ability to throw the ball a long way and run around and make some cool and fun throws and make some people smile.
But the reality is that I still have pressure, I still have worries, I still have fears, I still have things that happen.
Still have loss.
Positivity can be dangerous.
But what always works is negativity.
I never wanted to live in negativity, so I stayed in neutral.
I kept my shift in neutral.
And so that's where I lived, and that's where I've been living ever since.
Consider throwing a ball straight into the air.
Can you predict the motion of the ball after it leaves your hand?
Sure, that's easy.
The ball will move upward until it gets to some highest point, then it will come back down and land in your hand again.
Of course, that's what happens, and you know this because you have witnessed events like this countless times.
You've been observing the physics of everyday phenomena your entire life.
But suppose we explore a question about the physics of atoms, like what does the motion of an electron around the nucleus of a hydrogen atom look like?
Could we answer that question based on our experience with everyday physics?
Definietly not.
Why?
Because the physics that governs the behavior of systems at such small scales is much different than the physics of the macroscopic objects you see around you all the time.
The everyday world you know and love behaves according to the laws of classical mechanics.
But systems on the scale of atoms behave according to the laws of quantum mechanics.
This quantum world turns out to be a very strange place.
An illustration of quantum strangeness is given by a famous thought experiment: Schrödinger's cat.
A physicist, who doesn't particularly like cats, puts a cat in a box, along with a bomb that has a 50% chance of blowing up after the lid is closed.
Until we reopen the lid, there is no way of knowing whether the bomb exploded or not, and thus, no way of knowing if the cat is alive or dead.
In quantum physics, we could say that before our observation the cat was in a superposition state.
It was neither alive nor dead but rather in a mixture of both possibilities, with a 50% chance for each.
The same sort of thing happens to physical systems at quantum scales, like an electron orbiting in a hydrogen atom.
The electron isn't really mmeyers@example.net.
It's sort of everywhere in space, all at once, with more of a probability of being at some places than others, and it's only after we measure its position that we can pinpoint where it is at that moment.
A lot like how we didn't know whether the cat was alive or dead until we opened the box.
This brings us to the strange and beautiful phenomenon of quantum entanglement.
Suppose that instead of one cat in a box, we have two cats in two different boxes.
If we repeat the Schrödinger's cat experiment with this pair of cats, the outcome of the experiment can be one of four possibilities.
Either both cats will be alive, or both will be dead, or one will be alive and the other dead, or vice versa.
The system of both cats is again in a superposition state, with each outcome having a 25% chance rather than 50%.
But here's the cool thing: quantum mechanics tells us it's possible to erase the both cats alive and both cats dead outcomes from the superposition state.
In other words, there can be a two cat system, such that the outcome will always be one cat alive and the other cat dead.
The technical term for this is that the states of the cats are entangled.
But there's something truly mindblowing about quantum entanglement.
If you prepare the system of two cats in boxes in this entangled state, then move the boxes to opposite ends of the universe, the outcome of the experiment will still always be the same.
One cat will always come out alive, and the other cat will always end up dead, even though which particular cat lives or dies is completely undetermined before we measure the outcome.
How is this possible?
How is it that the states of cats on opposite sides of the universe can be entangled in this way?
They're too far away to communicate with each other in time, so how do the two bombs always conspire such that one blows up and the other doesn't?
You might be thinking, "This is just some theoretical mumbo jumbo.
This sort of thing can't happen in the real world."
But it turns out that quantum entanglement has been confirmed in real world lab experiments.
Two subatomic particles entangled in a superposition state, where if one spins one way then the other must spin the other way, will do just that, even when there's no way for information to pass from one particle to the other indicating which way to spin to obey the rules of entanglement.
It's not surprising then that entanglement is at the core of quantum information science, a growing field studying how to use the laws of the strange quantum world in our macroscopic world, like in quantum cryptography, so spies can send secure messages to each other, or quantum computing, for cracking secret codes.
Everyday physics may start to look a bit more like the strange quantum world.
Quantum teleportation may even progress so far, that one day your cat will escape to a safer galaxy, where there are no physicists and no boxes.
Over a million people are killed each year in disasters.
Two and a half million people will be permanently disabled or displaced, and the communities will take 20 to 30 years to recover and billions of economic losses.
If you can reduce the initial response by one day, you can reduce the overall recovery by a thousand days, or three years.
See how that works?
If the initial responders can get in, save lives, mitigate whatever flooding danger there is, that means the other groups can get in to restore the water, the roads, the electricity, which means then the construction people, the insurance agents, all of them can get in to rebuild the houses, which then means you can restore the economy, and maybe even make it better and more resilient to the next disaster.
A major insurance company told me that if they can get a homeowner's claim processed one day earlier, it'll make a difference of six months in that person getting their home repaired.
And that's why I do disaster robotics -- because robots can make a disaster go away faster.
Now, you've already seen a couple of these.
These are the UAVs.
These are two types of UAVs: a rotorcraft, or hummingbird; a fixed-wing, a hawk.
And they're used extensively since 2005 -- Hurricane Katrina.
Let me show you how this hummingbird, this rotorcraft, works.
Fantastic for structural engineers.
Being able to see damage from angles you can't get from binoculars on the ground or from a satellite image, or anything flying at a higher angle.
But it's not just structural engineers and insurance people who need this.
You've got things like this fixed-wing, this hawk.
Now, this hawk can be used for geospatial surveys.
That's where you're pulling imagery together and getting 3D reconstruction.
We used both of these at the Oso mudslides up in Washington State, because the big problem was geospatial and hydrological understanding of the disaster -- not the search and rescue.
The search and rescue teams had it under control and knew what they were doing.
The bigger problem was that river and mudslide might wipe them out and flood the responders.
And not only was it challenging to the responders and property damage, it's also putting at risk the future of salmon fishing along that part of Washington State.
So they needed to understand what was going on.
In seven hours, going from Arlington, driving from the Incident Command Post to the site, flying the UAVs, processing the data, driving back to Arlington command post -- seven hours.
We gave them in seven hours data that they could take only two to three days to get any other way -- and at higher resolution.
It's a game changer.
And don't just think about the UAVs.
I mean, they are sexy -- but remember, 80 percent of the world's population lives by water, and that means our critical infrastructure is underwater -- the parts that we can't get to, like the bridges and things like that.
And that's why we have unmanned marine vehicles, one type of which you've already met, which is SARbot, a square dolphin.
It goes underwater and uses sonar.
Well, why are marine vehicles so important and why are they very, very important?
They get overlooked.
Think about the Japanese tsunami -- 400 miles of coastland totally devastated, twice the amount of coastland devastated by Hurricane Katrina in the United States.
You're talking about your bridges, your pipelines, your ports -- wiped out.
And if you don't have a port, you don't have a way to get in enough relief supplies to support a population.
That was a huge problem at the Haiti earthquake.
So we need marine vehicles.
Now, let's look at a viewpoint from the SARbot of what they were seeing.
We were working on a fishing port.
We were able to reopen that fishing port, using her sonar, in four hours.
That fishing port was told it was going to be six months before they could get a manual team of divers in, and it was going to take the divers two weeks.
They were going to miss the fall fishing season, which was the major economy for that part, which is kind of like their Cape Cod.
UMVs, very important.
But you know, all the robots I've shown you have been small, and that's because robots don't do things that people do.
They go places people can't go.
And a great example of that is Bujold.
Unmanned ground vehicles are particularly small, so Bujold -- (Laughter) Say hello to Bujold.
(Laughter) Bujold was used extensively at the World Trade Center to go through Towers 1, 2 and 4.
You're climbing into the rubble, rappelling down, going deep in spaces.
And just to see the World Trade Center from Bujold's viewpoint, mmeyers@example.net.
You're talking about a disaster where you can't fit a person or a dog -- and it's on fire.
The only hope of getting to a survivor way in the basement, you have to go through things that are on fire.
It was so hot, on one of the robots, the tracks began to melt and come off.
Robots don't replace people or dogs, or hummingbirds or hawks or dolphins.
They do things new.
They assist the responders, the experts, in new and innovative ways.
The biggest problem is not making the robots smaller, though.
It's not making them more heat-resistant.
It's not making more sensors.
The biggest problem is the data, the informatics, because these people need to get the right data at the right time.
So wouldn't it be great if we could have experts immediately access the robots without having to waste any time of driving to the site, so whoever's there, use their robots over the Internet.
Well, let's think about that.
Let's think about a chemical train derailment in a rural county.
What are the odds that the experts, your chemical engineer, your railroad transportation engineers, have been trained on whatever UAV that particular county happens to have?
Probably, like, none.
So we're using these kinds of interfaces to allow people to use the robots without knowing what robot they're using, or even if they're using a robot or not.
What the robots give you, what they give the experts, is data.
The problem becomes: who gets what data when?
One thing to do is to ship all the information to everybody and let them sort it out.
Well, the problem with that is it overwhelms the networks, and worse yet, it overwhelms the cognitive abilities of each of the people trying to get that one nugget of information they need to make the decision that's going to make the difference.
So we need to think about those kinds of challenges.
So it's the data.
Going back to the World Trade Center, we tried to solve that problem by just recording the data from Bujold only when she was deep in the rubble, because that's what the USAR team said they wanted.
What we didn't know at the time was that the civil engineers would have loved, needed the data as we recorded the box beams, the serial numbers, the locations, as we went into the rubble.
We lost valuable data.
So the challenge is getting all the data and getting it to the right people.
Now, here's another reason.
We've learned that some buildings -- things like schools, hospitals, city halls -- get inspected four times by different agencies throughout the response phases.
Now, we're looking, if we can get the data from the robots to share, not only can we do things like compress that sequence of phases to shorten the response time, but now we can begin to do the response in parallel.
Everybody can see the data.
We can shorten it that way.
So really, "disaster robotics" is a misnomer.
It's not about the robots.
It's about the data.
(Applause) So my challenge to you: the next time you hear about a disaster, look for the robots.
They may be underground, they may be underwater, they may be in the sky, but they should be there.
Look for the robots, because robots are coming to the rescue.
(Applause)