The year is 1418.
On the horizon, a shimmering vision under the blazing sun.
This is not a cloud, or anything you've ever seen before.
It's an enormous ship followed by dozens and dozens more.
Strange men come towards you in their white robes carrying with them knowledge and treasures from a distant land.
This unimaginable assemblage was led by Admiral Zheng He who established the first-ever sea route connecting the western Pacific to the Indian Ocean.
The influence of this voyage was so profound that it changed the local cultures wherever it landed.
With navigation skills, shipbuilding techniques, Chinese etiquette and social practices on display.
Even today, the impact of Admiral Zheng's armada can be traced from Africa all the way back to Asia.
I'm here to tell you that another invasion is happening 600 years later and this one will impact you.
This one is also led by Chinese, but this time, it's Chinese millennials.
(Laughter) I know a ton has been written and said about American millennials - it's all you guys talk about!
You're trying to study them, label them, define them, and most importantly, you're trying to cater to them.
(Laughter) I'd like to suggest that you might be looking at the wrong group of millennials on the wrong continent.
Because whether you're ready or not, we Chinese millennials are about to take over the world!
(Laughter) But luckily, I'm here to help you.
(Laughter) Here are five things you must know for surviving the impending Chinese millennial invasion.
(Laughter) Number one: We are many!
(Laughter) Do you know how many American millennials you have today?
90 million.
That's a lot.
Now, imagine that times five.
That's how many of us there are.
With a population of around 400 million, we Chinese millennials are proud to be the third biggest country in the world.
Most of the talk about American millennials is related to the workplace.
With almost five times the amount of American millennials, Chinese millennials are an enormous labor pool.
And we're being completely overlooked in the U.S.
Who would you rather hire?
A new employee who is the best out of 100 people?
Or a new employee who is the best out of 500?
And since there are so many of us, you'll be seeing more of us in places you never thought of.
Don't believe me?
This guy seems pretty popular here.
(Laughter) He might look old; he's actually one of us millennials.
20 years ago, who would have imagined that a seven foot-plus tall Chinese athlete would become the only non-American player to lead the NBA in all-star voting.
Number two: We're well educated and super motivated.
Because of the high population density and limited resources, labor is easily replaceable in China.
We are required to work harder and be more motivated just to compete with our peers.
We're surely not all of the labor pool in China.
I contacted Dx Consulting.
Today, 57 percent of Chinese millennials have a bachelor's degree; 23 percent of us have a master's degree; and 20 percent have an associate's degree.
And of course, we're not just educated in China.
In the U.S. in 2014 and '15, 42 percent of Chinese students were studying STEM - science, technology, engineering, mathematics - versus 12 percent for American students.
27 percent of us were studying business and management versus 16 for all students studying in the U.S.
We are choosing majors that can give us a competitive edge, and in turn, higher exposure and impact in Western society.
Are you having a hard time motivating your American millennial employees?
(Laughter) Well, Chinese millennials don't need you to spend a dime on a Foosball table or an in-house coffee shop.
(Laughter) (Applause) We are already super motivated and qualified.
(Laughter) And we're more than happy to take on the tough jobs.
In fact, we've been preparing for it.
Number three: We are the Bruce Lee in Levi's with a smartphone who shop online every day.
Chinese millennials are multicultural.
I even used chopsticks to eat Georgian barbecue when I was interning here in Atlanta.
And I was more devastated at this guy's death than my best scores on my Chinese exam.
We are really digital.
In 2017, smartphone penetration rates is almost 100 percent for those of us who are ages 18 to 34.
We are also shaping mobile payment as well as the economy.
According to a 2017 survey from Labbrand, 86 percent of Chinese millennials use mobile payment in physical shops at least once a week, versus 45 percent for American millennials.
And according to Dx Consulting, we spend four times what American millennials spend for mobile purchases.
The U.S. is the center of the digital universe.
But for how much longer?
If you want to buy the best digital real estate in the virtual world of the future, I suggest that China is a prime location.
The good news for foreign companies hoping to capture part of the Chinese millennial market is that my cohort is extremely mobile and adventurous.
Here's my personal travel map for the last couple of years.
The desire to see the world dominates our consumption habits.
We aren't just spending money at home, we are also making purchases and using web services from foreign companies like Airbnb and Uber when we travel overseas.
Sure, you buy things from us, and we buy things from you.
(Laughter) So next time you have a meeting on how to exploit millennial markets, keep in mind that Chinese millennials - not American - are the biggest emerging consumer demographic on the planet.
Number four: We're big picture people.
Do you know how big China is?
It's around the same size as the States.
But we all know that there are four time zones across the contiguous United States.
In China, we've got one.
In China, everything is perceived as one.
One time zone, one official language, one party, despite diverse ethnicities and cultures.
Our thinking always starts from the overview to the specific.
The Chinese way of writing an address is country, city, and street.
And we write the date: year, month, and day.
And because we are such big picture people, we focus much more on growth and the future than Americans in the workplace.
We tend to look at a company as a whole and see how we fit into it.
And number five: We're still Confucian individualists.
Granted, we Chinese millennials are acting more and more individual nowadays, but ten years of iPhone and online dating apps cannot wipe out thousands of years of Confucian cultures.
A sense of hierarchy is still deeply entrenched in our understanding and construction of social relations.
In my mind, a child is supposed to show respect to his parents just like if I'm a subordinate.
I'm expected to show respect to a senior manager.
I don't think we should disagree with our bosses or criticize them, at least not directly or publicly.
(Laughter) (Laughter) My American friends are more likely to challenge authority and power, and I think that's a good thing.
We might learn a little bit from American millennials on that, but I do like our respect for hierarchy and experience, and I don't want to see that go away.
In 20 years, we'll all still be millennials, but we'll be 40, we'll be in bigger positions of power, and we'll have much more opportunity to change the world like we insist we know how to do right now.
And I really hope we do.
Everybody knows the Great Wall of China.
Even those ancient walls were crossed by Admiral Zheng He 600 years ago, and our new border, if we even had one, is far beyond the old one.
Whether you're trying to build your own walls, keep out what you don't want, keep in what you do, hold in your pride, keep out competition, all those things are going to happen anyway.
The world is flat.
It's flat!
But it's tilted toward China now.
(Laughter) And I can assure you, we Chinese millennials are ready to be the explorers in this new adventure from the Far East.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers)
(Nature sounds) When I first began recording wild soundscapes 45 years ago, I had no idea that ants, insect larvae, sea anemones and viruses created a sound signature.
But they do.
And so does every wild habitat on the planet, like the Amazon rainforest you're hearing behind me.
In fact, temperate and tropical rainforests each produce a vibrant animal orchestra, that instantaneous and organized expression of insects, reptiles, amphibians, birds and mammals.
And every soundscape that springs from a wild habitat generates its own unique signature, one that contains incredible amounts of information, and it's some of that information I want to share with you today.
The soundscape is made up of three basic sources.
The first is the geophony, or the nonbiological sounds that occur in any given habitat, like wind in the trees, water in a stream, waves at the ocean shore, movement of the Earth.
The second of these is the biophony.
The biophony is all of the sound that's generated by organisms in a given habitat at one time and in one place.
And the third is all of the sound that we humans generate that's called anthrophony.
Some of it is controlled, like music or theater, but most of it is chaotic and incoherent, which some of us refer to as noise.
There was a time when I considered wild soundscapes to be a worthless artifact.
They were just there, but they had no significance.
Well, I was wrong.
What I learned from these encounters was that careful listening gives us incredibly valuable tools by which to evaluate the health of a habitat across the entire spectrum of life.
When I began recording in the late '60s, the typical methods of recording were limited to the fragmented capture of individual species like birds mostly, in the beginning, but later animals like mammals and amphibians.
To me, this was a little like trying to understand the magnificence of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony by abstracting the sound of a single violin player out of the context of the orchestra and hearing just that one part.
Fortunately, more and more institutions are implementing the more holistic models that I and a few of my colleagues have introduced to the field of soundscape ecology.
When I began recording over four decades ago, I could record for 10 hours and capture one hour of usable material, good enough for an album or a film soundtrack or a museum installation.
Now, because of global warming, resource extraction, and human noise, among many other factors, it can take up to 1,000 hours or more to capture the same thing.
Fully 50 percent of my archive comes from habitats so radically altered that they're either altogether silent or can no longer be heard in any of their original form.
The usual methods of evaluating a habitat have been done by visually counting the numbers of species and the numbers of individuals within each species in a given area.
However, by comparing data that ties together both density and diversity from what we hear, I'm able to arrive at much more precise fitness outcomes.
And I want to show you some examples that typify the possibilities unlocked by diving into this universe.
This is Lincoln Meadow.
Lincoln Meadow's a three-and-a-half-hour drive east of San Francisco in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, at about 2,000 meters altitude, and I've been recording there for many years.
In 1988, a logging company convinced local residents that there would be absolutely no environmental impact from a new method they were trying called "selective logging," taking out a tree here and there rather than clear-cutting a whole area.
With permission granted to record both before and after the operation, I set up my gear and captured a large number of dawn choruses to very strict protocol and calibrated recordings, because I wanted a really good baseline.
This is an example of a spectrogram.
A spectrogram is a graphic illustration of sound with time from left to right across the page -- 15 seconds in this case is represented — and frequency from the bottom of the page to the top, lowest to highest.
And you can see that the signature of a stream is represented here in the bottom third or half of the page, while birds that were once in that meadow are represented in the signature across the top.
There were a lot of them.
And here's Lincoln Meadow before selective logging.
(Nature sounds) Well, a year later I returned, and using the same protocols and recording under the same conditions, I recorded a number of examples of the same dawn choruses, and now this is what we've got.
This is after selective logging.
You can see that the stream is still represented in the bottom third of the page, but notice what's missing in the top two thirds.
(Nature sounds) Coming up is the sound of a woodpecker.
Well, I've returned to Lincoln Meadow 15 times in the last 25 years, and I can tell you that the biophony, the density and diversity of that biophony, has not yet returned to anything like it was before the operation.
But here's a picture of Lincoln Meadow taken after, and you can see that from the perspective of the camera or the human eye, hardly a stick or a tree appears to be out of place, which would confirm the logging company's contention that there's nothing of environmental impact.
However, our ears tell us a very different story.
Young students are always asking me what these animals are saying, and really I've got no idea.
But I can tell you that they do express themselves.
Whether or not we understand it is a different story.
I was walking along the shore in Alaska, and I came across this tide pool filled with a colony of sea anemones, these wonderful eating machines, relatives of coral and jellyfish.
And curious to see if any of them made any noise, I dropped a hydrophone, an underwater microphone covered in rubber, down the mouth part, and immediately the critter began to absorb the microphone into its belly, and the tentacles were searching out of the surface for something of nutritional value.
The static-like sounds that are very low, that you're going to hear right now.
(Static sounds) Yeah, but watch.
When it didn't find anything to eat -- (Honking sound) (Laughter) I think that's an expression that can be understood in any language.
(Laughter) At the end of its breeding cycle, the Great Basin Spadefoot toad digs itself down about a meter under the hard-panned desert soil of the American West, where it can stay for many seasons until conditions are just right for it to emerge again.
And when there's enough moisture in the soil in the spring, frogs will dig themselves to the surface and gather around these large, vernal pools in great numbers.
And they vocalize in a chorus that's absolutely in sync with one another.
And they do that for two reasons.
The first is competitive, because they're looking for mates, and the second is cooperative, because if they're all vocalizing in sync together, it makes it really difficult for predators like coyotes, foxes and owls to single out any individual for a meal.
This is a spectrogram of what the frog chorusing looks like when it's in a very healthy pattern.
(Frogs croaking) Mono Lake is just to the east of Yosemite National Park in California, and it's a favorite habitat of these toads, and it's also favored by U.S. Navy jet pilots, who train in their fighters flying them at speeds exceeding 1,100 kilometers an hour and altitudes only a couple hundred meters above ground level of the Mono Basin, very fast, very low, and so loud that the anthrophony, the human noise, even though it's six and a half kilometers from the frog pond you just heard a second ago, it masked the sound of the chorusing toads.
You can see in this spectrogram that all of the energy that was once in the first spectrogram is gone from the top end of the spectrogram, and that there's breaks in the chorusing at two and a half, four and a half, and six and a half seconds, and then the sound of the jet, the signature, is in yellow at the very bottom of the page.
(Frogs croaking) Now at the end of that flyby, it took the frogs fully 45 minutes to regain their chorusing synchronicity, during which time, and under a full moon, we watched as two coyotes and a great horned owl came in to pick off a few of their numbers.
The good news is that, with a little bit of habitat restoration and fewer flights, the frog populations, once diminishing during the 1980s and early '90s, have pretty much returned to normal.
I want to end with a story told by a beaver.
It's a very sad story, but it really illustrates how animals can sometimes show emotion, a very controversial subject among some older biologists.
A colleague of mine was recording in the American Midwest around this pond that had been formed maybe 16,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age.
It was also formed in part by a beaver dam at one end that held that whole ecosystem together in a very delicate balance.
And one afternoon, while he was recording, there suddenly appeared from out of nowhere a couple of game wardens, who for no apparent reason, walked over to the beaver dam, dropped a stick of dynamite down it, blowing it up, killing the female and her young babies.
Horrified, my colleagues remained behind to gather his thoughts and to record whatever he could the rest of the afternoon, and that evening, he captured a remarkable event: the lone surviving male beaver swimming in slow circles crying out inconsolably for its lost mate and offspring.
This is probably the saddest sound I've ever heard coming from any organism, human or other.
(Beaver crying) Yeah.
Well.
There are many facets to soundscapes, among them the ways in which animals taught us to dance and sing, which I'll save for another time.
But you have heard how biophonies help clarify our understanding of the natural world.
You've heard the impact of resource extraction, human noise and habitat destruction.
And where environmental sciences have typically tried to understand the world from what we see, a much fuller understanding can be got from what we hear.
Biophonies and geophonies are the signature voices of the natural world, and as we hear them, we're endowed with a sense of place, the true story of the world we live in.
In a matter of seconds, a soundscape reveals much more information from many perspectives, from quantifiable data to cultural inspiration.
Visual capture implicitly frames a limited frontal perspective of a given spatial context, while soundscapes widen that scope to a full 360 degrees, completely enveloping us.
And while a picture may be worth 1,000 words, a soundscape is worth 1,000 pictures.
And our ears tell us that the whisper of every leaf and creature speaks to the natural sources of our lives, which indeed may hold the secrets of love for all things, especially our own humanity, and the last word goes to a jaguar from the Amazon.
(Growling) Thank you for listening.
(Applause)