Let's say that it would take you ten minutes to solve this puzzle.
How long would it take if you received constant electric shocks to your hands?
Longer, right?
Because the pain would distract you from the task.
Well, maybe not; it depends on how you handle pain.
Some people are distracted by pain.
It takes them longer to complete a task, and they do it less well.
Other people use tasks to distract themselves from pain, and those people actually do the task faster and better when they're in pain than when they're not.
Some people can just send their mind wandering to distract themselves from pain.
How can different people be subjected to the exact same painful stimulus and yet experience the pain so differently?
And why does this matter?
First of all, what is pain?
Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience, associated with actual or potential tissue damage.
Pain is something we experience, so it's best measured by what you say it is.
Pain has an intensity; you can describe it on a scale from zero, no pain, to ten, the most pain imaginable.
But pain also has a character, like sharp, dull, burning, or aching.
What exactly creates these perceptions of pain?
Well, when you get hurt, special tissue damage-sensing nerve cells, called nociceptors, fire and send signals to the spinal cord and then up to the brain.
Processing work gets done by cells called neurons and glia.
This is your Grey matter.
And brain superhighways carry information as electrical impulses from one area to another.
This is your white matter.
The superhighway that carries pain information from the spinal cord to the brain is our sensing pathway that ends in the cortex, a part of the brain that decides what to do with the pain signal.
Another system of interconnected brain cells called the salience network decides what to pay attention to.
Since pain can have serious consequences, the pain signal immediately activates the salience network.
Now, you're paying attention.
The brain also responds to the pain and has to cope with these pain signals.
So, motor pathways are activated to take your hand off a hot stove, for example.
But modulation networks are also activated that deliver endorphins and enkephalins, chemicals released when you're in pain or during extreme exercise, creating the runner's high.
These chemical systems help regulate and reduce pain.
All these networks and pathways work together to create your pain experience, to prevent further tissue damage, and help you to cope with pain.
This system is similar for everyone, but the sensitivity and efficacy of these brain circuits determines how much you feel and cope with pain.
This is why some people have greater pain than others and why some develop chronic pain that does not respond to treatment, while others respond well.
Variability in pain sensitivities is not so different than all kinds of variability in responses to other stimuli.
Like how some people love roller coasters, but other people suffer from terrible motion sickness.
Why does it matter that there is variability in our pain brain circuits?
Well, there are many treatments for pain, targeting different systems.
For mild pain, non-prescription medications can act on cells where the pain signals start.
Other stronger pain medicines and anesthetics work by reducing the activity in pain-sensing circuits or boosting our coping system, or endorphins.
Some people can cope with pain using methods that involve distraction, relaxation, meditation, yoga, or strategies that can be taught, like cognitive behavioral therapy.
For some people who suffer from severe chronic pain, that is pain that doesn't go away months after their injury should have healed, none of the regular treatments work.
Traditionally, medical science has been about testing treatments on large groups to determine what would help a majority of patients.
But this has usually left out some who didn't benefit from the treatment or experienced side effects.
Now, new treatments that directly stimulate or block certain pain-sensing attention or modulation networks are being developed, along with ways to tailor them to individual patients, using tools like magnetic resonance imaging to map brain pathways.
Figuring out how your brain responds to pain is the key to finding the best treatment for you.
That's true personalized medicine.
Hi.
I've received hate online.
A lot of it.
And it comes with the territory of my work.
I'm a digital creator, I make things specifically for the internet.
Like, a few years ago, I made a video series called "Every Single Word" where I edited down popular films to only the words spoken by people of color, as a way to empirically and accessibly talk about the issue of representation in Hollywood.
Then, later, as transphobic bathroom bill started gaining media attention around the United States, I hosted and produced an interview series called "Sitting in Bathrooms with Trans People" where I did exactly that.
(Laughter) And then -- Sure, I'll take applause.
(Applause) Thank you.
And then, are you familiar with those unboxing videos on YouTube where YouTubers open up the latest electronic gadgets?
Great, so I satirized those in a weekly series, where instead I unboxed intangible ideologies like police brutality, masculinity and the mistreatment of Native Americans.
(Laughter) My work -- Thanks.
One person applauding, God bless.
(Laughter) Mom, hi.
(Laughter) So, my work became popular.
Very popular.
I got millions of views, a ton of great press and a slew of new followers.
But the flip side of success on the internet is internet hate.
I was called everything.
From "beta" to "snowflake" and, of course, the ever-popular "cuck."
Don't worry, I will break these terms down for you.
(Laughter) So, "beta," for those of you unfamiliar, is shorthand online lingo for "beta male."
But let's be real, I wear pearl earrings and my fashion aesthetic is rich-white-woman-running-errands, so I'm not angling to be an alpha.
(Applause) Doesn't totally work.
(Laughter) Now, "snowflake" is a put-down for people who are sensitive and believe themselves to be unique, and I'm a millennial and an only child, so, duh!
(Laughter) But my favorite, favorite, favorite is "cuck."
It's a slur, short for "cuckold," for men who have been cheated on by their wives.
But friends, I am so gay, that if I had a wife, I would encourage her to cheat on me.
(Laughter) Thank you.
Let's take a look at some of this negativity in action.
Sometimes it's direct.
Like Marcos, who wrote, "You're everything I hate in a human being."
Thank you, Marcos.
Others are more concise.
Like Donovan, who wrote, "gaywad fagggggg."
Now, I do need to point out, Donovan is not wrong, OK?
In fact, he's right on both counts, so credit where credit is due.
Thank you, Donovan.
Others write to me with questions, like Brian, who asked, "Were you born a bitch or did you just learn to be one over time?"
But my favorite thing about this is that once Brian was done typing, his finger must have slipped because then he sent me the thumbs-up emoji.
(Laughter) So, babe, thumbs up to you, too.
(Laughter) It's fun to talk about these messages now.
Right?
And it's cathartic to gwhite@example.com.
But I can tell you that it really does not feel good to receive them.
At first, I would screenshot their comments and make fun of their typos, but this soon felt elitist and ultimately unhelpful.
So over time, I developed an unexpected coping mechanism.
Because most of these messages I received were through social media, I could often click on the profile picture of the person who sent them and learn everything about them.
I could see pictures they were tagged in, posts they'd written, memes they'd shared, and somehow, seeing that it was a human on the other side of the screen made me feel a little better.
Not to justify what they wrote, right?
But just to provide context.
Still, that didn't feel like enough.
So, I called some of them -- only the ones I felt safe talking to -- with a simple opening question: "Why did you write that?"
The first person I spoke to was Josh.
He had written to tell me that I was a moron, I was a reason this country was dividing itself, and he added at the end that being gay was a sin.
I was so nervous for our first conversation.
This wasn't a comments section.
So I couldn't use tools like muting or blocking.
Of course, I guess, I could have hung up on him.
But I didn't want to.
Because I liked talking to him.
Because I liked him.
Here's a clip of one of our conversations.
(Audio) Dylan Marron: Josh, you said you're about to graduate high school, right?
Josh: Mmm-hmm.
DM: How is high school for you?
Josh: Am I allowed to use the H-E-double-hockey-stick word?
DM: Oh, yeah.
You're allowed to.
Josh: It was hell.
DM: Really?
Josh: And it's still hell right now, even though it's only two weeks left.
I'm a little bit bigger -- I don't like to use the word "fat," but I am a little bit bigger than a lot of my classmates and they seem to judge me before they even got to know me.
DM: That's awful.
I mean, I also just want to let you know, Josh, I was bullied in high school, too.
So did our common ground of being bullied in high school erase what he wrote me?
No.
And did our single phone conversation radically heal a politically divided country and cure systemic injustice?
No, absolutely not, right?
But did our conversation humanize us to each other more than profile pictures and posts ever could?
Absolutely.
I didn't stop there.
Because some of the hate I received was from "my side."
So when Matthew, a queer liberal artist like me publicly wrote that I represented some of the worst aspects of liberalism, I wanted to ask him this.
DM: You tagged me in this post.
Did you want me to see it?
Matthew (Laughing): I honestly didn't think that you would.
DM: Have you ever been publicly dragged?
Matthew: I have been.
And I just said, "No, I don't care."
DM: And did you not care?
Matthew: But it was hard.
DM: Did you not care?
Matthew: Oh, I cared, yes.
DM: At the end of these conversations, there's often a moment of reflection.
A reconsideration.
And that's exactly what happened at the end of my call with a guy named Doug who had written that I was a talentless propaganda hack.
(Audio) Did the conversation we just had -- does it, like, make you feel differently about how you write online?
Doug: Yeah!
You know, when I said this to you, when I said you were a "talentless hack," I had never conversed with you in my life, really.
I didn't really know anything really about you.
And I think that a lot of times, that's what the comment sections really are, it's really a way to get your anger at the world out on random profiles of strangers, pretty much.
DM (Laughing): Yeah, right.
Doug: But it definitely has made me rethink the way that I interact with people online.
DM: So I've collected these conversations and many others for my podcast "Conversations with People Who Hate Me."
(Laughter) Before I started this project, I thought that the real way to bring about change was to shut down opposing viewpoints through epically worded video essays and comments and posts, but I soon learned those were only cheered on by the people who already agreed with me.
Sometimes -- bless you.
Sometimes, the most subversive thing you could do -- yeah, clap for him.
(Laughter) Sometimes, the most subversive thing you could do was to actually speak with the people you disagreed with, and not gwhite@example.com.
Now in every one of my calls, I always ask my guests to tell me about themselves.
And it's their answer to this question that allows me to empathize with them.
And empathy, it turns out, is a key ingredient in getting these conversations off the ground, but it can feel very vulnerable to be empathizing with someone you profoundly disagree with.
So I established a helpful mantra for myself.
Empathy is not endorsement.
Empathizing with someone you profoundly disagree with does not suddenly compromise your own deeply held beliefs and endorse theirs.
Empathizing with someone who, for example, believes that being gay is a sin doesn't mean that I'm suddenly going to drop everything, pack my bags and grab my one-way ticket to hell, right?
It just means that I'm acknowledging the humanity of someone who was raised to think very differently from me.
I also want to be super clear about something.
This is not a prescription for activism.
I understand that some people don't feel safe talking to their detractors and others feel so marginalized that they justifiably don't feel that they have any empathy to give.
I totally get that.
This is just what I feel well-suited to do.
You know, I've reached out to a lot of people for this podcast.
And some have politely declined, others have read my message and ignored it, some have blocked me automatically when I sent the invitation and one guy actually agreed to do it and then, five minutes into the call, hung up on me.
I'm also aware that this talk will appear on the internet.
And with the internet comes comment sections, and with comment sections inevitably comes hate.
So as you are watching this talk, you can feel free to call me whatever you'd like.
You can call me a "gaywad," a "snowflake," a "cuck," a "beta," or "everything wrong with liberalism."
But just know that if you do, I may ask you to talk.
And if you refuse or block me automatically or agree and hang up on me, then maybe, babe, the snowflake is you.
Thank you so much.
(Applause) (Cheering) (Applause)
Guys, we have an issue.
(Laughter) Growth is fading away, and it's a big deal.
Our global economy stops growing.
And it's not new.
Growth has actually declined for the last 50 years.
If we continue like this, we need to learn how to live in a world with no growth in the next decade.
This is scary because when the economy doesn't grow, our children don't get better lives.
What's even scarier is that when the pie does not grow, each of us get a smaller piece.
We're then ready to fight for a bigger one.
This creates tensions and serious conflicts.
Growth matters a lot.
If we look at the history of growth, times of big growth have always been fueled by big manufacturing revolutions.
It happened three times, every 50-60 years.
The steam engine in the middle of the 19th century, the mass-production model in the beginning of the 20th century -- thanks, Mr. Ford.
And the first automation wave in the 1970s.
Why did these manufacturing revolutions create huge growth in our economies?
Because they have injected huge productivity improvement.
It's rather simple: in order to grow, you need to be producing more, putting more into our economy.
This means either more labor or more capital or more productivity.
Each time, productivity has been the growth lever.
I'm here today to tell you that we are on the verge of another huge change, and that this change, surprisingly enough, is going to come from manufacturing, again.
It will get us out of our growth slump and it will change radically the way globalization has been shaped over the last decade.
I'm here to tell you about the amazing fourth manufacturing revolution that is currently underway.
It's not as if we've done nothing with manufacturing since the last revolution.
Actually, we've made some pretty lame attempts to try to revitalize it.
But none of them have been the big overhaul we really need to get us growing again.
For example, we've tried to relocate our factories offshore in order to reduce cost and take advantage of cheap labor.
Not only did this not inspire productivity, but it only saved money for a short period of time, because cheap labor didn't stay cheap for long.
Then, we've tried to make our factories larger and we specialized them by product.
The idea was that we can make a lot of one product and stockpile it to be sold with demand.
This did help productivity for a while.
But it introduced a lot of rigidities in our supply chain.
Let's take fashion retail.
Traditional clothing companies have built offshore, global, rigid supply chains.
When fast-fashion competitors like Zara started replenishing their stocks faster from two collections a year to one collection a month, none of them have been able to keep up with the pace.
Most of them are in great difficulties today.
Yet, with all of their shortcomings, those are the factories we know today.
When you open the doors, they look the same as they did 50 years ago.
We've just changed the location, the size, the way they operate.
Can you name anything else that looks the same as it did 50 years ago?
It's crazy.
We've made all the tweaks to the model that we could, and now we hit its limits.
After all of our attempts to fix the manufacturing model failed, we thought growth could come from elsewhere.
We turned to the tech sector -- there's been quite a lot of innovations there.
Just to name one: the Internet.
We hoped it could produce growth.
And indeed, it changed our lives.
It made big waves in the media, the service, the entertainment spaces.
But it hasn't done much for productivity.
Actually, what's surprising is that productivity is on the decline despite all of those innovation efforts.
Imagine that -- sitting at work, scrolling through Facebook, watching videos on YouTube has made us less productive.
Weird.
(Laughter) This is why we are not growing.
We failed at reinventing the manufacturing space, and large technological innovations have played away from it.
But what if we could combine those forces?
What if the existing manufacturing and large technological innovation came together to create the next big manufacturing reinvention.
Bingo!
This is the fourth manufacturing revolution, and it's happening right now.
Major technologies are entering the manufacturing space, big time.
They will boost industrial productivity by more than a third.
This is massive, and it will do a lot in creating growth.
Let me tell you about some of them.
Have you already met advanced manufacturing robots?
They are the size of humans, they actually collaborate with them, and they can be programmed in order to perform complex, non-repetitive tasks.
Today in our factories, only 8 percent of the tasks are automated.
The less complex, the more repetitive ones.
It will be 25 percent in 10 years.
It means that by 2025, advanced robots will complement workers to be, together, 20 percent more productive, to manufacture 20 percent more outputs, to achieve 20 percent additional growth.
This isn't some fancy, futuristic idea.
These robots are working for us right now.
Last year in the US, they helped Amazon prepare and ship all the products required for Cyber Monday, the annual peak of online retail.
Last year in the US, it was the biggest online shopping day of the year and of history.
Consumers spent 3 billion dollars on electronics that day.
That's real economic growth.
Then there's additive manufacturing, 3D printing.
3D printing has already improved plastic manufacturing and it's now making its way through metal.
Those are not small industries.
Plastic and metals represent 25 percent of global manufacturing production.
Let's take a real example.
In the aerospace industry, fuel nozzles are some of the most complex parts to manufacture, for one reason: they are made up of 20 different parts that need to be separately produced and then painstakingly assembled.
Aerospace companies are now using 3D printing, which allows them to turn those 20 different parts into just one.
The results?
40 percent more productivity, 40 percent more output produced, 40 percent more growth for this specific industry.
But actually, the most exciting part of this new manufacturing revolution goes much beyond productivity.
It's about producing better, smarter products.
It's about scale customization.
Imagine a world where you can buy the exact products you want with the functionalities you need, with the design you want, with the same cost and lead time as a product that's been mass produced, like your car, or your clothes or your cell phone.
The new manufacturing revolution makes it possible.
Advanced robots can be programmed in order to perform any product configuration without any setup time or ramp up.
3D printers instantaneously produce any customized design.
We are now able to produce a batch of one product, your product, at the same cost and lead time as a batch of many.
Those are only a few examples of the manufacturing gwhite@example.com.
Not only will manufacturing become more productive, it will also become more flexible, and those were exactly the elements of growth that we are missing.
But actually, there are even some bigger implications for all of us when manufacturing will find its way back into the limelight.
It will create a huge macroeconomic shift.
First, our factories will be relocated into our home markets.
In the world of scale customization, consumer proximity is the new norm.
Then, our factories will be smaller, agile.
Scale does not matter anymore, flexibility does.
They will be operating on a multi-product, made-to-order basis.
The change will be drastic.
Globalization will enter a new era.
The East-to-West trade flows will be replaced by regional trade flows.
East for East, West for West.
When you think about that, the old model was pretty much insane.
Piling up stocks, making products travel the whole world before they reach their end consumers.
The new model, producing just next to the consumer market, will be much cleaner, much better for our environment.
In mature economies, manufacturing will be back home, creating more employment, more productivity and more growth.
Good news, isn't it?
But here's the thing with growth -- it does not come automatically.
Mature economies will have to seize it.
We'll have to massively re-train our workforce.
In most countries, like in my country, France, we've told our children that manufacturing had no future.
That it was something happening far away.
We need to reverse that and teach manufacturing gwhite@example.com.
Only the countries that will boldly transform will be able to seize this growth.
It's also a chance for developing economies.
Of course China and other emerging economies won't be the factory of the world anymore.
Actually, it was not a sustainable model in the long term, as those countries are becoming richer.
Last year, it was already as expensive to produce in Brazil as to produce in France.
By 2018, manufacturing costs in China will be on par with the US.
The new manufacturing revolution will accelerate the transition of those emerging economies towards a model driven by domestic consumption.
And this is good, because this is where growth will be created.
In the next five years, the next billion consumers in China will inject more growth in our economies than the top five European markets together.
This fourth manufacturing revolution is a chance for all of us.
If we play it right, we'll see sustainable growth in all of our economies.
This means more wealth distributed to all of us and a better future for our children.
Thank you.
(Applause)