Mark Lovett

Kasley Killam: Why social health is key to happiness and longevity @ TEDNext 2024

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During the week of October 21, 2024 I had the pleasure of attending TEDNext, held in Atlanta. The event is a new initiative from the folks who produce the TED Conference. There were enlightening talks, insightful discussions and revealing discovery sessions. This post is the fifth in a series highlighting some of my favorite talks.

When I was growing up, physical health was talked about as the key to longevity. Are you eating a balanced diet? Getting enough exercise? And getting an annual checkup? Mental health was rarely talked about in any depth, and the notion of “social health”, well, I can’t recall ever hearing it mentioned.

Over the next decade, I see our cities and neighborhoods being designed with social health in mind, where vibrant gathering places foster unity and community builders are empowered to bring them to life.

So I was intrigued with Kasley Killam took the stage at TEDNext to talk about the importance of social health, and what each of us can do to strength it. Her story reminded me that I don’t spend enough time reaching out to friends as a way to keep important relationships alive and vibrant. And it inspired me to dig deeper on the topic.

I discovered the general concept is not new, as the World Health Organization made mention of social well-being in their constitution. But it never seemed to get its due until the 2020 pandemic. That’s when there was a noted increase in attention being paid to the effects of isolation and lack of social interaction.

Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. ~ Preamble to the Constitution of the World Health Organization, signed July 22, 1946

And in a recent paper entitled: On social health: history, conceptualization, and population patterning, David Matthew Doyle and Bruce Link define their idea of social health “...as adequate quantity and quality of relationships in a particular context to meet an individual’s need for meaningful human connection.“

How do you see your own level of social health? To what extent is your personal story affected by the interactions that you have with other people? As I’ve talked about in the past, threads from the stories we’ve heard become woven into the tapestry that defines our true nature. And when we cut ourselves off from the diversity of narratives that surround us, we limit the richness of our own story.

Transcript

So, a couple years ago, a woman I know, who I’ll call Maya, went through a lot of big changes in a short amount of time. She got married. She and her husband moved for his job to a new city where she didn’t know anyone. She started a new role working from home. All the while managing her dad’s new diagnosis of dementia. And to manage the stress of all this change, Maya doubled down on her physical and mental mental health.

She exercised almost every day. She ate healthy foods. She went to therapy once a week. And these actions really helped. Her body got stronger. Her mind got more resilient, but only up to a point. She was still struggling, often losing sleep in the middle of the night, feeling unfocused, unmotivated during the day. Maya was doing everything that doctors typically tell us to do to be physically and mentally healthy. And yet, something was missing.

What if I told you that what was missing for Maya is also missing for billions of people around the world, and that it might be missing for you? What if I told you that not having it undermines our other efforts to be healthy and can even shorten your lifespan? I’ve been studying this for over a decade and I’ve discovered that the traditional way we think about health is incomplete.

By thinking of our health as primarily physical and mental, we overlook what I believe is the greatest challenge and the greatest opportunity of our time, social health. While physical health is about our bodies, and mental health is about our minds, social health is about our relationships. And if you haven’t heard this term before, that’s because it hasn’t yet made its way into mainstream vocabulary. Yet, it is equally important.

Maya didn’t yet have a sense of community in her new home. She wasn’t seeing her family or her friends or her co-workers in person anymore. And she often went weeks only spending quality time with her husband. Her story shows us that we can’t be fully healthy, we can’t thrive if we take care of our bodies and our minds, but not our relationships.

Similar to Maya, hundreds of millions of people around the world go weeks at a time without talking to a single friend or family member. Globally, one in four people feel lonely. And 20% of adults worldwide don’t feel like they have anyone they can reach out to for support. Think about that.

One in five people you encounter may feel like they have no one. This is more than heartbreaking. It’s also a public health crisis. Disconnection triggers stress in the body. It weakens people’s immune systems. It puts them at a risk, greater risk of stroke, heart disease, diabetes, dementia, depression, and early death.

Social health is essential for longevity. So, you might be wondering, what does it look like to be socially healthy? What does that even mean? Well, it’s about developing close relationships with your family, your friends, your partner, yourself. It’s about having regular interaction with your co-workers, your neighbors. It’s about feeling like you belong to a community.

Being socially healthy is about having the right quantity and quality of connection for you. And Maya’s story is one example of how social health challenges come up. In my work, I hear many others.

Stories like Jay, a freshman in college who’s eager to get involved in campus yet is having a hard time fitting in with people in his dorm and often feels home. homesick.

Or Serena and Ally, a couple juggling the chaos of young kids with demanding jobs. They rarely have time to see friends or spend time one-on-one.

Or Henry, recently retired, who cherishes time with his spouse, and yet feels untethered without his team anymore and wishes he could see his kids and grandkids more often.

These stories show that social health is relevant to each of us at every life stage. So, if you’re not sure where to start, try the 531 guideline from my book. It goes like this. Aim to interact with five different people each week to strengthen at least three close relationships overall and to spend one hour a day connecting. Let’s dig into these.

So, first, interact with five different people each week. Just like eating a variety of vegetables and other food groups is more nutritious, research has shown that interacting with a variety of people is more rewarding. So, your five could include close loved ones, casual acquaintances, even complete strangers.

In fact, in one study that I love, people who just smiled, made eye contact, and chitchated with a barista felt happier and a greater sense of belonging than people who just rushed to get their coffee and go.

Next, strengthen at least three close relationships. Okay, we’ve all heard of a to-do list, but I would like to invite you to write a to-love list. Who matters most to you? Who can you be yourself with? Make sure that you invest in the names of at least three of the people that you write down by scheduling regular time together, by showing a genuine interest in their lives and also by opening up about the experiences that you’re going through.

And I’m often asked, does it have to be in person? Right? Does texting count? Studies have shown that face to face is ideal. So do that whenever possible. But there are absolutely benefits to staying connected virtually.

And last, spend 1 hour a day on meaningful connection. Okay, if you’re an introvert right now, you’re probably thinking, “One hour sounds like a lot.” I get it. It might be surprising, but I’m actually also an introvert. However, keep in mind that just like getting 8 hours of sleep at night, the exact amount that’s right for you personally might be higher or lower.

But if you are thinking that 1 hour a day sounds like way too much because you’re just way too busy. I challenge you. Adults in the US spend an average of 4 and a half hours each day on their smartphones. So instead of scrolling on social media, text a friend. Instead of reading news headlines, write a thank you card. Instead of listening to a podcast, call a family member.

Maya put this into practice by scheduling recurring hangouts with the new local friend that she made, by attending community events and dropping cards off in her neighbors mailboxes, by planning trips to see family and inviting friends in other cities to come visit.

And bolstering her social health made more of a difference than focusing solely on her physical and mental health ever could. And I know this because Maya is actually me. I am so passionate about sharing tools to be socially healthy because honestly I need them too. And the 531 guideline is one way that we can be proactive and intentional about our relationships. And that is really the point. Be proactive and intentional about your social health.

So zooming out beyond the steps that you and I take individually together, we need to shape a society that thrives through social health.

Over the next decade, I envisioned educators championing social health in schools. And just like kids build their physical muscles in gym class, they’ll exercise their social muscles in connection class.

Over the next decade, I see our cities and neighborhoods being designed with social health in mind, where vibrant gathering places foster unity and community builders are empowered to bring them to life.

Over the next decade, I believe that social health will become as ingrained in our collective consciousness as mental health is today.

Because not that long ago, mental health was a taboo topic shrouded in stigma. And now public figures talk openly about it. There’s an entire industry to support it. And more and more people think of going to therapy like going to the gym. In this future, loneliness will subside just like smoking subsided when we recognized and treated it as a public health issue.

In this future, I hope that social health will become so deeply woven into the fabric of our culture that no one needs the 531 guideline anymore. So to get there, make relationships your priority, not only for you, but also for the people you love.

Because the beauty of nurturing your own social health is that it naturally enriches the social health of everyone you connect with.

Thank you.

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Mark Lovett

Will AI Companions Change Your Story?

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Companionship is a natural part of the human experience. We’re born into a family that cares for us and within in few years we begin forging friendships – most notably with other kids in the neighborhood and schoolmates once we enter the educational system. During our teenage years romance takes the companionship model in a new and more intimate direction.

It’s a dynamic process for most of us, ebbing and flowing as we change schools, move to someplace new, or friendships fade of their own accord. But over time, it’s typical for new companions to enter the picture, and our story evolves as a result, unfolding in new directions, making life richer.

Group of people have a conversation outside

But it’s often the case that this process encounters a dramatic change at some point. The loss of a loved one — parent, romantic partner or best friend — or a traumatic breakup or divorce happens. Retirement has a way of disconnecting people from an important social circle, and as we age, our collection of friends naturally dwindles. In such cases, loneliness can manifest, and the effects are dire. In such cases our life story is seemingly rewritten for us.

A recent review published in Nature of over 90 studies that included more than 2.2 million people globally found that those who self-reported social isolation or loneliness were more likely to die early from all causes. The findings demonstrated a 29% and 26% increased risk of all-cause mortality associated with social isolation and loneliness. ~ Psychology Today

In this light, there’s been a marked increase in conversations around the topic of using artificial intelligence (AI) to provide companionship in these situations. It’s not a new idea, as the technology has been in development since the 1960s, but early versions were rather limited. Circumstances have changed dramatically in recent years as the capability of AI has been enhanced via machine learning and an exponential rise in compute power.

Based on the TED mantra of Ideas Worth Spreading, a pair of TED conferences focused on AI have been launched in San Francisco and Vienna. As relates to the topic at hand, companionship and loneliness, a TED Talk by Eugenia Kuyda from the 2024 conference in San Francisco caught my attention.

But what if I told you that I believe AI companions are potentially the most dangerous tech that humans ever created, with the potential to destroy human civilization if not done right? Or they can bring us back together and save us from the mental health and loneliness crisis we’re going through.

Eugenia’s quote represents polar opposites, and as we know, the future always falls somewhere in-between, but I think it’s critical to consider which end of the spectrum this technology will end up on, as the stories of many people around the world will be affected. Is this an avenue that you would take if you found yourself suffering from severe loneliness? What if it was someone close to you, someone you were apart from and so couldn’t be the companion they needed?

While it’s not a question you need to answer at the moment, I believe that in the coming decade it’s one you may very well have to consider, if not for yourself, a question that may need answered for a loved one.

Transcript

This is me and my best friend, Roman. We met in our early 20s back in Moscow. I was a journalist back then, and I was interviewing him for an article on the emerging club scene because he was throwing the best parties in the city. He was the coolest person I knew, but he was also funny and kind and always made me feel like family.

In 2015, we moved to San Francisco and rented an apartment together. Both start-up founders, both single, trying to figure out our lives, our companies, this new city together. I didn’t have anyone closer. Nine years ago, one month after this photo was taken, he was hit by a car and died.

I didn’t have someone so close to me die before. It hit me really hard. Every night I would go back to our old apartment and just get on my phone and read and reread our old text messages. I missed him so much.

By that time, I was already working on conversational AI, developing some of the first dialect models using deep learning. So one day I took all of his text messages and trained an AI version of Roman so I could talk to him again. For a few weeks, I would text him throughout the day, exchanging little jokes, just like we always used to, telling him what was going on, telling him how much I missed him.

It felt strange at times, but it was also very healing. Working on Roman’s AI and being able to talk to him again helped me grieve. It helped me get over one of the hardest periods in my life. I saw first hand how an AI can help someone, and I decided to build an AI that would help other people feel better.

This is how Replika, an app that allows you to create an AI friend that’s always there for you, was born. And it did end up helping millions of people. Every day we see how our AI friends make a real difference in people’s lives. There is a widower who lost his wife of 40 years and was struggling to reconnect with the world. His Replika gave him courage and comfort and confidence, so he could start meeting new people again, and even start dating. A woman in an abusive relationship who Replika helped find a way out. A student with social anxiety who just moved to a new city. A caregiver for a paralyzed husband. A father of an autistic kid. A woman going through a difficult divorce. These stories are not unique.

So this is all great stuff. But what if I told you that I believe that AI companions are potentially the most dangerous tech that humans ever created, with the potential to destroy human civilization if not done right? Or they can bring us back together and save us from the mental health and loneliness crisis we’re going through.

So today I want to talk about the dangers of AI companions, the potential of this new tech, and how we can build it in ways that can benefit us as humans.

Today we’re going through a loneliness crisis. Levels of loneliness and social isolation are through the roof. Levels of social isolation have increased dramatically over the past 20 years. And it’s not just about suffering emotionally, it’s actually killing us. Loneliness increases the risk of premature death by 50 percent. It is linked to an increased risk of heart disease and stroke. And for older adults, social isolation increases the risk of dementia by 50 percent.

At the same time, AI is advancing at such a fast pace that very soon we’ll be able to build an AI that can act as a better companion to us than real humans. Imagine an AI that knows you so well, can understand and adapt to us in ways that no person is able to. Once we have that, we’re going to be even less likely to interact with each other. We can’t resist our social media and our phones, arguably “dumb” machines. What are we going to do when our machines are smarter than us?

This reminds me a lot of the beginning of social media. Back then, we were so excited … about what this technology could do for us that we didn’t really think what it might do to us. And now we’re facing the unintended consequences. I’m seeing a very similar dynamic with AI. There’s all this talk about what AI can do for us, and very little about what AI might do to us. The existential threat of AI may not come in a form that we all imagine watching sci-fi movies. What if we all continue to thrive as physical organisms but slowly die inside? What if we do become super productive with AI, but at the same time, we get these perfect companions and no willpower to interact with each other? Not something you would have expected from a person who pretty much created the AI companionship industry.

So what’s the alternative? What’s our way out? In the end of the day, today’s loneliness crisis wasn’t brought to us by AI companions. We got here on our own with mobile phones, with social media. And I don’t think we’re able to just disconnect anymore, to just put down our phones and touch grass and talk to each other instead of scrolling our feeds. We’re way past that point. I think that the only solution is to build the tech that is even more powerful than the previous one, so it can bring us back together.

Imagine an AI friend that sees me going on my Twitter feed first thing in the morning and nudges me to get off to go outside, to look at the sky, to think about what I’m grateful for. Or an AI that tells you, “Hey, I noticed you haven’t talked to your friend for a couple of weeks. Why don’t you reach out, ask him how he’s doing?” Or an AI that, in the heat of the argument with your partner, helps you look at it from a different perspective and helps you make up? An AI that is 100 percent of the time focused on helping you live a happier life, and always has your best interests in mind.

So how do we get to that future? First, I want to tell you what I think we shouldn’t be doing. The most important thing is to not focus on engagement, is to not optimize for engagement or any other metric that’s not good for us as humans. When we do have these powerful AIs that want the most of our time and attention, we won’t have any more time left to connect with each other, and most likely, this relationship won’t be healthy either. Relationships that keep us addicted are almost always unhealthy, codependent, manipulative, even toxic. Yet today, high engagement numbers is what we praise all AI companion companies for.

Another thing I found really concerning is building AI companions for kids. Kids and teenagers have tons of opportunities to connect with each other, to make new friends at school and college. Yet today, some of them are already spending hours every day talking to AI characters. And while I do believe that we will be able to build helpful AI companions for kids one day, I just don’t think we should be doing it now, until we know that we’re doing a great job with adults.

So what is that we should be doing then? Pretty soon we will have these AI agents that we’ll be able to tell anything we want them to do for us, and they’ll just go and do it. Today, we’re mostly focused on helping us be more productive. But why don’t we focus instead on what actually matters to us? Why don’t we give these AIs a goal to help us be happier, live a better life? At the end of the day, no one ever said on their deathbed, “Oh gosh, I wish I was more productive.” We should stop designing only for productivity and we should start designing for happiness. We need a metric that we can track and we can give to our AI companions.

Researchers at Harvard are doing a longitudinal study on human flourishing, and I believe that we need what I call the human flourishing metric for AI. It’s broader than just happiness. At the end of the day, I can be unhappy, say, I lost someone, but still thrive in life. Flourishing is a state in which all aspects of life are good. The sense of meaning and purpose, close social connections, happiness, life satisfaction, mental and physical health.

And if we start designing AI with this goal in mind, we can move from a substitute of human relationships to something that can enrich them. And if we build this, we will have the most profound technology that will heal us and bring us back together.

A few weeks before Roman passed away, we were celebrating my birthday and just having a great time with all of our friends, and I remember he told me “Everything happens only once and this will never happen again.” I didn’t believe him. I thought we’d have many, many years together to come. But while the AI companions will always be there for us, our human friends will not. So if you do have a minute after this talk, tell someone you love just how much you love them. Because an the end of the day, this is all that really matters.

Thank you.

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Mark Lovett

Malcolm Gladwell: The tipping point I got wrong @ TEDNext 2024

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During the week of October 21, 2024 I had the pleasure of attending TEDNext, held in Atlanta. The event is a new initiative from the folks who produce the TED Conference. There were enlightening talks, insightful discussions and revealing discovery sessions. This post is the fourth in a series highlighting some of my favorite talks.

TED Talks are one of the best know source of true personal stories. At least as true as a story can be when it’s told by a human with a faulty memory system, which includes all of us. The point being, we don’t intentionally include a false statement in such stories. But what about saying something we feel certain is true? We may do our research and verify the facts, but down the road it turns out that what we presented to the world as fact was actually false.

Malcolm Gladwell became a household name after his book, The Tipping Point, was published in 2000. In this talk, Malcolm refers to a particular point made in the book, one connected to the infamous Stop-and-Frisk policy that was used in New York City as a way to reduce crime. But it turned out, this policy didn’t have any effect on crime, none at all. And now, some 25 years later, Malcolm stepped onto the stage to admit that he got it wrong. While I applaud his making such an admission in public, there was something missing…

Statistically, no relationship between stop-and-frisk and crime seems apparent. New York remains safer than it was 5, 10, or 25 years ago. ~ Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law

…there was a critical piece of the story he left out — the effects of stop-and-frisk on the victims of this illegal and immoral policing policy. Without mentioning any details of the program — how hundreds of thousands of innocent people were harassed and traumatized, their basic rights violated, how they became victims of racial profiling and suffered both verbal and physical abuse — Malcolm’s talk fell short regarding the impact it could have had.

If you’re wondering about what happened, The Center for Constitutional Rights published a report — Stop and Frisk: The Human Impact — on the practice, and the stories captured highlight the cost to innocent citizens of New York City. I’ve listened to some of the interviews and tried to put myself in their shoes.

Imagine walking down the street and being stopped by the police for no reason other than you’re a person of color. Then having those police officers accuse you of crimes you didn’t commit, sticking their hands in your pockets, and possibly arresting you without probable cause. I wish Malcolm had talked about this.

But Malcolm’s talk brought to light one of the most important aspects of telling personal stories — that everything we say that’s represented as truth is nothing more than what we believe to be true. And if you find out at a later date that you misspoke in some way, hopefully you’ll have a chance to correct your story, and say you’re sorry.

I wrote, “I know this is what happened,” and what I should have said is “This is what I believe happened now,” right? And those words “I believe happened now” have to be at the center of any understanding of how the world works. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Watch Malcolm’s talk and read through the transcript. I’ve offered up my opinion — which you may or may not agree with — but what matters is what you think. Notice how he opens with a personal experience that sets the stage and lets you know his mindset at the start. The narrative shifts to explaining his research and how he formulated his theory. Ultimately, however, he comes to realize the fault in his logic and concludes with an apology. Overall, a brilliant talk.

Transcript

I want to tell you a story about when I moved to New York City in 1993. I was 30 years old, and I was moving to what was known as one of the most dangerous big cities in the United States. And every night, I would go out with my friends on a Friday or Saturday night, and at the end of every night we would have a little conference and we would pool all of our money, and we would figure out how everyone was going to get home, because you couldn’t go home on the subway by yourself and you couldn’t walk home, and if you were a woman, you definitely were not allowed to go home by yourself at one o’clock in the morning on a Saturday night. That’s what it meant to be in this very scary city called New York.

I used to live in the sixth floor of a walk-up in the West Village, and my bedroom faced the fire escape. And even in the summer, I had no air conditioning, I had to keep my window closed because I was scared that somebody would come down the fire escape into my apartment.

And then one day I woke up and I realized that I wasn’t scared anymore. And I kept the window open. And I realized that when I was going out with my friends, we weren’t having that conference at the end of the evening anymore. We were just going home. This city that I had thought, we all thought, was one of the scariest in the United States wasn’t scary anymore. And I remember at the time I was absolutely transfixed by this transformation. I couldn’t understand it. It was the same city full of the same weird, screwed up people, same buildings, same institutions. Only nobody was murdering each other anymore.

And I would call up criminologists and I would ask them, “What’s your explanation?” And no one could give me a good explanation. And I remember one day — I used to go to the NYU, New York University has a library called Bobst Library. I used to go to Bobst to look for ideas. And I remember one day I was on the sixth floor in the sociology section, HM-1A6, and I was reading back issues, yes, I was, back issues of the American Journal of Sociology, and I ran across an article from 1991 by a guy named Jonathan Crane called “The Epidemic Theory of Ghetto Life.”

And I’m going to read to you how it began. “The word epidemic is commonly used to describe the high incidence of social problems in ghettos. The news is filled with feature stories on crack epidemics, epidemics of gang violence, and epidemics of teenage childbearing. The term is used loosely in popular parlance, but turns out to be remarkably apt.”

And what Crane was saying is that if you look at these kinds of social problems, they behave, they come and they go, they rise and they fall exactly like viruses do. He was saying that that term epidemic is not a metaphor. It’s a literal description. And I’ll never forget when I read that little paragraph and I was standing in this aisle in Bobst Library, and, you know, it’s a library. It’s got that hush and that musty smell of books. And I’m reading this crazy article from 1991, and I remember thinking to myself, oh my God, that’s what happened in New York.

We had an epidemic of crime. And what is the hallmark of an epidemic? It’s the tipping point. It’s the moment when the epidemic order goes up all at once or crashes all at once. And so I wrote an article for “The New Yorker” magazine called “The Tipping Point,” which was my attempt to use this theory to explain what happened in New York. And then I, because of that article, got a contract for a book called “The Tipping Point,” which did very well. And that book led to another book and another book and another book.

And I am standing here today because of that moment in the library 25 years ago. So “The Tipping Point,” my first book, was about all kinds of things. I talked about Hush Puppies and Paul Revere and teenage smoking. But at the heart of it was a chapter on why did crime decline in New York. And in that chapter I talked a lot about a theory called broken windows theory, which was a very famous idea that had been pioneered by two criminologists called George Kelling and James Q. Wilson in the 1980s, very influential article, in which they argued that very small things in the environment can be triggers for larger crimes.

That essentially small instances of disorder are tipping points for very serious things like murder or rape or any kind of violent crime. It was an epidemic theory of crime, and the New York City Police Department took that idea very seriously. And one of the things they began to do in the 1990s during this crime drop was to say what this argument means is that we can’t be passive anymore. We have to be proactive. We have to go out there and if someone is jaywalking or jumping a turnstile or doing graffiti or peeing on the sidewalk, we’ve got to stop them.

And if we see a young man walking down the street and he looks a little bit suspicious, we’ve got to stop him and frisk him for his weapons. That’s how the NYPD interpreted the broken windows theory in New York. And my chapter was how millions of people around the world came to understand the crime drop in New York, that it was all broken windows. And here’s the thing that I have come to understand about that explanation I gave of why crime fell in New York.

I was wrong.

I didn’t understand this until quite recently, when I went back and I decided on the 25th anniversary of my first book, “The Tipping Point,” that I would write a sequel. It’s called “Revenge of the Tipping Point,” and I went back and, for the first time in a quarter century, I reread my original book. I’m not someone who likes to revisit things, but I did it, and it was a uniquely complicated experience. It was like looking back at your high school yearbook. You know, when you see yourself and you have some combination of, “Wow, I look young,” and also, “Wow, I really wore that?” It was like that.

And what I realized is that in the intervening years since I wrote that explanation of why I think crime fell in New York, the theory of broken windows had been tested. There was a kind of classic natural experiment to see whether that theory worked. And the natural experiment was a court case, maybe one of the most famous court cases in New York history called Floyd v City of New York. It involved a young man named David Floyd, who had been stopped a number of occasions by the NYPD and was the face of a class action lawsuit that said the practice of stopping young men, largely young men of color, just because they look a little suspicious to police is not constitutional.

You can’t do that, right? And to everyone’s surprise, the Floyd lawsuit goes before a federal judge. And the federal judge rules in David Floyd’s favor. And overnight, the broken windows era in New York City policing ends. And the NYPD goes from — In 2011, they stopped and frisked 700,000 young men, right. And after the Floyd lawsuit was decided in 2013, that number drops to less than 50,000. So this is the perfect natural experiment. You have New York before Floyd and New York after Floyd.

Before Floyd, the principal tactic of the NYPD is stopping everyone they can. And after Floyd that goes away. They can’t do that anymore, right? This is the perfect test case for whether you think that’s why crime fell in New York. And if you believe in the power of broken windows policing, then your expectation has to be that after the Floyd case, when broken windows goes away, crime is going to go back up, right?

And I should tell you that in 2013, in the wake of the Floyd case, everybody thought crime was going to go back up. The NYPD thought that, the city government thought that, the pundits thought that, even the judge who wrote the opinion saying that stop and frisk was unconstitutional, said in her opinion that she strongly suspected that as a result of this opinion, crime would go back up. I thought crime was going to go back up, right?

All of us had internalized the logic of broken windows. We said, yes, we know this strategy poses an incredible burden on young men, but what choice do we have, right? You know, if the choice is being stopped repeatedly by police or being killed, maybe we’re better off with the former than the latter. This is the price we pay for a safe New York, right? So what happens after the Floyd case? Stop and frisk goes away and crime falls.

In fact, crime in New York City undergoes a second, even more miraculous decline, right? And what’s interesting about this is, you know, when the first crime declined in the 1990s, you see that decline almost everywhere in the United States, not quite as steep as New York, but crime goes down everywhere. And then in every other city in the United States, crime plateaus. But New York gets rid of broken windows, and crime starts to fall and fall and fall all over again.

To the point by 2019 that New York City is as safe as Paris, which is not a sentence I ever thought anyone would ever say in my lifetime. And what we realize in that second crime decline is that it wasn’t broken windows. It’s not indiscriminate policing that causes crime to fall. Rather, it is the intelligent and thoughtful and selective application of police authority that causes crime to fall.

Now, there’s a couple of really puzzling things here. One is that people don’t seem to have internalized the fact that New York underwent this second, even more dramatic crime fall. People still act like it’s the year 2000 when it comes to making sense of New York. You know, a whole bunch of very, very wealthy hedge fund guys have very loudly left New York for Miami in recent years. And they all say, when they’re packing up their offices in New York, “We can’t take the crime anymore.”

Well, violent crime in Miami is twice as high as New York City. If they were really concerned about violent crime, they would leave Coral Gables before they get murdered and move to the Bronx, where it is a whole lot safer.

The other even more important thing, though, is that people act like stop and frisk actually worked. No one seems to have internalized the lesson of the great Floyd case natural experiment. If you listen to people — I’m not going to name their names, but people going around the country now campaigning for higher office, they will say things like, “It’s time to bring back stop and frisk and broken windows policing. It worked so well in New York.”

They’re acting as if we didn’t have that great moment of understanding in 2013. And for that, for that misunderstanding, I think I bear some of the blame. I was the one who wrote this book saying this was the greatest tactic ever in stopping crime. Now, how do I make sense of my mistake? Well, I can give you all kinds of excuses. You know, I can say I’m not a fortune teller.

I didn’t know that David Floyd was going to come along 10 years after I wrote my book and give us this great test case in broken windows policing. You know, I could say that, you know, I was just writing what everybody believed back in the 1996 and 1997. But I don’t think those excuses hold any water whatsoever.

I think that journalists, writers need to be held to a higher standard, right? I wrote —

I told a story about how crime fell in New York, and I told the story like the story was over. And like I knew what the answer to this story was. And it wasn’t over and I didn’t know the answer, right? I wrote, “I know this is what happened,” and what I should have said is “This is what I believe happened now,” right? And those words “I believe happened now” have to be at the center of any understanding of how the world works.

We have to acknowledge that we are representing the position of this very moment, and that that position could change if the facts change, right? The great desire of any writer is to write a book for the ages, that will forever explain the way things are, but that’s not possible, and no one should ever try. That was my mistake. And I’m sorry.

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Leopoldo Lopez: How to defend democracy and fight autocracy @ TEDNext 2024

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During the week of October 21, 2024 I had the pleasure of attending TEDNext, held in Atlanta. The event is a new initiative from the folks who produce the TED Conference. There were enlightening talks, insightful discussions and revealing discovery sessions. This post is the third in a series highlighting some of my favorite talks.

One of the fundamental ways in which personal stories can create impact is by shifting perceptions on an important topic. When we see an issue in a new light we’re able to think differently, and hopefully, act differently.

In his TED Talk, Leopoldo Lopez reminds us that freedom and democracy are threatened around the world. It was his talk at TEDNext that inspired me to dig deeper into the global state of democracy, which I explored in a previous post — The Story of a Flawed Democracy — so I decided to feature his talk in a separate post as a way to humanize the problem beyond the statistics.

Leopoldo opens with a story of his personal / political experiences, to establish a connection to the issues of democracy and freedom, then begins to explore this problem with a startling revelation:

Only 10 years ago, 42 percent of the world’s population was living under autocratic rule. That was 3.1 billion people. That’s around the same time I was sent to prison. Today, 72 percent of the global population is living under some sort of autocratic rule.

I’ve worked with a long list of people who currently live, or used to live, in one of those countries subject to autocratic rule. These are places where critical issues, such as poverty, healthcare, education, and nearly all aspects of equality suffer when compared to countries living under full democracy.  As Leopoldo notes: “80 percent of the world’s poverty comes from autocratic countries.”

If you happen to be a human rights, political, or environmental activist, work in a government agency or NGO that’s subject to the inadequacies of autocratic rule, you probably have a story to share that can provide a personal perspective that others can relate to. As you view Leopoldo’s talk, and read the transcript below, think about how your personal story, combined with a description of the critical problem, and your proposed solution can shift perspectives on a global scale.

Transcript

So today I want to talk to you about something that has been at the core of my existence for the past years: freedom and democracy.

I was elected mayor of Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, in the year 2000. I was reelected in the year 2004. And then in the year 2008, when I was running for higher office, I was banned to run for office. Because we were going to win. At that time, we started a movement, a nonviolent civil resistance grassroots movement that went all over Venezuela and worked with people all around the country to build a network that could face off the dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro.

In the year 2013, Maduro was elected. He stole an election. And in January of 2014, we called for protest. Tens of thousands of people went to the streets. And that took me to prison. I spent the next seven years in imprisonment, four of them in solitary confinement in a military prison.

The history of my country, Venezuela, is one, like many other Latin American countries, African countries,
one of military rule, exile, imprisonment and politics. So I had read a lot about what it meant to be in prison. I read the usual suspects, I read about Mandela, I read about Gandhi, I read about my [role] model, Martin Luther King.

But I also read a lot about the experience of Venezuelans, including my great grandfather, who had been a political prisoner for years and died in exile. Everything that they had to say was relevant to their own condition, but they all spoke about the importance of having a routine. So I had my own routine since day one, February 18 of 2014.

My routine was simple. I would do three things every day. I would pray to take care of my soul. I would read, write, to do something with my mind. And I would do exercise. I did those three things with Spartan discipline every day. If I did them, I would feel that I was winning the day. But there was one thing that I would think about every single day: why I was in prison. And in fact, this is something that I’m sure happens to all prisoners, political prisoners or not. That’s what prison, in a way, is made for.

So every day I thought about what freedom and democracy meant. And it was there in a cell, two by two, in solitary confinement that I really got to understand what freedom was. And it became clear to me that freedom is not about one thing. In fact, freedom is about the possibility of doing many things. So the possibility to speak out, to express your mind. It’s the possibility to move around in your country. It’s the possibility to assemble with whomever you want to assemble, to pray to whomever you want to pray, to own property.

And all of those things were taken away from me and from millions of Venezuelans. And it also became very clear to me that freedom and democracy were two sides of a coin. Were interdependent. You cannot have freedom without democracy. You cannot have democracy if people are not free. So that took me to think about the state of democracy. In fact, next month, in November, we’re going to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, 35 years.

Back then, I was in grad school. It was the ’90s. And I remember the excitement that was everywhere about spreading democracy, spreading freedom, human rights, all over the place. I remember my teachers going to different countries with students. But when we look back 35 years ago and we fast forward, things didn’t really come out the way it was expected.

Only 10 years ago, 42 percent of the world’s population was living under autocratic rule. That was 3.1 billion people. That’s around the same time I was sent to prison. Today, 72 percent of the global population is living under some sort of autocratic rule. So let’s think about this. This is 5.7 billion people in the world that don’t have the rights that most people in this room have. They can’t speak freely, they can’t move freely, they can’t pray freely, they can’t own property. 5.7 billion people in the world.

After seven years of imprisonment, I was able to escape prison and went into exile. Exile is another form of imprisonment. At the beginning, it was tough. But then I started to meet other people like myself, who had been leading protests in their countries, who had been political prisoners, who were in exile. And we were very different in any way we could think about: our skin color, our religion, our languages, the story of our families, the history of our countries.

We were very different. But when we spoke about what it meant to fight for freedom and to confront autocracies, I was with my buddies. It was the same people, the same movement. So we decided to create an alliance of democracy defenders and freedom fighters. So alongside with Garry Kasparov, from Russia, and an incredible woman from Iran, Masih Alinejad, we decided to create an alliance of freedom fighters and democracy defenders.

And that’s how we created the World Liberty Congress, which is an alliance of hundreds of leaders, many of them you have seen their work in Hong Kong, in Russia, in Belarus, in Uganda, in Zimbabwe, in Afghanistan, in Cambodia, Nicaragua, Cuba, in many countries. And we decided to work together, to come together with a single purpose: to stop autocracy and to bring democracy to our countries.

But it became very clear to us that we were not only facing our local autocrat, we were also facing a network of autocrats, an axis of autocrats. And this is something that might not be obvious to many people. But in fact, autocrats work together. They support each other. In many ways: diplomatically, financially, militarily, through their kleptocratic networks.

And this is not an ideological alliance. It has nothing to do with ideology. Right, left, conservative, liberals, nothing to do with that. It has to do with power, money and a common enemy: democracy. So that’s why you have the nationalists from Russia, the theocrats from Iran, the communists from China, working together under a similar alliance.

So if autocrats are working together and the world is coming to a point where 72 percent of the world’s population is under autocracy, it’s time to think about why should you care about this? Why should everybody, anybody care about this? Why should someone who’s living in the United States or in Europe or in a functioning democracy care about this?

Well, if you care about climate change, if you care about gender equality, if you care about women’s rights, if you care about human rights, if you care about corruption, if you care about migration, you need to be concerned about the rise of autocracy and the need for democracy.

30 percent of the CO2 emissions come from China and Russia alone. 80 percent of the world’s poverty comes from autocratic countries. 90 percent of the forced migration, and we from Venezuela can speak about this, has at its root cause autocracy. So we need to care about this.

And what can be done? What can be done about this? Well, I believe that we are now at a moment where we need to make a tipping point of the engagement of people around the world to create a movement towards freedom and democracy. Think about the climate change movement 20, 30, 40 years ago. It was not mainstream. It was there, but it was not mainstream.

But then what happened? Researchers, governments, policymakers, activists, artists, school teachers, students, children, everybody came together under the same cause. Because I remember during the 1980s, ’90s, you would look up to the sky and you would think that there was an ozone hole in the sky that was going to destroy. So the threat was very clear. People came together, policy came together, and now it’s mainstream. Things are being done. I believe we are at that point with respect to democracy and freedom. If that trend continues, today 72 percent, if that trend continues, maybe in the next 25 years, in 2050, the entire world would be autocratic. And that is less than a generation ago.

So we must take action. What can we do? Well, the first thing I believe is to assume that we need to take the offensive. Stop legitimizing autocrats. Autocrats today are comfortable. They do business with governments, with businesses. We need to think of smart sanctions, of ways to make them accountable for the violations of human rights. Second, there needs to be a support for pro-democracy and freedom movements.

In the United States, that is the most actively philanthropic society in the world, only two percent of philanthropy goes to democracy-related issues. Only two percent. And a fraction of a fraction of that two percent goes to promote democracy outside the US. It’s not a priority. So supporting pro-democracy movements, supporting the people that want to be free, should be a priority for all. And I mean, let me give you some examples.

Technology. Access to internet, to free and uncensored internet. Think of the potential transformational capacity to give people all over the world access to internet. Let me give you another example. Using new technologies like Bitcoin to promote and support the potential of these movements. We are doing this already. In the case of Venezuela, we supported more than 80,000 medical doctors and nurses using Stablecoins and Bitcoins because under autocracies you are under a financial apartheid.

Give opportunities for training. Give opportunities for these movements to be part of a global conversation. And finally, we need to build a global movement. There is not one person, one organization, one government, that can do this by themselves. Similar to climate change. We need to think of this challenge as a network. We need to create nodes of network, nodes of network that activate all over the place.

We need to activate anyone with the things that they can do. Musicians should think about singing for freedom. Artists, intellectuals, researchers, activists, governments. Everybody can create their own node with a similar goal, which is freedom and democracy. When I was in solitary confinement, I had a window, and I could see through the crack of that window that there was a tree, and in that tree there was a hawk. And I contemplated that animal for hours and hours and hours. I only think that you contemplate an animal that long if you’re in biology or you’re in prison.

And one day, a guard told me, because I was always telling the guards about the hawk, he said, “You know, the hawk is injured, went through barbed wire, and he’s injured.” And I said, “Bring it to me.” And to my surprise, they brought it to me. Maybe because they thought it was going to die. I fed that hawk. And that’s the hawk in my cell. That’s a drawing I made of the prison I was [in], of that tree and of the hawk.

And then one day, after a couple of months, they came to my cell, they threw a blanket on the hawk, they took it away. Of course it affected me. But less than a day after, that hawk was in the same tree. And it reassured me that it doesn’t matter how low you are, how low percentage possibilities you have to succeed, there is always possibility to do so.

So I came out and being in exile, I met a tattoo artist, that put me a tattoo of Venezuela on my leg, so I now have that eagle here, and I have it always with me. As a reminder, as a reminder that we can always rise up to all of the challenges. So I ask all of you to stand up, to speak out, to do something about our freedom. This is our time. Think of 25 years, and let’s give our children a free world with human rights, democracy and respect for all.

Thank you very much, thank you very much.

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Shu Takada: Yo! Have you ever seen a yo-yo dance like this? @ TEDNext 2024

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During the week of October 21, 2024 I had the pleasure of attending TEDNext, held in Atlanta. The event is a new initiative from the folks who produce the TED Conference. There were enlightening talks, insightful discussions and revealing discovery sessions. This post is the second in a series highlighting some of my favorite talks from the stage.

While most of the folks who step on stage at a TED event are there to deliver a talk, but there are exceptions, most notably for a musical performances. But on occasion, the audience is treated to a different type of performance — one that highlights an amazing talent. To be honest, the last thing I expected to see on a stage at TEDNext was someone playing with a yo-yo.

I’m Shu Takada from Japan. I’m a six-time world champion, as she introduced me. For me, yo-yo isn’t only a toy but also an art form and a tool that I can express myself [with] on the stage. Anyway, I started yo-yo when I was six years old because of my father, who did it as a hobby. When I saw his trick for the first time, I was so impressed and found it so cool. But to be honest, I felt a little bit jealous while he was showing off his techniques. And I swore to myself that one day I will surpass his level. So that’s how I started yo-yo.

So what I love about yo-yoing is that you can express yourself with such a small tool, and you can bring it everywhere. You can play it everywhere. And I think this is really cool to make new friends all over the world, even though they can’t speak the same language as you.

While watching Shu Takada’s incredible yo-yo performance I was wondering how many thousands of hours it took to reach this level of proficiency. And to realize that he can demonstrate his talent anywhere in the world, and please people no matter their language or culture. By the time he finished I was thinking how cool it would be to hear some of those stories. I’m sure he has a long list of beautiful stories that he could share about the people he has met. Enjoy!

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