How your crazy idea can change the world | Patrick Baud | TEDxINSA

Patrick Baud, aka Axolot, tells us here the incredible stories of historical figures who, thanks to their different and unique approach to their situation, have been able to achieve prowess close to miracle ...

Author, host but also Youtuber, with no less than 240,000 followers, Patrick Baud is the creator of AXOLOT, "sources of astonishment". An original idea, that of sharing the curiosities of the world, as well as strange but very real stories, to surprise us.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

Hello everyone.

For several years now I've been
collecting stories about Nobodies

with extraordinary destiny,

men and women
we were not told about at school,

but whose stories collided with history.

In doing this research, I discovered
stories of extraordinary lives

like, for example,
the story of Tsutomu Yamaguchi.

He is a Japanese businessman

who happened to be in Hiroshima in 1945;
August 6, 1945 more exactly,

which was not the best
day to be in Hiroshima,

since it was on that day
that an atomic bomb fell on the city,

inadvertently killing 140,000 victims.

70% of the buildings were destroyed.

But Tsutomu managed
to take shelter, and he survived.

He suffered extensive burns,
but he was still fit enough

to go back home three days later,
and then go back to work.

And to him, home was in Nagasaki.

(Laughs)

So he goes back to the office,

and there, his colleagues
badger him with questions

on what he saw,
since it was the first time

any atomic bomb had fallen on civilians.

He explains what happened,
the lighting flash,

the buildings evaporating
in front of his eyes ...

Incidentally his boss is quite dubious,

because it's quite a far-fetched excuse
for not going to work,

and at that precise moment,

a second atomic bomb
falls on Nagasaki,

and this time, it kills 70,000 people.

But Tsutomu survives it,
and dies 65 years later,

in 2010, at the age of 93.

He is the only person acknowledged
by the Japanese government

as having survived two atomic bombs.

That's exactly the kind of story
I like to discover and share with people.

When I was transcribing these stories,

I realized that there was
some common thread,

of people, for example,
who changed the world

just because they dared
to act or to think differently.

One of my favorite
examples is Jadav Payeng.

He was a 16-year-old boy in 1979,

he lived near the Brahmaputra
River in India.

One day, he was shocked
by a terrible scene:

he sees hundreds of dead reptiles
on a sandbank on the river.

He decides to do something about it
because this vision moves him deeply.

He contacts the forest authorities

but they explain to him that
there is nothing much to do

because the sandbank
is too dry, too sterile,

and no tree can grow there.

So he says he's still going to try.

So he begins to plant bamboos
on this sandbank.

After a few years of hard work,

where there was nothing at all,
he managed to grow a bamboo plantation.

And since it works pretty well,
he decides to plant real trees.

And ten years later, he created a forest

where there was nothing
at all a few years before,

where animals will come to find shelter,

even some endangered species;
rhinos, tigers.

Today, more than 30 years
after he started his work,

Jadav has managed to create
a 500-hectare jungle,

bigger than Central Park.

Today, this jungle accommodates
100 elephants every year

and it was by tracking them
that the Ministry of Forests

discovered Jadav's work.

They eventually started
to help him in 2008.

Jadav's idea was crazy
but it was a good one.

And it ended up being supported.

Sometimes it takes time.

Jadav had a huge impact
on the environment.

Among these forgotten
heroes of history,

some have sometimes
saved thousands of people.

This is particularly the case
with Ignace Semmelweis.

He was a Hungarian doctor

who lived in the 19th century,
and you should know that back then,

women might prefer to give birth
in the street rather than in the hospital

because their mortality rate
was around 20% in hospitals.

The culprit was an infectious
disease, puerperal fever,

and it was thought at the time
that it was incurable.

It was taken for granted
that one in five women died in childbirth.

That's quite a quota!

And that's where Ignace
Semmelweis comes in:

in 1846, he is appointed
head of a large Austrian clinic

and he is determined
to eradicate this plague.

He starts to correlate elements

and realizes that the mortality rate
in his department is directly related

to the fact that doctors caring
for pregnant women also perform autopsies.

They fiddle with the corpses
before tending to delivering women.

You should know that at the time,
the concept of microbes does not exist,

so the link is not easy to make.

But Ignace has an intuition:

he thinks that there must be

a kind of cadaverous substance
that emanates from the body

and that doctors pass it
on to laboring women.

He has this revolutionary and crazy idea:

he will ask the doctors
to wash their hands

before examining the patients.

The mortality rate will
drop drown from 18 to 1.3%.

It's a huge success, but against all odds,

he is putting the scientific
community against him for two reasons:

the first reason is that doctors consider
that his method is not scientific

but rather superstitious,

since he does not know exactly
why washing hands avoids the disease;

and the second reason is
by accepting this method,

doctors recognize somehow

that they have helped killing
thousands of patients.

So Ignace is supported by the government,

but he is still despised by his colleagues
and suffers a lot from this situation.

He will have a nervous breakdown,

and he will end his days
in a psychiatric hospital.

The case is so unfair

that he gave his name
to a psychological effect,

the Semmelweiss effect, designating
the tendency to reject any new idea

if it upsets our habits,
even if it is supported by facts.

And ironically, a few years later,

Ignace Semmelweiss
will be avenged by science

with the discovery
of the existence of microbes.

But Ignace's idea was weird at the time.

Nevertheless, it was a good idea,
and it ended up being accepted.

Sometimes it takes time.

The man I'm going to talk about now

played an even bigger role
as he saved the world.

Stanislav Petrov is a Russian officer
you have probably never heard about,

but who probably saved your lives.

In 1983, he was assigned
to a very important task:

he was in charge of the surveillance
of Russian airspace

so he was responsible for detecting
possible US missile attacks.

One day, he watches his screen,

and he sees five missiles
coming towards Russia.

He just has to press a big red button
to alert his hierarchy

who will send an immediate counterattack
and start a world nuclear war.

But he knows that humanity's
future depends on his move.

And this makes him hesitate;
there is something wrong.

There are too few missiles coming up
compared to the huge US military arsenal

and on top of that,
there is a ground radar

that does not confirm
the observations of the satellite.

So Stanislav decides to tell his superiors
that it is a false alarm,

or a bluff, as far as he knows,
he couldn't say which.

This is one of the biggest
bluffs in history.

History proved him right
since it was a bug in the system.

It was a real close call
for the end of the world

thanks to the small hesitation
of a Russian officer.

(Laughter)

You might think he was hailed as a hero,
but it was not quite the case:

he was suspected of treachery
and pushed out of the army.

15 years passed

before one of his colleagues wrote down
what he had witnessed that day

and before the story of Stanislas
was unveiled to the citizens.

For that, he was bestowed a decoration,
and honored by the United Nations.

If you ask him whether
he considers himself a hero,

he answers that he just did his job.

The quintessence of any hero statement.

(Laughter)

Stanislav's idea was risky
but it was a good idea

that ended up being acknowledged.

Sometimes it takes time.

Like in comics, with Stanislav
comes a negative hero,

a man who almost destroyed
the world all by himself:

Thomas Midgley.

He looks pretty cool on this picture.

Thomas Midgley is an American chemist

working in 1911 for General Motors.

He was working on
noisy combustion engines.

While working on this problem,

Midgley discovers
that by putting lead in gasoline,

engines run much more
smoothly and quietly.

It's an international success,

General Motors will sell
gallons of leaded gasoline.

But there's just one small problem,
that is lead is a violent poison.

So it gets massively spread
into the atmosphere.

It is not until the early 2000s

that leaded petrol
was withdrawn from the market.

Its dangerousness
was already known at the time.

Public health is starting to suffer,

and even Thomas Migley suffers
from side effects.

But he washed his hands with his
gasoline in front of the journalists

to show that it is harmless -
he had the sense of marketing.

(Laughter)

To make up for that,

he decides to dive
into another problem: leaking fridges.

At the time, when a fridge
was leaking, people would die

because there was toxic gas
inside the fridge.

So Migley tries to come up
with an alternative.

He will create freon,
the first CFC, chlorofluorocarbons.

Everything works perfectly well.

He inhales freon in front of the press

since he is consistent with himself,
to show that it's harmless.

It was not until the 70s,
30 years after Migley's death,

that the real effects of CFCs were known.

A big hole in the ozone layer was found.

Thank you very much, Thomas Migley!

He kind of caused the hole
in the ozone layer all by himself.

Migley's ideas seemed good,
but they had catastrophic consequences.

And that too, to know it,
it sometimes takes time.

We could draw lots of lessons
from these stories:

the first, if you can
unleash a nuclear war,

it is better to think first, if you can.

But beyond that, there is the idea
that a single person

can have a huge impact
on the rest of the world

without being rich,
famous or powerful at first.

It is sometimes enough
to dare to think differently.

All these ideas
that you prefer to put aside

because they are too crazy,
too risky or too weird,

please give them a chance.

If they are good,
time will do them justice.

Thank you.

(Applause)