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So in the winter of 2012,
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I went to visit my grandmother's house
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in South India,
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a place, by the way,
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where the mosquitos have a special taste
for the blood of the American-born.
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(Laughter)
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No joke.
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When I was there,
I got an unexpected gift.
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It was this antique instrument
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made more than a century ago,
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hand-carved from a rare wood,
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inlaid with pearls
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and with dozens of metal strings.
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It's a family heirloom,
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a link between my past,
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the country where my parents were born,
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and the future,
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the unknown places I'll take it.
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I didn't actually realize it
at the time I got it,
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but it would later become
a powerful metaphor for my work.
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We all know the saying,
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"There's no time like the present."
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But nowadays, it can feel like
there's no time but the present.
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What's immediate and ephemeral
seems to dominate our lives,
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our economy, and our politics.
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If you think about it, our species
evolved to think ahead,
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to chart the stars,
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dream of the afterlife,
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sow seeds for later harvest.
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Some scientists call this superpower
that we have "mental time travel,"
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and it's responsible for pretty much
everything we call human civilization,
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from farming to the Magna Carta
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to the internet,
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all first conjured in the minds of humans.
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But let's get real:
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if we look around us today,
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we don't exactly seem to be
using this superpower quite enough,
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and that begs the question, why not?
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What's wrong is how our communities,
businesses and institutions are designed.
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They're designed in a way
that's impairing our foresight.
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I want to talk to you about
the three key mistakes
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that I think we're making.
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The first mistake is what we measure.
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When we look at the quarterly
profits of a company
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or its near term stock price,
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that's often not a great measure
of whether that company's
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going to grow its market share
or be inventive in the long run.
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When we glue ourselves to the test scores
that kids bring back from school,
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that's not necessarily what's great
for those kids' learning
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and curiosity in the long run.
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We're not measuring
what really matters in the future.
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The second mistake we're making
that impairs our foresight
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is what we reward.
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When we celebrate a political leader
or a business leader
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for the disaster she just cleaned up
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or the announcement she just made,
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we're not motivating that leader
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to invest in preventing
those disasters in the first place,
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or to put down payments on the future
by protecting communities from floods
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or fighting inequality
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or investing in research and education.
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The third mistake
that impairs our foresight
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is what we fail to imagine.
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Now, when we do think about the future,
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we tend to focus on predicting
exactly what's next,
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whether we're using horoscopes
or algorithms to do that.
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but we spend a lot less time imagining
all the possibilities the future holds.
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When the Ebola outbreak
emerged in 2014 in West Africa,
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public health officials around the world
had early warning signs
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and predictive tools
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that showed how
that outbreak might spread,
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but they failed to fathom that it would,
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and they failed to act
in time to intervene,
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and the epidemic grew to kill
more than 11,000 people.
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When people with lots of resources
and good forecasts
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don't prepare for deadly hurricanes,
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they're often failing to imagine
how dangerous they can be.
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Now, none of these mistakes
that I've described,
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as dismal as they might sound,
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are inevitable.
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In fact, they're all avoidable.
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What we need to make
better decisions about the future
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are tools that can aid our foresight,
tools that can help us think ahead.
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Think of these as something like
the telescopes that ship captains of yore
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used when they scanned the horizon,
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only instead of for looking
across distance and the ocean,
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these tools are for looking
across time to the future.
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I want to share with you a few of
the tools that I've found in my research
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that I think can help us with foresight.
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The first tool I want to share with you
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I think of as making
the long game pay now.
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This is Wes Jackson, a farmer
I spent some time with in Kansas.
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And Jackson knows that the way
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that most crops are grown
around the world today
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is stripping the Earth
of the fertile topsoil
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we need to feed future generations.
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He got together
with a group of scientists,
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and they bread perennial grain crops
which have deep roots
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that anchor the fertile topsoil of a farm,
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preventing erosion
and protecting future harvests.
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But they also knew
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that in order to get farmers
to grow these crops in the short run,
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they needed to boost
the annual yields of the crops
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and find companies willing
to make cereal and beer using the grains
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so that farmers could reap profits today
by doing what's good for tomorrow.
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And this is a tried-and-true strategy.
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In fact, it was used
by George Washington Carver
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in the South of the United States
after the Civil War
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in the early 20th century.
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A lot of people have probably heard
of Carver's 300 uses for the peanut,
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the products in recipe
that he came up with
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that made the peanut so popular.
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But not everyone knows
why Carver did that.
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He was trying to help
poor Alabama sharecroppers
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whose cotton yields were declining,
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and he knew that planting
peanuts in their fields
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would replenish those soils
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so that their cotton yields
would be better a few years later.
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But he also knew it needed
to be lucrative for them in the short run.
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All right, so let's talk about
another tool for foresight.
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This one I like to think of as keeping
the memory of the past alive
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to help us imagine the future.
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So I went to Fukushima, Japan
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on the sixth anniversary
of the nuclear reactor disaster there
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that followed the Tohoku earthquake
and tsunami of 2011.
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When I was there, I learned about
the Onagawa Nuclear Power Station,
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which was even closer
to the epicenter of that earthquake
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than the infamous Fukushima Daiichi
that we all know about.
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In Onagawa, people in the city
actually fled to the nuclear power plant
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as a place of refuge.
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It was that safe.
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It was spared by the tsunamis.
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It was the foresight of just one engineer,
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Yanosuke Hirai,
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that made that happen.
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In the 1960s, he fought
to build that power plant
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farther back from the coast
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at higher elevation,
and with a higher sea wall.
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He knew the story of his hometown shrine,
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which had flooded
in the year 869 after a tsunami.
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It was his knowledge of history
that allowed him to imagine
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what others could not.
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OK, one more tool of foresight.
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This one I think of as
creating shared heirlooms.
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These are lobster fishermen
on the Pacific coast of Mexico,
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and they're the ones who taught me this.
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They have protected
their lobster harvest there
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for nearly a century,
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and they've done that by treating it
as a shared resource
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that they're passing on to their collected
children and grandchildren.
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They carefully measure what they catch
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so that they're not taking
the breeding lobster out of the ocean.
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Across North America,
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there are more than 30 fisheries
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that are doing something
vaguely similar to this.
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They're creating long-term stakes
in the fisheries known as catch shares
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which get fishermen to be motivated
not just in taking whatever they can
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from the ocean today
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but in its long term survival.
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Now, there are many,
many more tools of foresight
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I would love to share with you,
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and they come from all kinds of places:
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investment firms that look
beyond near term stock prices,
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states that have freed their elections
from the immediate interests
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of campaign financiers.
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And we're going to need to marshal
as many of these tools as we can
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if we want to rethink what we measure,
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change what we reward,
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and be brave enough
to imagine what lies ahead.
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Not all this is going to be easy,
as you can imagine.
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Some of these tools
we can pick up in our own lives,
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some we're going to need to do
in businesses or in communities,
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and some we need to do as a society.
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The future is worth this effort.
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My own inspiration to keep up this effort
is the instrument I share with you.
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It's called a dilruba,
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and it was custom-made
for my great-grandfather.
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He was a well-known
music and art critic in India
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in the early 20th century.
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My great-grandfather had the foresight
to protect this instrument
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at a time when my great-grandmother
was pawning off all their belongings,
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but that's another story.
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He protected it by giving it
to the next generation,
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by giving it to my grandmother,
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and she gave it to me.
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When I first heard
the sound of this instrument,
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it haunted me.
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It felt like hearing a wanderer
in the Himalayan fog.
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It felt like hearing
a voice from the past.
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(Music)
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That's my friend Simran Singh
playing the dilruba.
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When I play it, it sounds
like a cat's dying somewhere,
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so you're welcome.
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(Laughter)
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This instrument is in my home today,
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but it doesn't actually belong to me.
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It's my role to shepherd it in time,
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and that feels more meaningful to me
than just owning it for today.
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This instrument positions me
as both a descendant and an ancestor.
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It makes me feel part of a story
bigger than my own.
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And this, I believe,
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is the single most powerful way
we can reclaim foresight:
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by seeing ourselves as
the good ancestors we long to be,
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ancestors not just to our own children
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but to all humanity.
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Whatever your heirloom is,
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however big or small,
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protect it
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and know that its music
can resonate for generations.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)