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I've actually been waiting by the phone
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for a call from TED for years.
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And in fact, in 2000, I was ready to talk about eBay, but no call.
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In 2003, I was ready to do a talk
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about the Skoll Foundation and social entrepreneurship. No call.
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In 2004, I started Participant Productions
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and we had a really good first year, and no call.
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And finally, I get a call last year,
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and then I have to go up after J.J. Abrams.
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(Laughter)
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You've got a cruel sense of humor, TED.
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(Laughter)
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When I first moved to Hollywood from Silicon Valley,
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I had some misgivings.
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But I found that there were some advantages to being in Hollywood.
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(Laughter)
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And, in fact, some advantages to owning your own media company.
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And I also found that Hollywood and Silicon Valley
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have a lot more in common than I would have dreamed.
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Hollywood has its sex symbols, and the Valley has its sex symbols.
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(Laughter)
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Hollywood has its rivalries, and the Valley has its rivalries.
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Hollywood gathers around power tables,
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and the Valley gathers around power tables.
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So it turned out there was a lot more in common
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than I would have dreamed.
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But I'm actually here today to tell a story.
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And part of it is a personal story. When Chris invited me to speak,
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he said, people think of you as a bit of an enigma,
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and they want to know what drives you a bit.
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And what really drives me is a vision of the future
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that I think we all share.
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It's a world of peace and prosperity and sustainability.
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And when we heard a lot of the presentations
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over the last couple of days,
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Ed Wilson and the pictures of James Nachtwey,
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I think we all realized how far we have to go
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to get to this new version of humanity
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that I like to call "Humanity 2.0."
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And it's also something that resides in each of us,
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to close what I think
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are the two big calamities in the world today.
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One is the gap in opportunity --
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this gap that President Clinton last night
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called uneven, unfair and unsustainable --
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and, out of that, comes poverty and illiteracy and disease
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and all these evils that we see around us.
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But perhaps the other, bigger gap is what we call the hope gap.
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And someone, at some point, came up with this very bad idea
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that an ordinary individual couldn't make a difference in the world.
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And I think that's just a horrible thing.
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And so chapter one really begins today, with all of us,
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because within each of us is the power to
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equal those opportunity gaps and to close the hope gaps.
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And if the men and women of TED
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can't make a difference in the world, I don't know who can.
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And for me, a lot of this started when I was younger
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and my family used to go camping in upstate New York.
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And there really wasn't much to do there for the summer,
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except get beaten up by my sister or read books.
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And so I used to read authors like James Michener
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and James Clavell and Ayn Rand.
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And their stories made the world seem a very small
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and interconnected place.
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And it struck me that if I could write stories
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that were about this world as being small and interconnected,
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that maybe I could get people interested in the issues
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that affected us all, and maybe engage them to make a difference.
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I didn't think that was necessarily the best way to make a living,
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so I decided to go on a path to become financially independent,
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so I could write these stories as quickly as I could.
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I then had a bit of a wake-up call when I was 14.
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And my dad came home one day
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and announced that he had cancer, and it looked pretty bad.
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And what he said was, he wasn't so much afraid that he might die,
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but that he hadn't done the things that he wanted to with his life.
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And knock on wood, he's still alive today, many years later.
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But for a young man that made a real impression on me,
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that one never knows how much time one really has.
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So I set out in a hurry. I studied engineering.
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I started a couple of businesses
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that I thought would be the ticket to financial freedom.
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One of those businesses was a computer rental business
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called Micros on the Move,
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which is very well named,
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because people kept stealing the computers.
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(Laughter)
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So I figured I needed to learn a little bit more about business,
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so I went to Stanford Business School and studied there.
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And while I was there, I made friends with a fellow
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named Pierre Omidyar, who is here today. And Pierre, I apologize
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for this. This is a photo from the old days.
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And just after I'd graduated, Pierre came to me
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with this idea to help people
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buy and sell things online with each other.
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And with the wisdom of my Stanford degree,
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I said, "Pierre, what a stupid idea."
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(Laughter)
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And needless to say, I was right.
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(Laughter)
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But right after that, Pierre -- in '96, Pierre and I left our full-time jobs
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to build eBay as a company. And the rest of that story, you know.
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The company went public two years later
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and is today one of the best known companies in the world.
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Hundreds of millions of people use it in hundreds of countries, and so on.
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But for me, personally, it was a real change.
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I went from living in a house with five guys in Palo Alto
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and living off their leftovers,
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to all of a sudden having all kinds of resources.
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And I wanted to figure out how I could
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take the blessing of these resources and share it with the world.
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And around that time, I met John Gardner,
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who is a remarkable man.
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He was the architect of the Great Society programs
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under Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s.
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And I asked him what he felt was the best thing I could do,
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or anyone could do, to make a difference
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in the long-term issues facing humanity.
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And John said, "Bet on good people doing good things.
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Bet on good people doing good things."
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And that really resonated with me.
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I started a foundation
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to bet on these good people doing good things.
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These leading, innovative, nonprofit folks,
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who are using business skills in a very leveraged way
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to solve social problems.
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People today we call social entrepreneurs.
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And to put a face on it, people like Muhammad Yunus,
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who started the Grameen Bank,
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has lifted 100 million people plus out of poverty around the world,
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won the Nobel Peace Prize.
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But there's also a lot of people that you don't know.
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Folks like Ann Cotton, who started a group called CAMFED in Africa,
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because she felt girls' education was lagging.
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And she started it about 10 years ago,
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and today, she educates over a quarter million African girls.
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And somebody like Dr. Victoria Hale,
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who started the world's first nonprofit pharmaceutical company,
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and whose first drug will be fighting visceral leishmaniasis,
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also known as black fever.
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And by 2010, she hopes to eliminate this disease,
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which is really a scourge in the developing world.
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And so this is one way to bet
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on good people doing good things.
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And a lot of this comes together in a philosophy of change
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that I find really is powerful.
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It's what we call, "Invest, connect and celebrate."
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And invest: if you see good people doing good things,
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invest in them. Invest in their organizations,
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or in business. Invest in these folks.
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Connecting them together through conferences --
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like a TED -- brings so many powerful connections,
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or through the World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship
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that my foundation does at Oxford every year.
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And celebrate them: tell their stories,
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because not only are there good people doing good work,
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but their stories can help close these gaps of hope.
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And it was this last part of the mission, the celebrate part,
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that really got me back to thinking when I was a kid
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and wanted to tell stories to get people involved
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in the issues that affect us all.
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And a light bulb went off,
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which was, first, that I didn't actually have to do the writing myself, I could find writers.
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And then the next light bulb was, better than just writing,
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what about film and TV, to get out to people in a big way?
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And I thought about the films that inspired me,
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films like "Gandhi" and "Schindler's List."
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And I wondered who was doing these kinds of films today.
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And there really wasn't a specific company
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that was focused on the public interest.
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So, in 2003, I started to make my way around Los Angeles
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to talk about the idea of a pro-social media company
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and I was met with a lot of encouragement.
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One of the lines of encouragement
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that I heard over and over was,
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"The streets of Hollywood are littered with the carcasses of people like you,
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who think you're going to come to this town and make movies."
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And then of course, there was the other adage.
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"The surest way to become a millionaire
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is to start by being a billionaire and go into the movie business."
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(Laughter)
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Undeterred, in January of 2004, I started Participant Productions
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with the vision to be a global media company
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focused on the public interest.
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And our mission is to produce entertainment
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that creates and inspires social change.
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And we don't just want people to see our movies
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and say, that was fun, and forget about it.
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We want them to actually get involved in the issues.
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In 2005, we launched our first slate of films,
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"Murder Ball," "North Country," "Syriana"
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and "Good Night and Good Luck."
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And much to my surprise, they were noticed.
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We ended up with 11 Oscar nominations for these films.
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And it turned out to be a pretty good year for this guy.
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Perhaps more importantly,
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tens of thousands of people joined the advocacy programs
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and the activism programs
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that we created to go around the movies.
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And we had an online component of that,
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our community sect called Participate.net.
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But with our social sector partners, like the ACLU and PBS and the
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Sierra Club and the NRDC, once people saw the film,
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there was actually something they could do to make a difference.
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One of these films in particular, called "North Country," was actually
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kind of a box office disaster.
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But it was a film that starred Charlize Theron
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and it was about women's rights, women's empowerment,
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domestic violence and so on.
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And we released the film at the same time that
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the Congress was debating the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act.
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And with screenings on the Hill, and discussions,
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and with our social sector partners,
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like the National Organization of Women,
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the film was widely credited
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with influencing the successful renewal of the act.
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And that to me, spoke volumes, because it's --
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the film started about a true-life story
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about a woman who was harassed, sued her employer,
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led to a landmark case that led to the Equal Opportunity Act,
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and the Violence Against Women Act and others.
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And then the movie about this person doing these things,
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then led to this greater renewal.
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And so again,
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it goes back to betting on good people doing good things.
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Speaking of which, our fellow TEDster, Al --
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I first saw Al do his slide show presentation
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on global warming in May of 2005.
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At that point, I thought I knew something about global warming.
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I thought it was a 30 to 50 year problem.
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And after we saw his slide show,
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it became clear that it was much more urgent.
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And so right afterwards, I met backstage with Al, and
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with Lawrence Bender, who was there, and Laurie David,
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and Davis Guggenheim,
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who was running documentaries for Participant at the time.
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And with Al's blessing, we decided on the spot to turn it into a film,
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because we felt that we could get the message out there
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far more quickly than having Al go around the world,
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speaking to audiences of 100 or 200 at a time.
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And you know, there's another adage in Hollywood,
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that nobody knows nothing about anything.
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And I really thought this was going to be
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a straight-to-PBS charitable initiative.