 So, a little bit of housekeeping on your way in, or while you're sitting in here, you may have received a blue marble, hopefully you have it. If you could find it, if you put it away, put it in your hand. And while you're doing that, I just want to say, I don't think it's been said before, but this is the coolest podium I think I've ever stood next to. And if it's okay, I think I'll drive it home, is that right? Pass the Teslas and they'll all look out and be like, whoa, jealous of your podium car. Super cool. It's even cooler from up here than it is from out there. So, if you take your blue marble out and hold it up like that, that is what we look like right now from a million miles away, depending on the length of your forearm, of course. I did the math. We look like a small blue marble. And it's a reminder that we are small relative to the universe, and we're blue because of the water. We're a water planet. We're water beings. And I'm going to talk a little bit more about what I'd like you to do with your blue marble a little bit later, but just keep it in your hand as we chat. If you have questions, comments, feedback, you want to debate or fight over something or go a little bit deeper, get in touch. I'm pretty easy to find. Email, Twitter. We use the hashtag BlueMine to talk about this conversation. But this is our responsibility, this little blue marble that we call home. As far as we know, there's not another one out there that we're going to anytime soon. NASA has been searching the universe for Earth-like planets. They have an acronym they call FTW, follow the water as they search the universe. They actually use that acronym for short over at NASA, FTW. They're searching for water because we know water is the matrix of life here. We know it works. So we search for other places where it may occur. So what I want you to do is receive this blue marble as a small token of gratitude for the work that you're doing, for the work that you're going to do when you leave here and go back home. And I want to ask you, what's your water? Simple question, but what is your water? What's the water that you fell in love with? Who were you with? What is the name of that water? How did it feel? What were the circumstances? There are a lot of different answers to that very simple, slightly provocative question. For some people, their water is necessary directly for hygiene and hydration. It's a very intimate relationship, perhaps involving the movement of water in buckets in small quantities. For others, the relationship is a little more exciting and a little more adventurous, maybe a little more ex-games. For some, it's an interaction with the other beings that live in the water, perhaps standing on the shore or a cliff, looking out and watching animals hang out together. Maybe from the bow, looking out, this is a backup, we're switching. Maybe from the bow of a boat, if you've ever been in the bow and the dolphins have come, you know exactly what that feels like, surrounded by water. The dolphins stay until they decide it's time to go, on their terms, and then they're gone. Perhaps your water experience was more submergence. So our friend Brian's scary at the bottom of the ocean, face to face with a beautiful animal, quite a moment. Maybe it's in a flowing river, casting your line, meditating, maybe catching nothing, but happy to be there. When we're in the water with those we love, we create a special bond. We create deeper memories, nostalgia. We fall more in love with each other. Sometimes our water experience involves the built environment, a pier, a building, a place to go. It's a special pier in the UK that actually burnt down a year ago. It will be rebuilt because it carries so many memories for so many generations who spent time there. Perhaps your water is more urban. We have a rooftop pool. This is one in Singapore that I've never been swimming in. Pretty nice spot there on the roof of a skyscraper looking out over the city. Maybe your water is more domestic, indoor in your bathtub, like our friend Jack. His answer is, oh yeah, my bathtub with my eggs and my puppy dog, that's his water, curlers in his hair. Maybe something really simple like the water fountain. I remember this photo always reminds me of that standing in line as a little kid in elementary school in New Jersey, waiting for my turn, so thirsty and you just move a step forward one person at a time and you finally get to the water fountain and get to be just in charge of the water fountain and luxuriate in the taste of that water and then you get back at the end of the line if you want another drink, you wait on line again. Remember those days, pre-plastic bottles, right, we had water fountains, they worked. On a real personal level, my water earliest memories involved my father. My best memories were just being in the water with dad, holding on to his shoulders. We did this thing called the turtle ride, he'd dive under and I'd hold on, we'd hold our breath and then we'd come back up for a breath and then we'd go back under and I do that with my daughters and it's their favorite memories. A little older, I remember backpacking in the Rocky Mountains in that water called Deep Lake, it's just seared into my neurons. I can look at a photo like that and I can feel the grass between my toes, I can feel the water, I can smell the air, I remember it so clearly, I remember the wolves howling while I tried to sleep in my little tent, the tent wall just seems so thin when you're listening to those wolves. But as a kid, I was completely enthralled in and loved with turtles. I just had a thing for turtles for some reason and I built a career around being a marine biologist and studying turtles and one of the first things that we did when I was a grad student is we put a satellite transmitter on this sea turtle and let's see if that'll play for us, yeah there we go. We named her Adelita, we put a satellite transmitter on her shell and we released her into the ocean and she swam off and the interesting thing about this little video clip that'll repeat a few times is that she swam about 10 meters and then paused because the tank that she was living in was 10 meters in diameter so watch as it comes around again she enters the water and then she kind of pauses there as if to say wall, where's the wall and there's no wall so she continues to swim through an imaginary wall so a turtle, a little turtle brain, imagined a wall where there was no wall and then she swam through that imaginary wall, interesting metaphor for this group in particular, the walls that we create in our mind that aren't really there that stop us from swimming where we need to go. Well in Adelita's case, we named her Adelita, she swam home and home in her case was the other side of the ocean, her home swimming from Baja California, Mexico across the north Pacific all the way to Japan and I was a grad student I was tracking her over the course of 368 days and I'd say this is probably my first officially my first float I floated for a year riding this turtles back day and night and day and night for 368 days across the open Pacific Ocean until she reached her home. We shared her data online in real time and I was told that was career suicide the scientists don't share their data until they're published in peer review journals but I put it up anyway and it wasn't career suicide in fact I met poets and other scientists who knew how to do things that I didn't know how to do so by sharing and building a network and reaching out and giving and corresponding and communicating we built this like super turtle geek network kind of like your super float geek network that you have so we were into turtles seriously totally I mean it was amazing so the question is what are the walls that you've swum through and what are the walls that you are going to swim through that aren't even there they're stopping you they're holding you back but you can swim through them and that's the work of this group to help people not just yourself but all of your clients all of your colleagues break down those walls and swim through them across vast oceans lying on the other side now our understanding of this conversation is getting a lot deeper thanks to people like Justin and his colleagues the research continues to move forward we're understanding our brains in a completely new way and the old way was kind of as a black box you could stimulate the brain and then you can see what happened you can ask people how it felt and write that down and talk about that you couldn't really look inside early neuroscience required a used brain of somebody was done with it that you could look at and see what might have gone wrong with that brain while it was in use but that was a very different endeavor so studying used brains was the way neuroscience was carried out now we can look at brains while they're in fact in use brains in progress brains shrinking and growing brain plasticity brain on flotation brains on water brains on music the technology continues to grow continues to expand and blow our minds literally we're now able to understand the brain that rest relative to the active brain and we know physiologically and our neuro anatomy is in fact different we're able to understand our chemistry and understand dopamine and serotonin understand chemicals like oxytocin that are implicated in trust in building trust so you are boosting oxytocin you are putting people into a state of trust in awareness and expansiveness and and wall breaking it's incredible in fact what this group of people does for our fellow humans we're understanding how love works the levers that slide up and down and different mixes of neuro chemistry and I just want to caution you if you're starting to geek out on the neuroscience particularly the neuroscience of love there's a time and a place to talk about it my my wife does not dig it so when things are getting really nice and romantic and I talk about oxytocin and serotonin really bad idea I just you know and you can get kind of enthusiastic about this stuff and there's a time and a place for it and maybe you already knew that but I just thought I'd offer that free unsolicited advice the world is just exploding in terms of the applications of neuroscience and you go to the library and you go to the section on science you'll find book after book after book on the neuroscience of of illusion and magic the neuroscience of music the neuroscience of stress and creativity neuroplasticity on and on and on there's even a book on the neuroscience of bacon just kidding there isn't a book on bacon but that's a funny joke because I thought there would be a book on your our brains on water the neuroscience of water and there wasn't and so I tried to convince fellow scientists neuroscientists to write that book and I wasn't successful so I had to buckle down and write it and it took five years Nobel Prize winners in neuroscience are studying our brains ability to build mental maps doesn't sound relevant to this conference but it totally is the neurons that create the maps that allow you to find your way back into this room even though you may not have been here before back to your hotel room or in particular back to that coffee cart really important neural maps that we need to create the cover of scientific map American magazine the science of meditation on the cover that's awesome that would have been like the punchline of a joke ten years ago and now there it is bam on the cover this generation is the first to have a decent user's guide to our brain think about that some people take things out of the package and they throw the user's guide away anyway but this is the first generation that least has that option to not throw the user's guide away to open it up and read it and to think about how our brains work and the question the fundamental question is what are we going to do with that why is it important and how are we going to apply this incredible knowledge to our lives now let's be reminded that we are a water planet but it's a bit of an illusion that big marble well that's all the water that slightly smaller marble that's the fresh water and that really teeny tiny tiny teeny one that's the fresh water we have access to so this illusion from space is in fact a bit of an illusion when we get out on the water it changes the way we feel the cognitive emotional psychological and social and some people say spiritual I say spiritual I had just said spiritual in public I'm a scientist I said spiritual look at that thank you thank you very much thank you those benefits of water are real they're measurable that's new that's exciting I call this emerging field that connects our brains to our water planet neuro conservation how are we going to use neuroscience to take care of our planet as we begin to understand that healthy water is medicine it doesn't come in a pill it comes out there you just have to go get it it occurs in your facilities you just have to get in there our world is increasingly stressful more and more I don't need to go too into deep about too deep into that you know it's true and we all wish we could go to the doctor and and have that happen just can you can you just take it out please just pop it open pull it out let's get rid of that at the extreme we have post-traumatic stress that's the extreme extreme case but we're all dealing with some level of chronic stress in one way or another psychological stress and that is the state I refer to as red mind for a lot of people it's the dominant state of mind that they live with those are the people who show up at your door saying I need a little help I need a break I need some rest people are living in fear of their neighbors other neighbors literally next door of our neighbors to the north and the south and the east and the west of our neighbors who look different they're living in fear of ideas we're stimulated to be afraid in contrast to red mind is what I call blue mind and that's what we deal in blue mind delivering blue mind guiding people into their blue minds now we've known about this forever a long long long history of art and literature describing the human emotional relationship with our waters people used to stand online to stand in front of paintings like this they'd wait online and pay money to stand in front of paintings by the great masters of water because it made them feel something big bigger than themselves imagine that standing in line to look at a painting of the ocean the modern masters is my brother John Ember who passed away last year of ALS painted into his last days as he lost the ability to use his right hand he switched to his left then he put the paintbrush in his mouth when he couldn't hold in his mouth he strapped it to his head and painted this of the main coast he was in love passionately in love with the ocean and my sister and their son ran Ortner paints the water massive triptychs sometimes five inches of paint stuck to the canvas his paintings look like photographs poets describing our deep connection to water as a source of creativity and imagination Jim Harrison writer I like to read that sound you know that sound now corona got it they built a whole ad campaign that built a brand that sold a lot of really bad beer to unsuspecting Americans thinking that they were getting a bottle of vacation or something first give away clear bottle first giveaway second give away the taste but amazing ad campaign all about water Hollywood gets it Shawshank Redemption remember that film the last line of the film the last line the film ends with that we dream of water we long for it little Leo up in the bow of the Titanic what was he saying there I'm king of the world surrounded by water surrounded by it made him feel so good then he goes back with his lover and they feel really good too now we'll just pretend the story ends right there otherwise my thesis is not supported you cool with that right we'll let James Cameron know that we just sort of adjusted things remember that scene from here from here to here imagine that scene without the water kind of weird totally rolling around in your underwear in the sand you like gross but not sexy at all like not romantic not memorable no Academy Award game over but you add the water and it's good whoa is it scandalous really it was quite scandalous cities like Modesto they knew that water was key when they built this archway into their city water is all about happiness right they knew that this is not a new idea places like Pittsburgh are restoring their waterways bringing them back and bringing back the soul of their cities ancient idea that water is medicine say again water is medicine one more time water is medicine it is Oliver Sacks one of the great neurologists who's in his dying days right now swims every day and got his best ideas his best ideas this is a brilliant man with numerous New York Times bestsellers smart smart guys best ideas came to him while swimming so you had to keep a notebook handy to jot them down this is Naoki 13 year old boy who wrote a bestseller about autism here's what he had to say about water I'm free and happy there free and happy I feel like you because the world is so noisy but in the water I'm free that's what it's about is Martin Pollock veteran from the UK returned from service missing both legs and an arm he planned on being a blob on a stool he said in the pubs with his buddies with his mates then you got on a surfboard and saw his life ahead of him got on the water now Martin is a surfer he sees himself as a surfer and he's an ambassador not only is he an ambassador for surfing he is an ambassador for the ocean for our waters so if you want to dig more into the research you can look up the work of the university at the University of Exeter medical school look up blue space Michael White and his colleagues have produced a vast body of literature so it's another list of references for you to dig into along with the others that have been mentioned throughout these past few days what we need access to that water and that's what this is all about keeping the gates open opening more flotation centers giving people access to their waters this is Jarmila she lived for 10 years in a nursing home suffering of Alzheimer's my friend Greg met her and said where do you want to go and say I want to see the ocean she got to the ocean she stood up out of her wheelchair and he said I didn't know you could stand I didn't know you could walk as she shuffled forward and she said I didn't have anything to walk for until I saw the water that's Jarmila we limit access in lots of ways culturally we limit access we need to open the doors to everybody and that may take some work it may take some reaching out it may take some education it makes and take some some active behavioral change but people around the world need to get back in their water like our friend Carlos and Mozambique who was told his whole life that his people didn't dive they didn't swim they didn't go in the water and he said I want to dive I want to be a diver and I want to take other people diving and he became the first dive master from Mozambique and now he takes people diving opening up their eyes to a whole new water world now we can have access but sometimes people go there and they bring their devices which closes them down completely and so imagine getting in a float tank and then and tweeting the whole time or you tubing the whole time and I know you've done it but you don't have to admit it it's okay those waterproof iPhone cases are really handy but people get to they had access they have the privilege of access and then they have their faces down in their devices I'd rather replace that device with a baby turtle right leave the smartphone home here's a baby turtle take that to the ocean and release it so home stretch here water gives us awe and wonderment when we feel awe scientists tell us we change it changes our brains chemistry it changes our body we switch from a me perspective to a we perspective and then what happens our compassion grows our trust deepens our creativity expands when we have solitude which is becoming more and more rare in our world we can get in touch with ourselves Justin pointed out this study earlier about the electrical shocks I won't go into that in detail but we're losing the ability to do solitude we're losing our privacy in lots of ways in this connected world water gives us romance when we fall more deeply in love with ourselves we can fall more deeply in love with others crash told the story about his experience and he learned to love himself again which allowed him to love others of course we relax we reduce our stress and that's very very important because stress is implicated in a whole range of modern diseases and illnesses we find our most precious memories and nostalgia when we're near in on and underwater and this all comes back to one thing love love for ourselves love for each other and love for this little planet that we share so my challenge to you my encouragement is to continue to build those bridges that you're building between people and themselves and each other and further their favorite water the local water your lakes and rivers and creeks and oceans and bays and swimming holes and ponds wherever you are make that connection when people can't surf they should float when they can't kayak they should float when they can't scuba dive they should float really it'll reactivate the stoke and I want you to take that blue marble and here's your homework you knew there would be homework take your blue marble keep it safe but pass it on it may be today maybe tomorrow and maybe in 10 years but I want you to take your blue marble and put it into the hand of somebody that you need to say thank you to for what they're doing and ask them to do the same thing and you'll see your blue marble float around the world and around and around thanks for what you're doing keep it up but on