 Now, who's got the guts? I think that perhaps you got the guts, since you came here. Even though it could have been raining, it is not. So do you have the guts? Because we need your guts now to do an experiment. And without you and your courage and your stomachs, we cannot do that experiment. It's in two parts, this talk, both of them about guts, first in the sense of the experiment that I want to do with you. It's a very, very simple experiment, but it takes a lot of courage on your side. It's an experiment involving a phenomenon known from everyday life, in particular when you deal with kids, the phenomenon of tickling. I've tried with the help of Wikipedia to find tickling in as many languages as I could come up with. You know what tickling is, you tickle another person with your fingers on their skin. And I want to do this experiment in two parts. The first part is extremely boring, but we'll get quickly over it. The first part is that everyone in this room will be tickling themselves like this on some kind of skin that you can reach. You will tickle yourself and you will notice that this is really, really boring because nothing really happens. You can tickle yourself okay, but it doesn't tickle. So we have to come up with something else to do this. So I'll ask everyone in this audience to turn to the person sitting or standing to your right side and please tickle that person. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. It seems that involving other persons in your life does make a difference. There is a problem however here that all of the people sitting at one end of the row were not tickled and those at the other end of the row didn't have the opportunity to tickle. So please will you now turn to the person sitting on your left and tickle back. Thank you very much. It seems that this worked. It's been tried in many audiences. If you would like to see another audience suffer, there's a film on my homepage tour decay where you can see an audience in Berlin covered by seven cameras. You were fortunate enough not to be covered that way here doing this thing and it's a great, great fun to watch just like you were. And if you noticed, because you're staring at me, I didn't touch anyone. I was the one person in this tent that was untouched and didn't do harm to anyone else. I just exerted the power of words. So you cannot really tickle yourself, at least not in a way that tickles. Sciences have been growing with this problem. There's a machine built about 10 years ago to permit people to tickle themselves because you have this machine that will displace the whereabouts of this little thing that will tickle you. So it comes as a surprise and even the experimenter will introduce a timing factor that comes as a surprise. And the funny thing here is that you can actually sense tickling when you tickle yourself in this robotic way this was done as a neuroscience project. Sarah Blakemore built the machine. The grand old man of this study was Chris Frith, a leading international theorist on schizophrenia, you know, split personality people. And they can tickle themselves in a way that tickles. Now I would like to go to monkeys then because what does this phenomenon tell us? It tells us something that we already have learned from studying monkeys drinking orange juice. It's the wrong year of the publication. It's from 87. It's a 25-year-old study of a monkey getting orange juice. You will see on the top here a monkey gets the orange juice at this point are and immediately there's a strong reaction in the brain of the monkey. A lot of dopamine is produced and dopamine as you might have heard of signals joy and the monkey is very happy because he gets orange juice. That's pretty fair. People do that when they go into a restaurant and get food. They get happy too. But then you train the monkey in such a way that a signal will tell it orange juice is coming and you will be served soon. So what happens then is that the monkey, when he gets the signal orange juice on his way, there comes this wave of dopamine. Hooray, orange juice on its way because now it knows it's coming. So it's very happy, just like in a restaurant. But when it actually arrives, that was the wrong button. I was, can we go back one here? We should, yeah, sorry. What happens here is that all the dopamine comes when the orange juice is announced, but when it's actually served, nothing happens. Because if you're quite certain that you will get orange juice and scientific experimenters are more reliable than people in restaurants. So the monkey knows that it will get its orange juice as announced. Then there's no joy connected to that. So if you're quite certain of things, they will no longer be a joy to you. Scientists call it the reward prediction error. It's really when you get something you didn't expect or more than you expected that you feel joy. When you get exactly what you expect, like a Western person taking his morning shower, you're not joyful about that. Even though millions and billions of people on this planet would be, you just get sour and angry when it doesn't work, because you get used to it. And so I created this formula, which has even been exhibited in an art museum, the Serpentine Gallery in London. I'm very proud of it. What it says is that storing control sort of tend to exclude each other. The more control you have of stuff, the less joyful it seems to you. Your morning shower, you don't really notice until it doesn't work. While if you're surprised, there's a chance that you become very joyful. So if you want joy, you should not have too much control. But the problem, of course, is that our civilization is all about trying to control and predict everything and make them predictable. That it doesn't rain when we're discussing a mat, at least inside the tent. That we have streets where we have a predictable surface we can bike on or walk on that trains go on time. Civilization is about making the world predictable, about taking away problems that annoy us. And that's great because we get rid of all these problems that annoy us. But it doesn't make us happy because we just get used to it. So our world, in the sense when we create a world that we control, that we cultivate, that we produce to be pleasing to us. The irony is that it stops being joyful because it is exactly as we expected. Civilization will take away our unhappiness, but it will not make us happy. And that's a very simple lesson, but it seems to be very surprising for civilized people like ourselves. Civilization is very much like tickling yourself. Because there's no surprise out there. When you're tickling yourself, your brain knows exactly what will happen. So it will not have that tickling sensation. And civilization is just like that and it doesn't tickle. Every day life becomes dull and boring. Now, how does that relate to food? Now, let's go to guts number two. Let's go to the actual gut, your stomach, your intestines and all that. Your inside surface, you could say. Tickling is about your skin, your outside surface. Let's take a look at your inside surface. Your inside surface is pretty big. Here's a drawing from one of my books, probably more than 20 years ago, where you have the human being seen as a tube, basically. There's a tube going from the mouse to the other end, which is a little like the outside skin tube in this simplistic drawing. And you can see the human being as this extended doughnut kind of character. And you would say, okay, how big is that? Well, here's the cover of the magazine Science from 2005, in a special issue on the inner tube of life, the gut, which has a lot of beautiful articles about this system. With the general idea, this is a huge system. The tube, as we heard, is 10 meter long between your mouth and your other end because it's curled up all the way along. So it's a very big surface you have there. You can actually compare the size of the surface you have on your inside to the surface you have on your outside. On that little green thing there is the two square meters of skin that you have. That's the outside surface that suffers the tickling sensation. If you take your lungs, they're very cleverly arranged, so there's a lot of surface inside your lungs. They're sort of folded and folded and folded. And the lungs are pretty big. It's about 100 square meters that you have right there in your chest. But then the intestines in this very conservative estimate of what is the surface area of this enormously long 9, 10 meter long tube with all the foldings inside and all the wrappings and all the funniest things going on. The conservative estimate is 300 square meters. This morning you heard a less conservative estimate, which was 10 times higher. But the important thing is that it's much, much, much, much higher than the actual skin surface, much, much higher. So there's more surface within you than without you. So here is enormous potential for tickling. Tickling is always something about the outside surface, but here you really have something to tickle. So you would say, ah, but this inner surface isn't really a surface. It's just a hole inside me and nothing much goes on there. You put gourmet food in and you get gourmet shit out and that's about it. It's not really a border to the other like the skin is. But as we've heard, inside your gut lives on the order of 1 million, million foreign microorganisms, each of which are free-living organisms with their own reproductive system, their own ability to reproduce themselves, their own DNA different from yours, they're in every respect living beings. And there are 1 million, million of those inside your stomach, hopefully. That is 100 times more than the number of cells that you have in your body, which is what you can compare to these microorganisms, the number of units in you that could reproduce. Your cells are much heavier than the individual microorganisms, so you still outweigh the microorganisms in your gut, but you do not outnumber them. On each chair in this tent sits a person with 100 times more foreign cells in her than her own cells. So you are, in a sense, a walking ecosystem. You are the carrier of a fantastic ecology inside of yourself with enormous amounts of organisms that do a lot of work for you in there that you provide also with the benches and the tables and the knives for their work because the fiber you eat in your food, for instance, will be where the microorganisms will sit to digest other parts of the food that you provide them with. So even though you are sitting ecosystem now, you have other inside yourself. And that is important because you can program that other inside yourself. If you eat one kind of food, you have one kind of microorganism dominating the ecosystem within you. If you eat another kind of food, another kind of microorganism or another spectrum of microorganisms will dominate your gut. So you can program. It's like a computer. Your gut is like a computer that you can program in different ways. And of course, if you give it the same McDonald burger all the time, you will have also a very dull system inside. And now I come to the problem that I want to address in this slide, which is the problem of industrial agriculture or the problem of human beings cultivating the planet in their own image because they've not yet heard of Roland Riedman's revolution that we've started earlier today, that we try to make the world pleasing to us and make the world do exactly what we want, make it easily edible, easy to digest through the cultivation of plants, through the way we process these plants and so on. We try to make things so that they're not challenging for us to eat. Our project is historically to cultivate, to process, to prepare everything so that it comes very easily into our body that creates a lot of problems for us in the sense of overweight and overeating and so on, but it also creates an enormous lack of joy because these things become more and more predictable and more and more the same all the time we are never challenged inside. So you could say that the problem with this kind of food is that there are really not enough surprises, really not enough difficulty in eating it, really not enough chewing. Chewing also as a metaphor, not only of what goes on in your mouth, but also deeper down in your system, there's not enough challenge in that food. It doesn't surprise you or unsettle you in any way so it becomes boring. And therefore there's also no diversity inside your gut. There's no rich ecosystem within you and therefore not a lot of fantastic things to experience. So what is then the problem with the food that we get from agriculture? And I use the word agriculture here to mean the modern industrialized, big scale, monoculture agriculture. What is the problem with this agriculture? It is a very simple problem. That the food we get from agriculture is a little like tickling yourself in the sense you present yourself with your own project. You already know what you're getting, all the otherness has been taken out and therefore the problem with agriculture is that agriculture doesn't tickle. It will not tickle you on your inside when you eat this kind of thing. And that's a sad thing. It's like tickling yourself to eat this over produced food. So therefore my wish, when I go into one of the restaurants that you're dealing with, my wish as a customer, as a human being wanting something to eat, my wish is a very simple wish. And that is that I would like you to tickle me on my inside, dear chef. I would like you to challenge me. I would not like you to please me or to make it easy to digest your meal. I would prefer that you would somehow challenge me with food stuff that is so surprising and so new to me that it will tickle. I was offered a grasshopper, a live grasshopper collected here by Miles Irving for lunch. And I had to bite its head off first and then chew it. And that really tickled all the way down. So that was sort of my ideal of a meal is a tickling grasshopper going down your stomach. At least I'm proud to tell the story. I'm not so sure that I was proud to experience the story at lunch here. But now I'm afraid that Rene might be coming on stage because it says tickle me, chef. So I would like to add as my final word and slide here before you jump on me that it's on the inside I want to be tickled. Thank you. Thank you.