>>Luciano Huck: As you probably realize, I'm not another pretty face in Brazilian television.
[ Laughter ] >>Luciano Huck: Easy.
And the truth is that I think I'm here because I'm not a typical TV personality.
In my homeland, I host a weekly TV show watched by around 18 million people every Saturday
around Brazil and also in 150 countries all over the world.
I have 21 million followers on my social networks.
And I also was the first Brazilian to reach 1 million followers on Twitter.
I began my career when I was 21, which was a small daily newspaper column that turned
into a radio show which became a weekly TV show in a small TV station.
Two years after that, I was hired by the largest Brazilian television network, called Rede
Globo.
And I'm there since then, hosting the same show for the last 14 years.
I think the reason I have been successful is that I truly love what I do.
I consider it as my life mission.
I have the honor of inspiring Brazilians with the best part of my country, our people.
One might say that just famous people can inspire.
I have learned that often those who seem to have the least who can really offer us the
most.
And I love to listen to people, and I love to turn it into TV content in Brazil.
Each year I receive more than 1 million stories from all over Brazil.
Classic letters, people sit down and write.
And also emails, lots of them.
And I just -- recently I just reeve received an email from a Police Lieutenant Shayla from
Para De Minas.
That's Shayla from Para De Minas.
It is Motown in the interior of Brazil.
Lieutenant Shayla drove me to telling me the story about Roberta, a cleaning lady who recently
had been hired at her police station to clean the bathroom and all the stuff.
Shayla noticed two things about Roberta.
First, she was a top-notch efficient cleaner.
Second, at meals time, she didn't eat anything and she just set her food aside to take home
every day.
Looking deeper into this, Lieutenant discovered that Roberta at 33 -- I said 33 years old
-- she had seven children between 18 months and 15 years old and she had three ex-husbands.
The first was murdered.
The second ran with another woman.
And the third was hooked on crack and arrested by drug trafficking.
Her oldest daughter that you can see on the left, Haessa is the one who takes care of
all the brothers and sister.
Shayla discovered also that Roberta would wake up every morning at 5:30 a.m., dropped
the kids at school -- this is the house -- dropped the kids at school.
Go to the police station, work there until 4:00 p.m., go back home, arrive home at 5:00
p.m.
At 6:30, she left for her second job as a cook in a popular restaurant.
She arrived home at 2:00 a.m and the next day she repeated the same routine Monday through
Saturday.
This is the house, her room.
She lived with five kids over there.
And this is the side of the house.
For this Roberta earned 500 bucks, $500 each month, every month.
And this is the total income of the family.
Despite having only one hour a half each day to be with her kids, she knew everything that
went in her home house.
She has the love and respect for her kids.
The kids are crazy about the mother.
And Roberta did all of this with a big smile on her face.
I asked Roberta how long her monthly wages lasted.
She said it didn't last more than ten days every month.
So she spent 20 days not knowing where the money will come from to put food on the table.
She told me that every month she -- when she received her wages, she choose one of her
children to provide some "culture."
And you know what she means about culture?
Taking one of the seven kids each month to a restaurant to eat with fork and knife.
This is culture.
This can sound like a sad story.
Depends on the point of view.
But I must tell you, Roberta is one of the most inspiring women I ever met in my life
and also one of the most happy also.
And she could transform -- I spend two hours in her house the first time I met her and
she transformed all my big problems into dust in two hours.
I listened to Roberta's story with as much interest and respect I would listen for a
chief of state or if anyone was on this stage today here.
It was a great day.
I think my talent in life is to walk this fine line between chaos and inspiration.
And just for the record -- this is good -- this is Roberta's home today.
Please.
Yes.
Do you remember the old house?
[ Applause ] >>Luciano Huck: And then the new house again.
Thank you.
I like this.
We put some people -- it is not "Extreme Makeover."
Just put some cool people together, designers, architects to leave a legacy in Roberta's
life.
The program was a hit.
It was broadcasted already.
But the house and the benefits will last forever in her life.
Brazil is changing, and I'm a witness to this, in the streets, in homes, and in families.
We have no Arab Spring in Brazil.
Sorry.
But we are seeing now a digital spring in Brazil through social networking.
Even without broadband and with a dramatic digital divide, Brazil is a world power when
it comes to social networking.
We are a networked country.
Brazilians are reaching out to each other in new ways.
They are becoming active in each other's lives and in their country development.
They are taking on the streets, demanding quality public -- this was a few months ago,
two months, three months ago -- demanding quality public service and transparency.
I think that social awareness is growing via the Internet.
Brazil's great asset is the people and this is the capital that I truly believe in.
For me, producing content based in real-life stories, making heros of underdogs, social
networking is a powerful tool to discover these stories.
Three years ago Rio de Janeiro was in the middle of the worst war it had ever seen between
good and evil.
In one side, the police; and the other side, drug dealers.
Here and there.
Rio de Janeiro was a city divided.
The population, the police, and a good part of the essential service could not enter much
of the city.
The people of the city had lost the freedom to come and go.
They cannot go wherever they want in the city.
It was crazy.
And I'm not talking about the city periphery far away from the city center.
Some of the Rio slums, it is less than 500 yards from the most expensive city blocks
of the city.
With the upcoming of World Cup and the Olympics, the public powers begin a pacification process
of the territories occupied by the drug dealers.
By "pacification," I mean reclaiming these areas and returning the basic rights to the
citizens.
The greatest challenge was so-called Complexo do Alemao.
In English, it is maybe the German complex or the German field.
The German was the owner of the farm that became this.
An area over half of mile -- a square mile in size covering 15 slums and where more than
100,000 people lived, people who had to live with guns and drug dealers around every day.
On November 28, 2010, the police with the help of the Marines invaded the Complexo do
Alemao.
It was the worst urban battle in the city history.
I was out of the country on vacation with my family and began following the facts via
Internet.
And the situation inside the slum was so violent that the process -- the press were unable
to enter the community to cover what happened inside the community, inside the favelas.
I went to my social networks, and I found among my Twitter followers a 17-year-old boy,
the son of a housekeeper, a street sweeper, who lived inside the favela, inside the Complexo
do Alemao.
And he was in his grandmother's house in the middle of the favela, inside, tweeting all
the details of the battle and the occupation.
At the moment, he has around five followers.
This was Henay (phonetic).
He ran a computer newspaper called "The Voice of the Community" which he founded in 2005
when he was 11 years old.
I retweet his message on what was happening inside the slum.
And very quickly a 17-year-old boy was reporting to the great Brazilian media one of the most
dramatic stories in Brazilian life.
The boy became an instant celebrity.
I cut short my vacation.
I return to Brazil.
When I got back home, got to the city, the police had already taken control of the situation
and they allowed me to go inside the slum.
I went to meet Henay.
He told me his history.
I got to his family, his house, his grandmother.
And I decide to build for Henay and his co-workers a proper newspaper office inside the slum.
Outside it is ugly, but inside it was pretty like this.
Henay, Roberta, and the digital spring that we are seeing in Brazil are the proof of this.
Simple stories that are driven by social networking and empowered through TV can inspire a whole
country.
Regardless of this, I highly recommend all of you to see and get to know Brazil personally,
and if you can take your families.
It is a unique country.
We have a very special people, culture and places.
I have been traveling all over the world with my wife and three kids and there may be people
just as nice around the world but there's no place better.
And if you'd like, you can stay at my place, okay?
[ Laughter ] >>Luciano Huck: Thank you.
[ Applause ]