Transcriber: Yeoram Seo Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
Hi. I want to speak to you today about the moment it found me.
I want to take you back when I was 11 years old.
It's 2001 and I'm on the beach.
I'm shooting off fireworks trying to impress my friends.
And this old lady comes out,
and she starts screaming at me
about how these lights that I'm shining into the sky
are messing with these sea turtles vision of the moon
so they're not going to be able to get back down to the water.
I'm with my friends, so being a punk 11-year-old kid,
I'm like, "Get out of here, go home, get out of here, you old lady!"
Next morning I wake up,
and she's in my house having coffee with my mom.
So there I am. I know I'm done. I'm in trouble.
So I come out after she's gone,
and I talked to my mom, and she says, "You need to go down to her house.
She's the state permit holder
for all the sea turtles on this segment of the beach in Florida."
So, great, better.
Now she's someone important that's going to get me in trouble.
So I go down to her house,
and I'm expecting just to get chewed out by like this 50-year-old lady
who's going to tell me about all these awful things I did.
She brings me inside,
and she starts telling me about sea turtles.
And she's not yelling at me, she's just, like, educating me
about these endangered animals.
What I was doing with those fireworks was impeding a creature
that has been around the Earth for 65 million years
and that they're integral parts of the coral systems they inhabit
when they're feeding.
And I don't know what happened, something all of the sudden snapped.
I had never cared about something.
All of the sudden I was asking, like, "What could I do?
What could I do to help protect these sea turtles?"
And she started telling me,
"You know, there's not many youths
doing anything to protect these sea turtles."
And after that day,
there wasn't a day that went by when I didn't think about them.
Over the next 10 years - her name was Linda Soderquist, the "old lady" -
she's going to kill me for calling her that four times in this presentation.
We worked 10 years to try and protect these animals together.
She'd been doing it for a very long time.
I started doing school presentations; that's what I knew how to do.
I started telling kids about why it was important
to protect these animals I cared so deeply for.
I created this activity book that you see here,
and we got it printed in a couple of languages,
and she did all the illustrations, and it was going really well.
Today, in the last decade, we've got 250,000 copies of the book
in five different languages and 20 countries.
(Applause)
It's going really well.
It's the biggest publication about sea turtles in the world.
And scenes like this absolutely kill me.
And this is the reason I go out there and try and make change.
This happens I think with everybody
who goes out there and wants to - and finds the passion.
There's this one moment when all of the sudden things change.
I got a chance to talk to Jane Goodall, who I'm sure many of you know.
She's the person who single-handedly
almost saved the chimpanzees in Tanzania and Tunisia area.
She was telling me that she went to Africa,
not knowing about chimpanzees,
and then one day, she saw this animal and said,
"I know for the rest of my life,
I'm going to do something to protect these animals."
My mentor in life, a guy named Jay Wallace Nichols,
he was telling me this story that -
he grew up in Indiana, super far away from the oceans,
and in his pond,
he would catch fresh water turtles and paint numbers on the back of them,
at 11 years old, and he would go back and recollect them.
He was doing a population study
on these freshwater turtles at his pond in Indiana.
And one thing he did was put a transmitter on a leatherback sea turtle
that traveled the span of the Pacific ocean.
It doesn't sound like a big deal,
but for sea turtle geeks like me, that was crazy.
So that was a big deal.
And then I met this lady when I was working in Trinidad.
Her name was Suzanne,
and as a small child she grew up on the north coast of Trinidad.
They couldn't go to the beach during the nesting season
because the smell of rotting flesh of leatherback sea turtles,
where poachers would go and lob off their flippers to make turtle soup.
The [stench] during the summer made it impossible to go to the beach.
So she knew she had to change that after seeing that one time.
Now that area in Trinidad where I went, stayed and viewed sea turtles
is one of the most beautiful places in the world,
where leatherback sea turtles who've been around for 65 million years flourish.
We heard earlier about a guy named Dan who before today I'd never heard of.
One day he went to Africa with his family and saw people less fortunate than him.
He knew from that day on he was going to do everything in his life
to help those people, and he did it.
I think there's these moments for everybody
that starts something really passionately.
That's the only reason not all of us are out there doing things like this.
We haven't found one thing yet
because we all want to make changes in the world.
Every morning you wake up
you make positive and negative impacts on our world.
There's a lot of things going on in the world right now
that make my work with sea turtles look totally trivial,
things that - sea turtles, they're just reptiles that roam the oceans.
But there's things going on right now that are insane that really matter.
I promise you right now though,
if you left this building and walked to the nearest Starbucks,
you could find something in this city, in Manhattan,
where we do very well here that you could make a big difference in.
We all need to do something to protect our world,
and the only reason we're not all out there doing something
is maybe our lives have become a little bit too cushy.
I'll be the first to admit, I'm addicted to Netflix!
Some days I sit around in my boxers all day and watch amazing documentaries.
I saw a commercial on TV last night for 3D TVs,
and they spoke about how you can get the real feel
for this video game.
The real feel of a videogame?! That's totally crazy!
The real feel of something is when you go out there and actually do it!
That's my challenge to you:
when you leave here you do something that you haven't done before.
Open your eyes, walk around, even the city you're in, go places you haven't been.
Look for things you can make a difference
because I promise you once you find that one thing
that grabs you by the hand and doesn't let go, that's the hard part.
There are people who've done amazing things,
but it all can be traced back to one moment.
My challenge to you: Go find that one moment and make a change.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) (Cheers)