Transcriber: Capa Girl Reviewer: Fran Ontanaya
Hello.
This video just now was a wonderful introduction
to what I wanted to speak to you about today — veg.
No, it was actually the second video. Because I wanted to talk to you about
how you can combine two things that always drove me around,
and that was how can you have fun on the one hand
and still somehow better the world whilst you're at it.
So, if we look at the first bit.
How do you manage to better the world?
How can you change behavioral patterns
like the chap told us in this weekday veg thing?
In short, how do you get people from driving
one of the big ones to one of the little ones?
Or how do you get people to go from a burger to a salad?
Now historically, there was one very simple approach to that
and that was shock and awe if you wish.
And all of you probably know it, it doesn’t really work very well.
You do it if there is really someone standing with a stick,
but otherwise you are not really bothered.
Now, this man had a slightly more subtle approach.
He is Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey.
Atatürk was a very secular man,
and he thought that for a modern state to succeed,
it was absolutely essential
that religion didn't play any part in that state.
Now, looking at this, this is simple, right?
So what he wanted to do is — he thought,
"In order to achieve this in society, I need to make sure
that people don’t run around with religious symbols."
And this is not only limited to veils or anything like that,
this could apply to anything.
How do you get a Muslim country — How do you get people to stop wearing a veil?
He made — and this is a anecdote, I couldn’t prove it — but he made a law.
And under this law he made it obligatory
for prostitutes to wear a veil.
Imagine if every pedophile in this country would be obliged to drive a Range Rover.
The carbon footprint of Premiership footballers would go down rapidly, I swear.
So, basically what this shows us is that stick works.
But there is no carrots in there, right?
Because Ataturk's approach
was slightly more subtle than that "Litter and Die!" sign.
But he's still using the stick.
He's still using a negative impact on people if they don't comply.
Where's the fun in that?
Because that was what I would always try to do.
I thought, what is life if you can't have fun?
Now, simple little problem for parents.
You'll be there one day maybe.
So you have this room, and how do you get
— it's probably a boy's room, whatever —
How do you get your son or daughter to clean it up?
Rules do not tend to work,
I know that from when I was a kid
and I know that from being a dad now. It doesn’t work.
Now if one of these two — depending on your sexual orientation —
were to come down to visit.
I'm sure that room would clean up itself in no time.
So basically we know carrots work.
Right? Now why is that so?
Because it might be a long shot with Sienna Miller and whoever the other guy was —
But you know — It's a positive driver to do that.
And things giving you stuff — if you do something,
you know, they are old.
We've seen them, you find them on the back of cereal packets.
Weight Watchers tries that.
You probably all know the Caffé Nero and things like that.
But it's a little lame, it's a little boring.
It's sort of, you know, it doesn’t really drive you on.
I never collect these Nero things because I tend to forget them.
Here, however, is a slightly more creative way of instilling fun
and achieving something good at the same time.
This is a staircase at a subway station in Stockholm.
So what they did is, they kitted it out like a piano keyboard.
And if you watch very closely — I’m not sure if you can see it on the slide —
but you'll see a couple of cables sticking out on the side
because what they also did is put sensors underneath.
And then they connected it to a sound system.
And when you would walk across those stairs
it would actually sound like a piano.
We all know it's healthier to use the stairs
than it is to use that escalator that is right next to it,
and people rarely ever do it.
Use of that staircase increased 68%.
No one actually said anything, there was no sign anywhere.
There weren’t people telling you what to do
there weren't people telling that you would die of heart attacks, and obesity and whatnot,
unless you would walk the stairs, but it was fun doing it so they did it.
Very similar thing —
Couldn’t find the high resolution photo of this, unfortunately,
it's a bottle bank, a normal bottle bank,
But they put a little arcade machine on top.
So you get a high score
and then these lamps you see on top of those holes
would flash up at random intervals.
And so the quicker you would throw your bottle into that hole
where the lamp was flashing, the higher your score was.
There was another bottle bank just down the road,
apparently over 80% of people used this one.
Why? Because it's fun.
This was one of the coolest things I've seen.
This is the dashboard of the Ford Fusion Hybrid.
The US model.
And besides being a very fancy dashboard,
because it's on a hybrid car,
it has one thing that you don’t normally find on a dashboard.
And that’s this little plant there in the corner.
Now, what that does is, it thrives or withers depending on how you drive.
So the more economical you drive the more the plant thrives.
You put the pedal to the metal it starts to wither.
It probably never really dies because Ford wouldn’t want that.
A couple of months back I was in San Francisco and I stepped into a cab.
that was one of those cars and I was so excited about this
because I had read about this thing
and I had seen a couple of things about it. So I asked the cabbie,
"Now besides this being a very cool gadget, does it actually do something?
And he said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. I actually do look.
It's like a tamagochi in my car and I'm quite taken to it
so I want it to do well.
Now, all these things, you think, "Well they are quite cool,
but what do they do in the longer term, on the larger scale?"
Now, what I did then is —
I thought, lets look at this tamagotchi in the car and let's see what it does.
There's 850 million cars in the world, roughly.
I assume that the average mileage would be 20,000 miles per year.
And I reckon this will include everything
from Australian road trains going up and down the country
to my good self who rarely ever drives.
Now, the cabbie said he would save roughly 5 mpg
simply because this little plant thing
— he didn’t want to see it whither.
That would equate to an annual saving of nearly 61 billion gallons.
And that equals 56% of Saudi Arabia’s annual oil output.
All because of a little gamey planty thing — tamagochi, digital toy in your car.
Of course it's a bit distorted because it would require
that every car in the world would run around with one of those things.
But nonetheless the overall number is quite staggering.
So I thought, "Ok. What more is there?"
This is fun stuff and with a bit of creativity
and engineerity you can probably come up
with a couple of these cool things.
But there are more tools, if you wish,
there are positive drivers,
that — I think — work.
So, 'Who's a fan of...?' I am not talking of screaming or whatever.
I want you to stand up whenever a term comes up that might apply to you.
OK? Ready?
And it's running through quick.
Ok. So. Football, Rugby, Cricket.
'X factor.'
'Next Top Model.'
'Britain's Got Talent.'
Tennis. Golf. Netball, Basketball. Formula One Racing.
'X games.' 'Mega-Ramp.'
All the Red Bull stuff.
Olympics. Figure skating. Come on, there must be figure skaters here.
'The Boat Race.' 'Eggheads.'
'Angry Birds.'
'X box Live Arcade.'
'Strictly Come Dancing.'
So by now everyone should have stood.
And the reason is all these things have one little thing in common.
They are all about competition in one way or another.
It is, you either watch it or you participate in it.
But it is about competition.
And that concept isn’t actually new.
[Slide: Sofia Loren staring at Jayne Mansfield] (Laughter)
Now here is another tool.
All these things I just described they work much better with your friends.
Even if you don't tweet.
Everything works better with friends.
With groups that matter to you,
where you actually care what the people
within this group think, feel, do.
And sometimes we have a lot of friends.
It's even more fun.
So here is another one, that actually starts combining these things.
Do you know what this is?
— There is a mayor of Fallibroome, I know that. —
These are icons from a little application called Foursquare.
You might have read about this, it went through the press a lot.
And it's a little app on iPhone and Android and whatnot phones
that allows you to "check in" a place.
And it can be a pub, a school, whatever it is.
And that’s really it, that’s what you do.
Now, they gave it a little twist.
Because the person who checks in most in any particular venue becomes its mayor.
So you get that little crown.
And there’s a couple other awards that you can achieve.
Now, I trained as a lawyer originally
and I still have a couple of lawyer friends.
You know these guys who are very sincere with their dark suits and all the rest of it.
One of them is a corporate partner in a big London law firm,
the other runs HR for a large bank.
Both of them changed their way to work
so they could check in in the morning in their favorite pub
because they're competing for the bloody mayorship.
And it might be only a little anecdote,
but again – something fun changed the behavioral pattern.
On a slightly more serious note, the Nike folks have —
you know, you get this Nike+ system
where you buy shoes and you put this GPS thing into your shoe
and there’s an iPhone app for it and you can share it on Facebook.
Now you guys probably all are incredibly fit,
when you get my age, every one of my friends
who post something of their Nike+ run on Facebook
gets the most encouraging comments that you could possibly imagine.
"Way to go buddy!" – "It's only another 2 miles to get the half marathon!" etc.
Which does what? It's a positive driver to keep him going, right?
Now, another thought — I need something about schools here.
Now, this is professor Lee Shelton and he's a professor in Indianapolis.
And I'll tell you in a moment of what.
But he did one thing. He thought this whole bloody grading system,
B, A star, is ancient and doesn’t really do much,
so he replaced normal school grades by XP
Experience points. You level up.
Now, he's a professor of game design,
but what it did to his university course,
and he measured this over a couple of years,
it was, attendance was up, performance was up,
achievement was up and that was across the board, all the students.
There’s this one little thing
which in his case of course was a rather obvious one
because when you study game design you probably know exactly what XP are.
But again he used a positive driver to change behavior,
no pressure at all.
Just, you know, by adding a little bit of fun, by adding a bit of positive driver to it.
So these are the main tools we have in that respect
we know the carrot works, we have the competitive piece
and we have the relation and connection to friends.
And now imagine what you could do if you applied it
to any of life's little issues
and of life's big issues if you think of the cause
you know, healthy eating,
speeding or not,
using public transport,
the littering thing,
similar.
There’s so much you could do with that.
What's next?
That’s probably up to you guys to come up with.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)