Transcriber: Alina Siluyanova Reviewer: Denise RQ
If you look into ideas that are worth spreading
and look at the stories behind them,
you find people with magnificent obsessions.
You find people with brave hearts, vision, and purpose.
They go to work and get things done, we've heard some of them tonight.
I'm awestruck by Paul, and by Bernard, and what they do.
The Modern Olympic Movement was founded by a small old Frenchman
by the name of Pierre de Coubertin.
And the evolution of his ideas started out innocently enough
with an inquiry into how to improve children's education in France.
He was intrigued by what the British were doing
using competitive play and sport to invigorate their youth
filling them up with capacity to send them out into the world
faster, higher, and stronger.
He also studied the Ancient Greek culture
and how they embraced and celebrated a virtue called "areté".
And what "areté" is translated it is "excellence" inside you,
that is bound by the fulfillment of a purpose,
living up to your full potential,
a virtue that is embodying being the best that you can be.
So he took new ideas and he forged them with ancient old ideas into a fresh idea
that became an idea worth spreading,
worth doing, worth repeating for the last 115 years.
And from the very beginning,
he always believed that sport was a curriculum and a tool
for higher means and higher regard.
And I'm a living proof of that: I met my wife at the Olympics
and we have 3 daughters, so you can say it's an eternal legacy for our family.
But in any event, he also believed that competitive play and sport
brought out the best in us, brought our areté.
The whole American narrative, free, fair, open competition,
is our economic story,
it is what has made the American competitive greatness.
In some way, shape, or form - this is a very self-actualized audience-
we are all athletes out there in the game of life
trying to elevate our contribution to the team.
In his 2011 State of the Union Address,
President Obama challenged us as a nation to go win the future.
And he said we need to out educate, we need to out innovate,
and we need to out build our global competitors.
Last several years has given us pause though all over
into American "what" and American "how"
as we dig deeper into the "whys" and why we do what we do.
We're still the richest nation on earth by far,
but we're understanding this big distinction
between success and fulfillment.
As a 20th century athlete, America was the superstar of success,
and in the 21st century,
we're still trying to get our mojo back and find that areté and that meaning.
Obama said, "This is our 'Sputnik moment'."
And what Sputnik was it was the first Earth-orbiting satellite
put into the space in 1957 by the Russians, our competitor.
It was a competitive challenge which activated
the whole several decades worth of innovation
in all kinds of different ways.
Obama's reference to it, and what it represented
- it is a historical reference,
but what it means for all of us when you hear "Sputnik moment" -
it basically is a challenge to you to get your game on.
Every athlete knows that to compete at the highest level
you got to be healthy, and you got to be fit.
This is an ad that could've appeared last week as a public service ad,
10 years ago, 20 years ago.
This was 50 years ago, this was put out in 1960.
Then president-elect Kennedy wrote an article in Sports Illustrated,
and it was a referenced in a 15-year study
that showed the decline of American youth and in their fitness
- it's called "The soft American" -
and in it he referenced how the Greeks prized physical fitness
and he understood it as a prime foundation to a vigorous state.
And he said, "To realize our full potential,
we need to know what the Greeks know:
that hardy spirits and tough minds
resign within a sound body that is healthy, fit, and strong."
We cannot let this generation grow up to be spectators.
This is a new frontier,
and we got to get our kids healthier.
The unfortunate thing is we didn't really hear Kennedy's call,
and welcome to death, disease.
We've heard a lot of this, we know about this.
7 out of 10 people die in this country because of lifestyle related diseases,
diseases that are attached to your behavior.
We eat too much. What do we eat? What kinds of things do we eat?
We'll probably talk about that.
We need to move more. Do we smoke? Do we drink?
And in this world of abundance, how do we manage this mentally
and deal with the stress and the biochemistry that that creates.
These are diseases of a modern era.
And we've passed this torch on to our kids.
Born in the USA now means
that you have a shorter life expectancy than your parents.
One of two of our kids, your kids, my kids,
are going to get heart disease, 1 in 2.5 - cancer, 1 in 3 - diabetes.
And it gets worse, and the stats keep compounding.
Obesity, asthma, allergies, ADD,
their trend lines are like this, and they're going up.
These are the top 10 drugs that we bought in 2007,
under the underlying physical conditions that those top 10 drugs address
and try to band-aid not addressing root causes at all,
all these attached behavior and lifestyle, things that we do.
In 2010 alone, the top 20 drugs: we spent 130 billion dollars,
and they were virtually all lifestyle related diseases.
We're hemorrhaging our economic prosperity.
This was a stunning economic forecast put out by The Milken Institute.
And what they did was they grew GDP out over the next 40 years to 2050,
Gross Domestic Product,
with health care growing out at the same rate
with some modest improvements in the intervention of disease.
And then they played "what if".
They said, "What if we actually chose to stand up and win the future,
and invest in [health] care and invest in the ROI of prevention?
What would that economy look like?"
And they looked at the differential between those two forecasts.
I want you to imagine in your mind the accumulative net effect
that The Milken Institute came up out over the next 40 years.
I want to put that number in your mind.
And it's going to blow you away, when I put up this number.
A 100 trillion dollars of lost economic prosperity, lost economic output.
And for those of you who think that those people with diseases
and those people who are unhealthy choose that lifestyle,
and that's not me, understand
that the economics of it all connect us all.
We become the poster child for a lifestyle of excess,
and we're realizing sort of the economic triage of it all.
And it's become malignant, and it's factoring out all over the world.
You heard a lot about infectious diseases from the bottom five billion.
Well, as it turns out, 60% of all disease and death in the world
happens from lifestyle related diseases.
And the epic, global myth in public health
is that these are diseases of affluence, developed countries.
Turns out, 80% of all death in our world
occurs in urban communities, in ethnic communities
that have middle income, low income, poor income.
So, what are we supposed to do?
Where are we supposed to go when we fundamentally need as a nation,
as a country, now, which is in an urban world?
Where are we supposed to go
when we need a cultural transformation, a lifestyle transformation?
About four, five years ago, I was speaking at the National Mensa Conference.
And for those of you who don't know what Mensa is,
your IQ has to be in the top 2% in the world to be a part of this society.
Rest assured, I'm not a member. (Laughter)
I knew a physician who was, I got the gig,
the title of my talk I was very proud of.
I was talking about health and vitality.
The title of my talk was "Duh". Very proud of that. (Laughter)
Take away from that, I got to tell you, it was a twilight zone experience
because this audience had the intellectual horse power,
but they were probably the most unhealthy audience
that I've ever spoken to.
They had the knowledge intellectually, and what the takeaway was
is health in the modern era, health in the 21st century
is a learned skill, it is an adaptive trait,
it is an acquired doing,
and we have to train that over time into habit.
Intel, healthy active lifestyle in the literacy found and doing that
in the modern era, is placed on par with reading, writing, and arithmetic
in our public school system.
We're going to be forever disabling the next generation at best,
and at worst,
we're just going to be rearranging the deck chairs on our Titanic.
(Applause)
Translated, that's putting health and fitness class
back in the public education, K through 12, five days a week.
(Applause)
Because we know what the Greeks know, right?
We can't push rope on this though,
because this has to be a cultural mandate,
we have to make it so.
The spinal tap into the kids' "why" is culture, it's pop culture.
Pop culture has got to get involved in this.
We've got to romance children into healthy lifestyle and vigor,
it's got to be attractive,
it's got to be cool and hip in the way we roll as a society.
Here is what culture does:
culture takes and trains habit into existence unconsciously.
And that's what we need.
Melinda Gates spoke to this in her TED Talk when she said,
"We need to look to the levers of culture to transform public health."
America needs cultural leadership,
we need functional vocational training every day with kids to develop that habit.
Competition is not going to wait for us.
Faster competition, stronger competition, higher competition.
There are two kinds of competition:
there is competition that beats you down and breaks you up,
and there is competition that brings you to life,
brings up the best in you, and there is a joy found in that effort.
You know the Olympic Movement, "Citius, fortius, altius",
it's the motto of the Olympic Games,
"Faster, higher, stronger",
an organization for 115 years that was created out of one thing:
to use sport to build a peaceful and better world,
to put sport at the service of humanity,
to use it as a tool to go do something using competitive play.
I want to give you a case study of what I think is the finest execution
of a host nation taking on these games,
being the Stewart of that mission in a clearly defined way.
Lillehammer hosted the 1994 Winter Olympic Games,
and about a decade prior they set off trying to find their own Olympic "why".
And they studied their culture, they looked at their people,
and what was resonating, sacred, and of high value to them,
was the environment.
And what they did with the environment is they made it their areté,
they made it their reason for being.
And they imbedded it into the procurement, the planning,
the philosophy, the narrative, the decision making in the Olympic Games,
and they hosted the first ever Environmental Games.
And it stands as a legacy today.
Henceforth, every city that is bidding on the Olympic Games
has to submit an entire chapter that is their environmental plan.
They put environment into the Olympic Movement.
You think America could do something like that
if it decided to get back in the game,
to take on something that is of importance to us as a nation,
important to the world,
and use sport as a tool to go do something,
to carry a torch in a brighter way, which is the Olympic Movement,
the reason for being a brighter movement to the Olympic movement?
America finds itself trying to sort of get its game back,
trying to find its groove.
The hardest thing for an athlete to do is maintain that level of competitiveness,
to tap into that level of desire.
Dan Jansen was an American speed skater
who was the gold medal favorite at two separate Olympic Games.
And he fell, back to back, in two separate games,
and when he came to the third Olympics, he won a gold medal.
This is what champions do, they persevere.
Within the next year, America has got to decide
if it's going to get into the race for 2022.
The United States Olympic Committee has to make that decision.
And then they got to pick a city, and a partner, and a winning horse
that they think can win.
2013 - the race begins, 2015 - the city is selected.
So, it's on, make no mistake, it's on.
There is an effort under way in this town to carry the torch for 2015.
(Applause)
What if we, as Americans, could do the same thing
that Norway did with the environment?
What if we chose to steward health into our country,
to steward health into the Olympic Movement?
Can you think of a city that carries a healthy lifestyle and sport?
Can you think of a city that embodies vigor and vitality?
Can you think of a city that could walk the talk
through 2022 and beyond
and show the world how to roll in this conversation,
and how to become a cultural mandate for us as a community?
Bidding on the Olympic Games is what great cities do,
it's what great countries do.
If we're to have a good fortune to be selected as America's choice,
what if we used that as our "Sputnik moment"?
What if it galvanized our areté as a community?
And our willing resolved
to activate sport for a healthier generation,
to put sport at the service of the humanity,
and train up the whole generation in our backyard,
what if we became the first state, the first community
to reverse the trends of childhood obesity,
to reverse the trends of chronic disease?
We would be the first city.
That's like breaking the four-minute mile in public health.
A lot of people say, it's going to take a miracle
for all those pieces to come together.
Look, the miracle on ice was not a miracle, OK?
It was an execution in team around a mission, and a goal, and a vision.
I got your back, OK?
What is your areté? What is you led-Olympic moment?
What is your live areté?
I believe that elevating sport for a healthier generation
is an idea worth spreading,
a game worth playing, and a race worth winning.
It's my obsession, but I need your help to make it magnificent.
So, with that, team Mile High,
if you're looking for a pick-up game to play
and your seat is to sit on the sideline,
you got to get on the court, because it's game on.
Thank you.
(Applause)