in Denmark there is a coastal city
called
Aarhus tidy and neat nothing too
remarkable or out of the norm until 2012
the local police department receives a
phone call from a desperate set of
parents their teenage son has gone
missing days later they received yet
another phone call from another set of
desperate parents their teenager has
gone missing and then they receive
another call and another within months
27 are reported missing vanished without
a trace
quickly the Police Department uncover a
chilling reason for this rash of sudden
disappearances the radicalization of
Muslim teenagers now in 2012 Syria’s
Civil War was giving rise to radical
Islamist groups and with it propaganda
and promises of a better future for
those who felt the victims of a Slama
phobia all across Europe thousands of
teenagers were running away from home to
fight in this war and these European
countries responded by prosecuting
suspects by confiscating documents by
shutting down mosques now here’s where
the story takes a remarkable turn
instead of responding with hostility
like these other European cities the
police department in Aarhus choose to
seek understanding and so they begin to
engage with the Muslim community in
Aarhus one coffee at a time and here’s
what they find racial profiling in
Aarhus is prolific the sentiment around
Islam is aggressive and negative and
it’s Muslim community feels violently
banished by the rest of the city now
given this learning the police
department decides to take a different
approach to public safety
they set up programs focused on creating
a sense of acceptance amongst those who
felt other in Aarhus and this strategy
works wonders so much so that many of
the 27 who had run away from Aarhus to
go to Syria decide to come back and
instead of being met with hostility upon
their return they are given the medical
treatment that they may have needed are
given help to find housing and help to
reintegrate into society now this story
reveals so many incredible lessons about
human behavior but there is one in
particular that has enraptured me for a
couple of years now and that is what can
happen when we come together across
lines of difference but in the grips of
fear anger and hatred coming together
across lines of difference is seldom the
option to which were drawn instead we
choose to isolate ourselves from those
who are different we isolate ourselves
politically over 60% of the country
lives in a land slide County meaning
that the presidential candidate that won
in that county won by over 20 percent we
choose to isolate ourselves racially
three out of four white Americans do not
have a single friend who is non-white
and we choose to isolate ourselves
religiously while there are over three
million Muslims living in this country
only one in four Americans have ever met
one now I get it it’s scary to engage
with difference after all when you open
up the newspaper it is so easy to see
how violence takes place at these lines
of difference whether it’s police
brutality and yet another shooting of an
unarmed black civilian or whether it’s
terrorism and radicalization or whether
it’s the imminent
rats of nuclear warfare it feels safer
to incriminate and banish then it feels
to sit face-to-face with those whom we
may fear but our survival of humankind
depends upon it here’s why back in the
day tools of destruction were limited to
sticks and stones
fast forward a hundred and thirty
thousand years and we have the bow and
arrow sixty thousand years after that we
find medals on the ends of our spears
and six thousand years later gunpowder
five hundred years after that TNT and
now just a hundred years later to this
very moment in time intercontinental
ballistic missiles we are living in an
era where with just the click of a
button hundreds of millions of people
could die now luckily researchers say
that one of the greatest ways to
increase our compassion is through
intimate contact and if we want
humankind to survive we have to increase
the rates of compassion our moral
restraint is what keeps our destruction
in check so here is the survival of our
species we urgently have to increase the
rate of compassion and so there’s this
psychological theory called the
intergroup contact theory which states
that the greatest way to scale back
hatred discrimination and fear is
through one moment of intimate contact
with someone from a group that we may
fear so I decided to test this theory
out for myself
in 2016 I felt so afraid of the hatred
that existed on the opposite side of the
political spectrum my parents are
immigrants and my father is from Iran
and this beer was very real in our
family so I was watching the news one
night and a political news reporter was
talking about how in Oklahoma it’s one
of the most conservative states in our
country because since the year 2000
every single county has voted red
choosing its Republican candidate over
its Democrat knowing I had to do
something other than give in to my fear
I decided to drive out to rural Oklahoma
where just two months prior a pig
carcass had been dumped right outside of
a mosque a devastating demonstration of
religious intolerance I was petrified of
what I would find but here’s what I
found instead hospitality kindness
friendship I’d be free I befriended a
much different manifestation of
conservative than what I had prepared
for and while I was there they met a
manifestation of Iranian liberal
cosmopolitan and millennial that
diverged from the narratives that they
believed it was a beautiful moment for
us to recognize that we were both so
wrong about one another and actually
what happened after that was that we
realized together that the the greatest
way to scale back hatred is through this
intimate contact so here we are we
urgently have to increase our rate of
compassion but it is hard it is scary it
is inconvenient it is uncommon if we
want to increase our compassion
exponentially we have to accelerate the
rate at which people can come together
safely and intimately with those who are
now I am a technologist and I see so
many ways that technology is furthering
this isolation but I find hope in what
technology is capable of doing
especially in accelerating the speed and
rates of coming together across lines of
difference so I started a non-profit
so where do you start when that’s your
mission if we wanted to bring people
together we decided we had to start with
people so we launched a public call for
stories and hundreds of people responded
they spanned the religious spectrums the
cultural spectrums the political
spectrums they identified is
developmentally different as physically
disabled as gender non-conforming some
were nervous some were afraid some were
confident some were longing for their
past while others were striving for a
better future and yet many felts other
in America there was see be a formal of
former crystal meth addict there was
Michael a gender non-conforming writer
there was a beer a Syrian refugee from
Aleppo there was Nancy a single mother
living on the streets there was been a
schizophrenic and bipolar teenager there
was Marie a five-year-old child who just
felt other at school now after recording
hundreds of individuals we decided we
wanted a way to share this experience in
a way that was intimate in a way that
felt real in a way that felt synchronous
and so we decided to use virtual reality
to simulate an eye gazing experience
with this mosaic of American diversity
so when people put on the virtual
reality headset they feel intimately
there in front of the other seeing and
being seen now I don’t know how many of
you have experienced this eye gazing
but this seemingly simple task requires
an incredible amount of vulnerability
because for just a couple of moments you
are seen exactly as you are for your
beauty and for your imperfections and so
research also says that if you are
placed face to face with someone that
you may fear someone that you may hate
or disagree with if you are met with
kindness and vulnerability then you will
start to feel the same way in return
it’s called mirroring in the fall we are
embarking upon this six-month journey
around the country to share this
experience with isolated communities and
to interview 2,000 individuals who
represent the wider spectrum of American
diversity and along the way we will
strive to answer one key question and
that is how do we continue to create
understanding across lines of difference
when we live in a world that feels so
isolated I don’t know all the answers
but I do feel like technology will be an
important ingredient we live in a world
today where it is much easier to
incriminate and banish because it feels
safer that way we live in a world where
responding to the radicalization of
Muslim teenagers is practically unheard
of but I think a change is coming I
think that technology can grease the
wheels of this transformation from
isolation to connection
I believe that technology needs to call
out to our courage to come face-to-face
intimately with someone entirely unlike
us and in that moment of profound
humanity we preserve our future thank
you [Applause]
called
Aarhus tidy and neat nothing too
remarkable or out of the norm until 2012
the local police department receives a
phone call from a desperate set of
parents their teenage son has gone
missing days later they received yet
another phone call from another set of
desperate parents their teenager has
gone missing and then they receive
another call and another within months
27 are reported missing vanished without
a trace
quickly the Police Department uncover a
chilling reason for this rash of sudden
disappearances the radicalization of
Muslim teenagers now in 2012 Syria’s
Civil War was giving rise to radical
Islamist groups and with it propaganda
and promises of a better future for
those who felt the victims of a Slama
phobia all across Europe thousands of
teenagers were running away from home to
fight in this war and these European
countries responded by prosecuting
suspects by confiscating documents by
shutting down mosques now here’s where
the story takes a remarkable turn
instead of responding with hostility
like these other European cities the
police department in Aarhus choose to
seek understanding and so they begin to
engage with the Muslim community in
Aarhus one coffee at a time and here’s
what they find racial profiling in
Aarhus is prolific the sentiment around
Islam is aggressive and negative and
it’s Muslim community feels violently
banished by the rest of the city now
given this learning the police
department decides to take a different
approach to public safety
they set up programs focused on creating
a sense of acceptance amongst those who
felt other in Aarhus and this strategy
works wonders so much so that many of
the 27 who had run away from Aarhus to
go to Syria decide to come back and
instead of being met with hostility upon
their return they are given the medical
treatment that they may have needed are
given help to find housing and help to
reintegrate into society now this story
reveals so many incredible lessons about
human behavior but there is one in
particular that has enraptured me for a
couple of years now and that is what can
happen when we come together across
lines of difference but in the grips of
fear anger and hatred coming together
across lines of difference is seldom the
option to which were drawn instead we
choose to isolate ourselves from those
who are different we isolate ourselves
politically over 60% of the country
lives in a land slide County meaning
that the presidential candidate that won
in that county won by over 20 percent we
choose to isolate ourselves racially
three out of four white Americans do not
have a single friend who is non-white
and we choose to isolate ourselves
religiously while there are over three
million Muslims living in this country
only one in four Americans have ever met
one now I get it it’s scary to engage
with difference after all when you open
up the newspaper it is so easy to see
how violence takes place at these lines
of difference whether it’s police
brutality and yet another shooting of an
unarmed black civilian or whether it’s
terrorism and radicalization or whether
it’s the imminent
rats of nuclear warfare it feels safer
to incriminate and banish then it feels
to sit face-to-face with those whom we
may fear but our survival of humankind
depends upon it here’s why back in the
day tools of destruction were limited to
sticks and stones
fast forward a hundred and thirty
thousand years and we have the bow and
arrow sixty thousand years after that we
find medals on the ends of our spears
and six thousand years later gunpowder
five hundred years after that TNT and
now just a hundred years later to this
very moment in time intercontinental
ballistic missiles we are living in an
era where with just the click of a
button hundreds of millions of people
could die now luckily researchers say
that one of the greatest ways to
increase our compassion is through
intimate contact and if we want
humankind to survive we have to increase
the rates of compassion our moral
restraint is what keeps our destruction
in check so here is the survival of our
species we urgently have to increase the
rate of compassion and so there’s this
psychological theory called the
intergroup contact theory which states
that the greatest way to scale back
hatred discrimination and fear is
through one moment of intimate contact
with someone from a group that we may
fear so I decided to test this theory
out for myself
in 2016 I felt so afraid of the hatred
that existed on the opposite side of the
political spectrum my parents are
immigrants and my father is from Iran
and this beer was very real in our
family so I was watching the news one
night and a political news reporter was
talking about how in Oklahoma it’s one
of the most conservative states in our
country because since the year 2000
every single county has voted red
choosing its Republican candidate over
its Democrat knowing I had to do
something other than give in to my fear
I decided to drive out to rural Oklahoma
where just two months prior a pig
carcass had been dumped right outside of
a mosque a devastating demonstration of
religious intolerance I was petrified of
what I would find but here’s what I
found instead hospitality kindness
friendship I’d be free I befriended a
much different manifestation of
conservative than what I had prepared
for and while I was there they met a
manifestation of Iranian liberal
cosmopolitan and millennial that
diverged from the narratives that they
believed it was a beautiful moment for
us to recognize that we were both so
wrong about one another and actually
what happened after that was that we
realized together that the the greatest
way to scale back hatred is through this
intimate contact so here we are we
urgently have to increase our rate of
compassion but it is hard it is scary it
is inconvenient it is uncommon if we
want to increase our compassion
exponentially we have to accelerate the
rate at which people can come together
safely and intimately with those who are
now I am a technologist and I see so
many ways that technology is furthering
this isolation but I find hope in what
technology is capable of doing
especially in accelerating the speed and
rates of coming together across lines of
difference so I started a non-profit
so where do you start when that’s your
mission if we wanted to bring people
together we decided we had to start with
people so we launched a public call for
stories and hundreds of people responded
they spanned the religious spectrums the
cultural spectrums the political
spectrums they identified is
developmentally different as physically
disabled as gender non-conforming some
were nervous some were afraid some were
confident some were longing for their
past while others were striving for a
better future and yet many felts other
in America there was see be a formal of
former crystal meth addict there was
Michael a gender non-conforming writer
there was a beer a Syrian refugee from
Aleppo there was Nancy a single mother
living on the streets there was been a
schizophrenic and bipolar teenager there
was Marie a five-year-old child who just
felt other at school now after recording
hundreds of individuals we decided we
wanted a way to share this experience in
a way that was intimate in a way that
felt real in a way that felt synchronous
and so we decided to use virtual reality
to simulate an eye gazing experience
with this mosaic of American diversity
so when people put on the virtual
reality headset they feel intimately
there in front of the other seeing and
being seen now I don’t know how many of
you have experienced this eye gazing
but this seemingly simple task requires
an incredible amount of vulnerability
because for just a couple of moments you
are seen exactly as you are for your
beauty and for your imperfections and so
research also says that if you are
placed face to face with someone that
you may fear someone that you may hate
or disagree with if you are met with
kindness and vulnerability then you will
start to feel the same way in return
it’s called mirroring in the fall we are
embarking upon this six-month journey
around the country to share this
experience with isolated communities and
to interview 2,000 individuals who
represent the wider spectrum of American
diversity and along the way we will
strive to answer one key question and
that is how do we continue to create
understanding across lines of difference
when we live in a world that feels so
isolated I don’t know all the answers
but I do feel like technology will be an
important ingredient we live in a world
today where it is much easier to
incriminate and banish because it feels
safer that way we live in a world where
responding to the radicalization of
Muslim teenagers is practically unheard
of but I think a change is coming I
think that technology can grease the
wheels of this transformation from
isolation to connection
I believe that technology needs to call
out to our courage to come face-to-face
intimately with someone entirely unlike
us and in that moment of profound
humanity we preserve our future thank
you [Applause]
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