how many of you were enthralled by your
history textbooks a few you stayed up
late at night under the blanket with a
flashlight reading history right how
many of you are history majors let’s see
your hands I’m going to take more than
five history classes in college or high
school okay for most of us though
history is a class we have to take to
graduate it is something that requires
us to memorize some dates and some
places and some names take a test and
get a degree or a diploma and most of us
know that history is an important part
of a well-rounded education and we may
have heard a quote some of the effect of
those who do not know history are doomed
to repeat it
but the actual quote is from a man named
George Santayana and in 1905 in a book
entitled a life of Reason he wrote those
who do not remember the past are
condemned to repeat it
two critically important words the first
remembering remembering is memory it is
a recollection of experience and the
second condemned condemnation implies
our guilt we are willing participants in
our own demise if we fail to remember
the past because history even what we
teach is our memory as a society it is
how we pass on the context of what we
learned the actions we took what led us
to that path and the results the real
human impact of those decisions and
actions it is that context that is
important that memory allows us to share
our greatest triumphs as a species and
it also allows us to recall and remember
our most shameful and horrible failures
so that as we
what took us to that place we can avoid
going there again as we look around our
country today and we see the rise of
fascism and ethnocentrism and hate it is
not a coincidence it happens at the same
moment that the very people who fought
those things in Europe in the 1930s and
40s are dying with them they take our
memory and without the memory of the
past we are condemned to repeat it
I want to take you further back though
there’s another echo in our history
right now in this country we are very
divided we all know that sitting here
today in fact pure research just
released a study that showed that we are
more divided now as a country than any
point in our history since the American
Civil War think about that for a second
the last time we were this divided as a
people we were literally killing each
other over it and at that point in that
war there was a leader who stood on a
stage and tried to make sense of it all
and tried to express why the price we
were paying was worth it for the promise
that is America that leader was Abraham
Lincoln and you know the speech he gave
was the Gettysburg Address many of you
learned this in school it was only ten
sentences long far shorter than what I’m
doing here on this stage if you know the
Gettysburg Address say the first line of
it with me four score and seven years
ago our fathers brought forth on this
continent a new nation conceived in
Liberty and dedicated to the proposition
that all men are created equal you
learned it you memorized it when you
learned it you probably didn’t
understand it with age and experience
you may have gained some context if you
studied history you may have understood
the historical facts and events that led
up to it but it wasn’t the true
experience of humanity you see we have a
tradition of teaching these things from
teacher to student to teacher in an oral
history that goes back before the
ancient Greeks
and somewhere in the 20th century
because of industrialization of the
requirements of a modern society we
realized we had to be more efficient and
so we distilled down the context and the
meaning of history into those things
that could be easily measured on a
scantron sheet and we lost the
experience of history it’s funny George
Santayana was a bit of a visionary he
said the great difficulty in education
is to get experience out of ideas ideas
are wonderful and we’re here to share
them today but experience is what
changes your behavior in the future it
is the recollections of your past that
changes your trajectory so how do we
give history students in modern
education experience the easiest method
would be time travel and I can’t do that
yet but I can trick port your mind you
see virtual reality is very interested
as a psychoactive technology research at
Stanford in their laboratory for virtual
reality and human behavior demonstrates
that your mind cannot tell the
difference between virtual reality and
reality and so we could put you on a
field in Gettysburg Pennsylvania
standing in the crowd and that
experience would become your memory you
would experience it as a personal
narrative you would understand better
context and emotion and human impact and
it would cease to be words on a page and
become real this is exciting for me as a
storyteller because there are kind of
three layers of narrative that we work
with the first is dictated narrative
most of you who tell stories understand
this one we have two events and a
cause-and-effect
the king died the Queen died of grief
that’s a story and that’s the kind of
story we tell very often and the brain
loves that story and it’s very
interested in it one layer deeper is
something called self-assembled
narrative and this if you watch Game of
Thrones or lost or West world as we feed
you little bits of information and
scenes and frames of reference in your
mind assembles the story
you build the story on the fly and every
time a new reveal or a new piece of
information reaches you you have to
rebuild the story and one layer deeper
this participatory narrative this is
where you are in the story everything
that happens to you is important to you
because it happens to you it’s the most
important thing right here on this edge
of self-assembled narrative and
participatory narrative this very
powerful point of immersion I only need
to make you the witness in history to
immerse you in it most of the people in
history we’re not actors they were
witnesses and so I can use it to change
your behavior because we know it works
already we use it to train medical
personnel to engage in complex
procedures that risk human life because
using virtual reality they build the
neural pathways and the muscle memory to
perform those operations when it really
counts based on their experience in
virtual reality
we used to Train first responders so
they are faced with difficult and
complex life-threatening situations they
can make mistakes where it does not cost
lives the brain doesn’t care that that
was virtual reality it remembers those
experiences and those outputs when it is
actually faced with a situation and so
those first responders remember their
past and are therefore not condemned to
repeat it
now I can’t just drop you on a
battlefield in the middle of a war
your brain can’t tell the difference we
would traumatize our high school
students they would all have PTSD and
while we’re using virtual reality to
treat PTSD I don’t think we want to fill
that pipeline just yet so I’m not going
to put you on Omaha Beach on d-day in
Normandy but I could put you on a glider
on the night before and you could sit
with men who are about to jump out of
that plane and listen to their stories
and hear why they care about what’s at
home and understand their fear and their
courage and why they are willing to make
the ultimate sacrifice to ensure fascism
never rises again on this planet and
that would become your memory you would
I know many of you are thinking this is
kind of high-tech stuff it’s probably
very expensive there’s a lot of hardware
and a lot of cost and you might be
thinking Virtual Reality involves
something like this but in fact with $1
worth of plastic lenses and the old
cardboard from a pizza box we can build
virtual reality headsets for the phone
you already have in your pocket your
phone is a virtual reality engine 85% of
American high school students have
access to smart phones today the other
15% would have them tomorrow if we
donated our phones instead of throwing
them out of recycling them for $30 we
can outfit an entire classroom with the
capability to view virtual reality
that’s the cost and it is difficult to
create virtual reality production in the
sense that what you know about movie and
TV and film the jump cut the pan shot
the close-up those things cease to exist
because in virtual reality the viewer is
the camera they choose what to see and
where to look however we have history on
how to tell those stories because on the
stage you use lighting and sound cues
and blocking to drive the narrative and
it may seem like it’s expensive to
produce this kind of content but I can
tell you that using off-the-shelf
components two years ago a small team
and I produced a four-minute spaceflight
experience based on Carl Sagan’s pale
blue dot we built the solar system at
scale and we wrapped each planet with
the scans from the public domain
available NASA files of those planets
and we built all of that in four months
for less than $20,000 the planet you see
in front of you this picture of Earth is
not a picture this is a CGI generated 3d
model that we built that’s the quality
that can be built with off-the-shelf
components so now what does that
experience like does it look like I
can’t put headsets on all of you right
now but I’m going to ask you to imagine
with me what that experience is so for a
second imagine putting a headset on and
when you open your eyes
you’re on a field in Gettysburg
Pennsylvania it is November late
November it’s cold won’t be above 60
today you’re standing in a crowd of
7,000 people who have come here to watch
behind us is a wall of cavalry horses
with mounted soldiers a complete line at
the back of the crowd they push forward
nudging us towards the dais and we can
hear the rustle of saddle leather and
the jingle of Spurs often the distance
in the middle distance we see the field
that for months prior held the Battle of
Gettysburg and while there are no
casualties remaining the flotsam and
jetsam of that terrible battle still
exists there are pieces of broken rifle
and pieces of wagon wheel and bandages
and strips of cloth and old canteens
still littered about standing the very
front row of the crowd right in front of
the dais is a line of men in bandages
missing limbs and eyes on crutches and
in chairs and they hold in front of them
a homemade banner on it is painted first
Army of the Potomac invalid division
these are the men who fought and were
wounded at Gettysburg and they stand and
look up at a president who sent them
into battle
Lincoln rises and walks to the center of
the stage he is a tall man he is a gaunt
man he has already lost one child and
another is sick he is not a very popular
president and he looks into the faces of
people asking why this division is here
what do we do next
why did we pay this terrible price then
he begins to speak the address that you
learned Lincoln had a high voice it
wasn’t low and resonant and he didn’t
use his hands to gesticulate he held
tightly a single piece of paper on which
the Gettysburg Address was written
although he did not look at it because
he had it memorized and he spoke to
Americans about how
promise of liberty and equality was why
we had to pay this terrible price he
spoke about how that promise is the very
thing that this war is being fought
about he spit the ground that we’re
standing on could not be consecrated or
made hallowed in any way further than
the sacrifices of those who fought and
died here and poured out their last full
measure of devotion and that by making
that sacrifice it demands the
responsibility in us as a country to
come together to heal divided to move
forward to build on the promise of
equality and Liberty that that sacrifice
cannot be in vain and to ensure together
that government by the people of the
people and for the people shall never
perish from this earth that moment that
experience that resonating truth of who
we are and where we need to go that is
the memory we can give your students
that is the experience they can carry
with them so that they remember the past
and we are never ever condemned to
repeat it thank you very much [Applause]