Hello. The title of my talk is actually a text that my wife sent to her parents as I was walking up onto the stage. And so it has a lot of meaning for me. Let me say something about that talk. What I did was I invited the audience to step into the shoes of average Arab Muslims living in Iraq. And I said, "Imagine that you went through two wars and sanctions and a whole host of - to watch your country in many ways just fall apart. How would you feel?" And then the radical part was I said, "Hey, actually, now imagine yourself in the shoes of the insurgency who is trying to kill Americans and kick us out of the country. How would that be?"
And so pretty quickly I started to hear from people around the world after it went up online. And one of the first people I heard from was a gentleman from Iraq. His name is Basim. And he said, "Hey, I watched your talk, and I don't know how Americans are thinking about this and what they're saying, but I'll tell you, you got it right. My friends and I - what you said in that talk is exactly what we say, and we're average Iraqis." And so I said, "Wow." I think I was very happy because I hadn't ever kicked the idea off of any Iraqis. And so I said, "Hey do you want to Skype into my class?" And he said, "Sure." And so every semester after that, he would come into my class and talk about life in Iraq and being a Muslim, and who he is, and just talk. Really just a nice guy, just an average, ordinary guy. And then shortly, at some point in time, not too long after it went up online, I heard from a team in Doha, Qatar. And they say, "Hey, we have some students in Gaza. Any students at Penn State that would like to talk to them?" So we said, "Sure." And so the woman who contacted us, her name is Luna, that's her on the right. And the woman on the left is my wife, Laurie. We're partners in all of this, in everything we do. And so Luna said, "Let's make it happen." So we did. And here's a couple shots from the very first dialogue that we did with students in Gaza. It was an absolute disaster, but we said, "Hey, let's keep going." And so we did. And before we knew it, Laurie and I were really immersed in a lot of projects in Doha. And we were flying back and forth quite a number of times over quite a few years. And here's a shot of Laurie on stage with Faruq. And Faruq then later became a friend. He's the very first person who watched my TED Talk. He's living his boss. And here's a shot of, a photo of Faruq and I with Sheikha Moza, her highness, the queen of Qatar, because she was funding many of our projects. And then these things morphed into lots of other projects. One, we brought Qatar youth into conversation to engage with young people in Ethiopia, and we found ourselves back and forth a couple of times to Addis Ababa. And then, as things would have it, often what happens in the TED world is maybe a curator at another TEDx hears a speaker and says, "Hey, would you be interested in coming down or coming to this - speaking at one of our events?" So I was contacted by somebody in Brazil who was the curator of TEDxLacador. And this is her on the right; her name is Ana. She's really a dynamic, loving, amazing person I had the opportunity to meet - and absolutely a TEDx junkie and the guru, I would say. And then, there I am on stage in Porto Alegre, in Brazil. Things go on, and I'm contacted by somebody from NATO, who says, "Hey I watched your talk. And I love the idea of trying to get Americans into the shoes of people in other countries." He said, "Why don't we start doing some things together?" He said, "The first thing is we have this three-day conference. Why don't you come down, be part of that?" So Laurie and I went down, and we facilitated three days of talking about civilian issues of war. That's him on the right. His name is Serg. This is a photo of us at NATO headquarters. And one project, as we kept working together and coming up with different things to do, one thing we decided, hey, let's build a conflict-prevention tool. Let's use facilitated dialogue and the video screen, and let's do conflict prevention, and, you know, maybe a pre-deployment tool with soldiers so that before they deploy into a land, they actually have an opportunity to speak with civilians in those conflict zones. And so we said, "Alright, let's do it." And so we applied for a grant for NATO's Science for Peace and Security program. And I needed a partner. And so I searched around to try to find a partner, and I did. I needed a partner in Afghanistan because we were going to work in Afghanistan, and then I found a gentleman. His name is Rafi. And we hit it off, and we said, "Let's do it." And before I knew it, Rafi and I flew into Dubai. And this is a photo of him three hours after we met. We were eating in a Pakistani restaurant in downtown Dubai. And here's a shot of us in the hotel room. We spent 48 hours in working on what turned out to be an 86-page grant proposal. Sequestered away. Just hammering this thing out. And we got it. And there's a shot of our first team meeting back at that same hotel in Dubai. And just not having any idea what's going to happen, but it just - we're going to make it work. And what the project was, we brought soldiers and cadets into conversation with young people in Afghanistan. And these are some cadets from the Dutch military. And then it was a whirlwind of traveling around. Here we are at the Polish Military Academy. Here's a shot in - this is from Kiev, in Ukraine. This is Laurie at a panel with some soldiers who had been - women soldiers who had been fighting in Crimea against Russians. Here we are at a French airforce base in southern France. This is a gentleman who we met who had been working in Northern Ireland for 30 years on dialogue with the troubles between Protestants and Catholics. The first person who really understood what it was that Laurie was doing. Then the team started growing, and here we are - we had a team meeting in New Dehli. It's with Afghans and Americans, folks working for us at World in Conversation. There we are in Dubai. And you can just see the energy in that photo, just the awesomeness of bringing these teams together. And then, at some point in time, we were invited down to Colombia. Colombia was coming out of a 50-year war. And some colleagues who later became friends, Fernando and Gloria, said, "You know, you really need to come down here and tell us about your work because we need to dialogue. We need to have an understanding of these things." And so we did, and this is a photo of our first team. We actually really dug in there. We have friends Fernada and Julie. We started this organization called Colombia Se Eschuche with them. And that's our first trained facilitators. So, I ended my talk years ago with these words. ["step out of your tiny little worlds and into the tiny little worlds of other people.] The idea is that if you step out of your shoes and step into other people's, and you do it again, and you do it again, and you do it again, transformation happens. Things happen. But what I didn't know is that something magical was going to happen to me. And that 10 years later, I would be a different person because I was going to experience for myself what I was suggesting that other people experience for themselves, which is radical empathy. I want to introduce you to a few people who really changed my life. The first one is going back to Rafi. So Rafi is my hero. That man. He does work that endangers his life every day because the Taliban give him death threats because of his work with women and his work with us. And I say, "Rafi you need to stop." And he says, "I'm okay, Sam, I'm okay. It's good." And he teaches me some things. And he says it's alright. And I say, "But, Rafi, you have so much to lose." And he does have a lot to lose. These are his daughters. And I can assure you, that his wife is every bit as beautiful as his daughters are cute. But yet he does what he needs to do, this man. Because it's right, and it is good. And he is trying to change his country. And every day I learn from him by walking in his shoes. And this man right here works with us. This is Mr. Rashidi; he lives in Kabul. And he video conferences into my class every single semester because he is the kindest, most gentlest, most loving human being that I have ever met in all of my life, in all of my travels. A Muslim man living in Kabul. I love this man. He is the closest thing to a manifestation of purity and of God and of love that I have ever met in my life. And early on, after my talk went up, I started hearing from our Iranian youth. And they were saying, "Hey, we just want to talk to Americans." And this guy was one of them, and he was a really happy kid, young man. And he just would talk and made friends with everybody. His name's Mazziar. After a while, he said, "You know what? I've got to come to Penn State. And the best way for me to come to Penn State is to join the military." But what he didn't realize joining the military is that he would maybe have some experiences that he wasn't prepared to have. And so he found himself on the frontlines in the war with ISIS. And he was broken. And so one day, I say, "You've got to come back into my class." So he did. And here he is in a conversation with two disabled American veterans. The gentleman on the left lost his leg in Afghanistan. And sitting at his feet, is his service dog. And the gentleman on the right was severely injured at a roadside bomb. And the three of them had a conversation. These three wounded vets on different sides of conflicts. And they empathized. And they talked. And it was the most amazing experience of radical empathy I think I've ever seen in my life. Because they shared something between themselves. Because they had all seen the horrors of war. And they all moved beyond it. And they connected. And the tears were real. And the experience was real. And then I had a chance to meet with Mazziar in one of our trips to India because we brought him there, flown there. And that's the first beer that we had together, he and I. And the woman who is standing beside Ana, her name is Mariluz. And she spoke at TEDx that day. And they couldn't really get her in the right stage, and they couldn't get her to figure out how she was going to tell her story, and they finally just said, "Listen, just go. Just talk." And she did. And 20 minutes later, there wasn't a dry eye in the room, including my own. She had this amazing story of resilience. And she now works with kids in one of the poorest favelas in Rio, where the police come and they kill with impunity. But she worked with kids because she doesn't want children to have to live the life that she lived. And so she and I now partner together on projects. And I fundraise for her, and she carries it out, and these are some kids, and that's a thank you card that they sent to my students who raised money for them. And who would have thought? And so in 2015, I got online, and I saw this message, and it was from Basim, and I said, "Hey Laurie, something happened to Basim." And so I put it into the Google Translate. And I went, "Oh my god." And what it says is "In the middle of the night, in the quiet of the darkness, two coalition missiles struck the homes of innocent civilians, taking the lives of my wife, my daughter, my brother, and my nephew. What kind of justice is this? May Allah accept their souls." So I called him immediately, and we got close suddenly. We talked, and it was real. Because these things don't happen to me. They happen to other people. This isn't a story that I'm ever going to tell. Other people tell this story. And so we continued to work together. We talked. And we forged a bond. And I watched. I had a front row seat to watch this man go from anger and hate to grief and sadness, to despair and depression and start to pull out of it and start to have these other feelings like love and compassion and forgiveness. I had a front row seat to a human being whose family was murdered by another country, go through a place of forgiveness. And so, I said, "You've got to come back and talk to my class, my friend." And he said, "Oh I can't." I said, "No, no, no, you have to." And finally, after a couple semesters, he agreed. And he did, and it was so powerful. The students - to hear this Muslim man who forgave in the purest of possible ways speak to them about forgiveness. And so immediately after the class, we took a collection - they did - and they raised $3,000, and they brought him here. And the very first thing we did when I invited him up onto the front of the room, is we took a selfie together. And that's us right there. The proudest moment of my entire teaching career. And then, the relationship grew, and my wife and I, in December of 2018, Laurie and I were in Iraq, we visited Basim and met his friends, and his mother, sister-in-law, and son, and then Basim now works for us. He's the global dialogues manager for World in Conversation. Here's a photo from a dialogue that we had just three weeks ago. These are students in Mozul. Mozul. Where the Caliphate was going to take over. But they're not there; now it's students. And the students are talking to American students in my class. Things change. And so I think about the theme of this TEDx, the "Continuum." Of these discrete series of events. They all appear to be very similar, and when you put them side-by-side, you can't tell them apart. But when you start at the beginning, and then you go to the end, they're really, really very different. And I think about my life these past 10 years, the radical empathy that I engaged in. I had no idea that when I stood on this red carpet 10 years ago, I was actually talking to myself about radical empathy. And I started here, and all these things were happening and people I was meeting, and I got to here. And I'm a very, very, very different person because of that. And that's continuum. And it's magical. And this carpet is magical. And this platform is magical. Things happen. It's a very powerful platform. It's a platform on which you can change the world. And if you're paying attention, you can change yourself. And that's what happened to me. I'm living testimony of that. And so when I think about the speakers today and all the people who are going to come out here, and they're going to occupy this red carpet, and they're going to give a talk, and I'll be sitting in the audience, and I'm going to be watching and thinking, "What's going to happen to this person in the next five years? The next ten years? Are they going to have an experience like I did? Are there lives going to be radically transformed because of the things that they said on this stage, right here, with this red X." And it's really exciting for me, as a person who has had his life transformed by TED, by this platform, to watch and discover, and I really can't wait to see what goes on in their lives. So thank you very much. (Applause)