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Actually, we inspire our next generation every day by our actions. It's the teachers who teach. It's the parents who parent. It's the leaders who engage young people. It's our colleges and universities that reach out and spend time with younger people. People lead -- people are inspired by actions.

The Internet inspires people all the time; 500 million TED talks have been watched from TED.com. That inspires people. Nobody watches those talks to do better on an exam, generally speaking. They're inspirational.

We inspire people at our churches and synagogues, when we talk about humanist values. We inspire people when we teach the history of our nation and where we come from and how we got here. We inspire people through selfless acts day in and day out. Kids aren't stupid. They're inspired by real things, real people doing real things.

Every one of us has a responsibility to inspire people, and when we don't, we lose. I think as a nation we're doing pretty good. There are more people in school than ever before. I was reading the other day that the debt from colleges and universities, our educational debt passed $1 trillion, which is greater than the debt from credit cards. I said, "You know, that's pretty damn good."

As a nation, we owe more for our education than we owe for all the things we've bought on credit cards. Now some people might decry that and say, "That's just terrible! We're spending too much on education!" That may be true; the value we're getting for our $1 trillion is up for debate. But the fact that every one of our citizens have voluntarily taken loans in order to learn more and invest in themselves because they believe in the future of themselves and their country, as opposed to going out and getting a job after high school, that's a testimony that we've inspired our youth to believe that education matters.

We've inspired our people to believe that it's more important to have college debt than it is to have credit card debt. OK, we can have discussions about the levels of things, but that sounds like pretty good news.

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Well, that's another key answer to your earlier question about what it takes to replicate Silicon Valley. A major defect in a bunch of the cities that aspire to be Silicon Valley is their attitude toward the people who do Silicon Valley-type things. Cambridge, England, when I was there, was wondering why they had 600 small companies and no big ones. And after a year of dinner and tea, we concluded it wasn't because English people are stupid, or there's no money, or they don't know how to market. We went through the list of all the reasons why Cambridge -- which has changed, by the way.

The reason was that in Cambridge, England, business was not a respectable thing to do. The best students went into government service, and you can't have Silicon Valley with an attitude like that. Boston has a case of this. The most esteemed people in Boston are professors and doctors, not entrepreneurs, and the Boston Globe, with the exception of one or two key reporters, routinely savages businesspeople. So being an entrepreneur in business here in Boston is not quite as revered as you will find in Silicon Valley.

And since you mentioned Michael Dell, I live in Austin, and Michael's a friend of mine, and one of my heroes. I'm going to fix this: Austin reveres, to some extent, Michael Dell, but not because of the $60 billion company that he runs in their midst. It's because he gives money to charities. He's a very generous, philanthropic fellow. That's what they admire him for, not Dell Computer down the street with $61 billion a year in revenue. That's broken. Austin needs to revere its entrepreneurs more than it does.

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I've had occasion to think about that a lot lately, because these are dark times in many respects. I've got three daughters in their 20s. We had an interesting Thanksgiving dinner here. My kids were here, and a lot of their friends were here, and we were going around talking about what we were grateful for and what frightened us, and I was trying to -- I was so inspired by the presence of these young people who were so alert and funny and creative, and I felt this sense of grave responsibility in having participated in giving them a world that didn't look like it was necessarily inhabitable.

But, you know, I spent the first 40 years of my life assuming that the human race sometime in my lifetime was going to incinerate itself, that it was just a foregone conclusion that somebody would make a mistake with one of these warheads one day, and that would be the ball game. Damn it. The system that we had that was so delicately balanced that it had enough lethal force to eliminate terrestrial life -- would be triggered. And that didn't happen. And I don't think it will happen. So I spent 40 years under the cloud of a horror that makes global warming seem like a good start. And I think that we will figure it out. I couldn't have seen how that was going to get sorted.

In fact, I was in Germany in 1989, and nobody thought that the wall was going to be down by Christmas. I mean, it was going to be there forever. So I said, "You have to take into consideration the fortuitous possibilities, because they're always there." And the world seems to be going to hell in a hand basket for the entire length of recorded history and somehow hasn't gotten there yet. I look at life as a human being as being kind of a zero-sum game.

The things that you love and care about -- many of them go away. Other things come. I know this: that we don't know what's really going to happen. But I know that even if we're headed toward catastrophe, my trip from here to catastrophe is going to be a lot easier to bear if I'm preceding with the assumption that somehow it's going to be all right. It's kind of like Pascal's wager. Pascal bet there was a God because if there wasn't one, he hadn't lost anything. I bet we're going to figure it out. This doesn't mean I'm going to try to help figure it out. But I think we're going to be OK.

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I think that people are inspired by impact and the ability to make progress. It's sort of interesting. I remember reading a study from a few years ago where they talked about what makes people happy in their jobs, which is kind of like asking what makes people happy day to day.

They found that salary, promotions, all of those things are important. But what makes people the most excited is, can they make progress with their job every day? And do they feel like the work that they do matters, that there's a chance that it could have an impact on someone or on the world?

I think that if you can point out to a person that, "Hey, if you take on this role, or if you take on this project, you're set up for success; you're set up for progress; you're going to be able to build something or be able to get something out. We know this is important. We want to release something or build something here." Or if you're a woman entering the field, "Yes, this is an exciting place to be for anyone, man or woman. There are a lot of things that we can do. There are a lot of ways to have an impact." I think those are things that get people really excited.

I think that the arguments for why people should do something are almost always around the ability to make progress and actually get to a really good outcome, as well as the ability to have an impact.

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I'm often asked to give inspirational talks to young people, high school students, and young college students. And what I do is I basically describe my life journey as an example of someone who got into this field and has had enormous gratification in participating in it. I start off with some life lessons -- the turning points and the lessons I learned along the way.

One of the first turning points for me was as a 6-year-old kid when I opened a Superman comic book and I found a description of how to build a crystal radio. And I could build it without spending much money at all.  I could steal a headset from a telephone booth in the candy store down the street. I need an empty toilet paper roll. I needed some wire I could find. Even my father's old razor blade and a pencil lead could be used to serve as the crystal. All that was free. And then I needed a variable capacitor, which I had to go downtown to spend 15 cents on. My mother took me down in the subway. I bought the part and wired it together. I heard music -- no power, no batteries. And I said, "This is magic." That was a turning point in my life. I just said, "I want to understand how that magic works."

A little later in life, I was challenged by my Boy Scout scoutmaster to become an Eagle Scout. No one had done that in my troop before. And it was just outside my grasp. I decided to do it, and I did achieve the rank of Eagle Scout. That gave me the confidence I could achieve things, which are real challenges. Another life lesson is that once you achieve your first success, it gives you confidence you can achieve others.

A little later on in life, I was about to enter college. My folks couldn't afford to send me to a free college, CCNY.  Rather, I had to earn money, so I went to evening session for my Bachelors degree. That was a bit of a blow. The trick is you take that blow and you don't give up. You pierce through and you take on a challenge and you accept adversities of life without collapsing. Now it's easy to say that. How do you get a young kid to do that these days? It's harder. But the lesson is to recognize that people have gone through that path without getting crushed.

Then I went to MIT, got my master's degree, and I was ready to stop. The university convinced me to go on for a Ph.D. I decided to change my plans and pursue the PhD; that was a decision I never regretted.  The lesson is that the decisions one makes along the way are critical. I was ready to do research at MIT when I finished my graduate work. However, UCLA offered me a faculty position, all the way across the country in California. In those days, that was an enormous journey. Who lived in California? Certainly none of my relatives. Nevertheless, I decided to take a job that was paying half of what I could have earned at MIT. And the reason I could do that is because MIT Lincoln Lab, where I was planning to work, said, "Try it. If you don't like it, come back. So take a chance."  Opportunities will arise, I'm telling these young people. Don't stick to your game plan if an opportunity comes along that's worthwhile. Be willing to change and adapt and be flexible. When I came to UCLA, the first thing that happened is that nobody wanted to do networking. Nevertheless, I pursued networking technology research. This was another lesson for young people.  Stick to your convictions and something good will come along. But it means perseverance.

By the way, as another point, there's no science or academics or mathematics in my family background. You don't need that kind of crutch or background to succeed in a new field. You carve your own way. Look for what you want. Don't let others tell you what to do. If they offer you opportunities, try them. But listen to your own melody. And everything you do, do well because you never know if it's important. A good example was when we sent that first message; I had no idea but it was indeed a turning point. Nobody knew it was important but we did it well. We carefully documented as far as we could. We made sure we got the technology to work. Don't do anything sloppy.

As a last lesson, don't ever take a job that you don't like. They will never, ever pay you enough to take on a job you don't enjoy. Life is too short. There's too much fun to be had.

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I think everyone's very different. I think I'm an odd duck, and I don't wish my life on anybody else, although I'm happy the way it worked out for me. But I think there's a fundamental philosophy, which is to question authority and think for yourself, and that's actually a really hard thing to teach because a lot of people then ask you a question: "What should I do?"

You can't give them the answer, so it's kind of like a Zen riddle. You have to figure out a way to get people to feel confident and to be curious, to think for themselves. For each person, it's a little bit different. Part of it is to show examples, and part of it is to push people. I think in a funny way, leadership is a little bit overrated because I think that a lot of the really interesting stuff is happening in communities and networks, and I think a lot of it is about empowering these networks.

One of the problems about becoming influential or getting attention is, there's an unfortunate byproduct or side effect of a certain kind of pattern, but there are plenty of people doing really important things who aren't famous or aren't on your show, and that shouldn't be the goal.

I think the other key is to not be goal-oriented. Again, this is very Buddhist, but I think it's important to be process-oriented and to not have, "I want to make this much money. I want to be rich and famous," but to sort of figure out, "What are you? What are you excited about? Are you happy day to day?" If you happen to end up becoming financially successful or famous or whatever, that's fine, but I think you'll never be happy chasing goals, because you get there and then you adjust.

I think the fundamental nature of happiness, especially in the west, is a little bit focused on money or influence and things like that. I think the other thing that I would say is that goals should really be much more about, "Am I enjoying myself? Am I learning? Do I have a good process?"

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I'd say give them a world of possibility. I can get very sobered up by reading climate science, and it's my professional obligation to understand what's going on, so I do. But I don't spend most of my time there. The way I react, I would say emotionally, is I'll stipulate the dangers. I mean, I've heard them. And they can be 10 percent worse or 10 percent better. That doesn't change my motivation. What gets me up in the morning is seeing something that works, and understanding how by rethinking a problem or by reengineering a solution, you can have some spectacular gains.

Also by sifting through complex data and finding really interesting patterns, you know? That this idea of 10 policies matter the most. That was just such a great "aha" moment, if you look at the whole world of energy policy.

Now, I haven't done enough yet to communicate that. I need to work with other people. But I would say both with respect to the question about social media and inspiring young people, let them see the possibility. Let them play with the data. Let them invent new things. Get them in the labs. The more they do with their hands, the less they're doing abstract work and the more they're figuring stuff out, the more likely we're going to have a spectacular generation of leaders, I would say.

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One of the things I find the most frustrating is I just don't understand how the hell we make science boring. I mean, here's 90 percent of the stuff in the universe -- we don't know what it is. We call it "dark matter," we call it "dark energy." Here's 90 percent of the stuff in our genomes. We call it "junk DNA" because we have no clue. Here are discovery after discovery that fundamentally change our concept of how things are made, how time appears, what you can do, how you have sex -- name a topic.

It is an incredibly exciting time to be alive, and somehow we seem to be able to couch it in the most dry, obscure, boring, just horrifying language, to the point where there's the tribe that reads this, and then there's everybody else. When the science community doesn't go out of its way to try and bridge into ethics, to try and bridge into how things are structured, to try and bridge into, "What's the impact of these changes over here?" then either people will ignore them, or they'll be scared of them, or they'll be overwhelmed by them.

There has to be much more of a dialogue between our daily lives and scientists, and scientists have to get a hell of a lot better at teaching, at expressing, at asking questions of people who have other expertise at crossing boundaries. That's going to require a whole restructuring of education, part of which we're seeing in concepts like TED.

The whole TED idea is "ideas matter." All of a sudden, you have a global movement of thousands of TEDx's, of thousands of TED derivatives, because people don't want a 30-second sound bite, because people want to discuss an idea seriously, because people want to have the idea in 50 languages, because ideas, ultimately, matter.