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[Stanford University www.stanford.edu]
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Announcer: This program is brough to you by Stanford University. Please visit us at stanford.edu.
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[applause]
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Steve Jobs: Thank you.
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[Steve Jobs - CEO Apple and Pixar Animation]
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Jobs: I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world.
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[cheering]
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Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.
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[laughter]
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Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it: no big deal, just three stories.
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The first story is about connecting the dots.
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I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit.
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So why did I drop out?
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It started before I was born.
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My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption.
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She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates,
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so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife.
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Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl.
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So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking:
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"We've got an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course."
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My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school.
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She refused to sign the final adoption papers.
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She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college. This was the start in my life.
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And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford,
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and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition.
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After six months, I couldn't see the value in it.
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I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.
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And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life.
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So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK.
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It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made.
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[laughter]
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The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me,
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and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.
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It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with,.
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And I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple
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I loved it.
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And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.
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Let me give you one example:
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Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.
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Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand-calligraphed.
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Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.
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I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations,
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about what makes great typography great.
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It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
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None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life.
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But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.
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And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography.
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If I had never dropped in on that single course in college,
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the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.
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And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.
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[laughter and applause]
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If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class,
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and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.
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Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college.
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But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
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Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.
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So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.
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You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.
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Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart,
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even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.
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My second story is about love and loss.
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I was lucky - I found what I loved to do early in life.
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Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20.
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We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees.
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We'd just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I'd just turned 30.
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And then I got fired.
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How can you get fired from a company you started?
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Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me,
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and for the first year or so things went well.
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But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out.
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When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him.
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And so at 30 I was out. And very publicly out.
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What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
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I really didn't know what to do for a few months.
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I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me.
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I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly.
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I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the Valley.
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But something slowly began to dawn on me - I still loved what I did.
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The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love.
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And so I decided to start over.
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I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.
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The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything.
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It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
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During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar,
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and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife.
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Pixar went on to create the world's first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.
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[applause and cheering]
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In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to Apple,
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and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance.
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And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
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I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple.
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It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it.
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Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick.
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Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.
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You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for work as it is for your lovers.
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Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.
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And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.
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If you haven't found it yet, keep looking and don't settle.
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As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.
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And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.
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So keep looking. Don't settle.
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[applause]
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My third story is about death.
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When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like:
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"If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right."
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[laughter]
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It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself:
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"If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?"
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And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
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Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.
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Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure
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- these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
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Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
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You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
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About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer.
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I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas.
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I didn't even know what a pancreas was.
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The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months.
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My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die.
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It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months.
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It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family.
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It means to say your goodbyes.
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I lived with that diagnosis all day.
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Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach, into my intestines,
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put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor.
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I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying,
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because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery.
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I had the surgery and thankfully, I'm fine now.
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[applause]
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This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades.
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Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
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No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there.
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And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it.
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And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life.
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It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.
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Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away.
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Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true.
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Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.
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Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking.
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Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice.
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And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.
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They somehow already know what you truly want to become.
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Everything else is secondary.
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[applause]
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When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation.
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It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch.
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This was in the late 60's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras.
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It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
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Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog,
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and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue.
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It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age.
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On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous.
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Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off.
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Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself.
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And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
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Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
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Thank you all very much.
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[applause]
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[Stanford University - www.stanford.edu]
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Announcer: the preceding program is copyrighted by Stanford University.
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Please visit us at standord.edu.
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