Flipside futures: The talks of TED@BCG 2023

Today is good, but tomorrow can always be better. There are new possibilities for our future if we use our uniquely human creativity. In a day of talks and performances, 16 leading minds gathered to flip expected thinking on its head and map out how we might build a brighter future.

The event: TED@BCG: Flipside Futures is the fourteenth event TED and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) have co-hosted to uplift forward-thinking speakers from around the globe. Hosted by TED’s head of media and curation Helen Walters.

When and where: Thursday, November 16, 2023 at the BCG office in Paris, France

Speakers: Catalina Lotero, Adam Whybrew, Jessica Apotheker, Diarra Bousso, Hanjo Seibert, David Kwong, Sylvester Chauke, Annalee Newitz, Adriann Negreros, Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju, Slava Balbek, Paul Hudson, Beth Viner, Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak, Sagar Goel, Bonnie Hancock

Opening and closing remarks: Francois Candelon, the global director of the BCG Henderson Institute and TED@BCG 2018 speaker, welcomes the audience while Olivier Scalabre, the head of BCG France and TED@BCG 2016 speaker, closes out the day.

The talks in brief:

Catalina Lotero, purposeful designer

What might Latin America look like if colonization hadn’t broken the evolution of its ancient iconography? Catalina Lotero presents stunning images of “Pre-Columbian futurism” that infuse Latin American design with Indigenous symbolism — a testament to the power of aesthetics to rewrite historical narratives and envision new futures.

Adam Whybrew, depression truth-teller

We can’t get rid of anxiety and depression, so we might as well talk about it, says Adam Whybrew. He shares how talking about his own debilitating mental health struggles with his coworkers created unexpectedly positive outcomes, offering a comforting message of hope for those in need of support. 

Jessica Apotheker, marketing expert

Research shows AI is poised to explode marketers’ performance — but there’s a problem, says Jessica Apotheker. AI may make marketers more productive but, if not harnessed correctly, it might also homogenize and clog the marketing landscape.

Diarra Bousso, designer, mathematician

Growing up in Senegal, getting a new outfit for Diarra Bousso was never an impulse purchase; her clothes were made to order by local artisans and designed to last. Through her brand, Diarrablu, she’s working to bring this sustainable fashion model to modern e-retail, using digital tools to crowdsource designs, limit excess inventory and reduce overconsumption and waste.

Hanjo Seibert, economic crime fighter

Hanjo Seibert spends his time fighting economic crime, a wide field ranging from drug trafficking and human trafficking to fraud, cybercrimes, tax evasion and more. He explains how gangsters, criminals and terrorists launder their money through this shady underground economy — and how all of us can take small steps to make it harder for them to do so.

David Kwong, magician 

“We live in a time that’s more wondrous than our ancestors ever could have imagined, and technology isn’t the barrier to unlocking that wonder: it’s the key,” says David Kwong. He explores how tech elevates our capacity for bewilderment — and invites an audience member to the stage for some ChatGPT-powered magic.

Sylvester Chauke, branding disruptor

After years of brand building, marketing veteran Sylvester Chauke realized that his industry had sold the world on overconsumption, with devastating consequences. He shares how marketers could instead promote sustainability and responsible consumerism with “honest ads.”

Annalee Newitz, journalist, sci-fi author

“Escapist stories allow us to reimagine our relationship with the places we live,” says Annalee Newitz. Inviting you to the whimsical world of sci-fi, cosplay (short for “costume play”) and goblincore (an internet-born aesthetic that celebrates the “ugly” side of nature), Newitz shares why, sometimes, the best way to solve our problems is to escape them.

Adriann Negreros, change management expert

Nearly three billion people have frontline jobs: work that requires them to be in person, whether it’s as baristas, Uber drivers, factory floor workers or anything else. Adriann Negreros is on a mission to make these jobs more rewarding by getting employees what they need but often lack – like respect, better pay, more flexibility and safety gear that actually fits.

Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju, food systems advocate

Sub-Saharan Africa needs more meat consumption to solve its nutrition challenges, says Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju. Instead of building feedlots, she makes a case for scaling meat and milk production in the region by supporting its millions of nomadic livestock herders. 

Slava Balbek, architect, humanitarian

The Russian invasion of Ukraine forced architect Slava Balbek to rethink the nature of his craft. From a tool that develops localized blueprints to rebuild your home to the construction of comfortable, stylish temporary housing, Balbek and his team are exploring the healing power of architecture with a simple motto: “Dignity no matter what.”

Paul Hudson, healthcare innovator, in conversation with Lindsay Levin, the head of TED Countdown

Rather than resisting AI, Paul Hudson has welcomed the opportunity to let it completely disrupt Sanofi, the healthcare and pharmaceutical company he leads. In conversation with Lindsay Levin, he discusses how AI can propel daily decision-making, its impact on data transparency and the role it might play in decarbonizing the pharmaceutical industry.

Beth Viner, culture strategist

We often venerate dreamers: the innovators who smash through barriers. But for every dreamer, says Beth Viner, a team of doers works hard to transform that vision into reality. The best companies succeed by harnessing this synergy.

Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak, economist 

Economic models always seem to predict disaster, creating financial losses that could have been avoided if shoppers and business owners were more rationally optimistic, says economist Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak. He calls for everyone to be their own judge, evaluate the doomsday narratives with a careful eye and embrace the inevitable uncertainty.

Sagar Goel, skill-building strategist

People are worried that AI will replace them at work — but upgrading skills and lifelong learning can help. Sagar Goel shares insights from a partnership with the Singaporean government on a digital reskilling program that helped people gain experience for jobs for which they previously wouldn’t have qualified.

Bonnie Hancock, Ironwoman, paddler, record breaker

In 2020, Bonnie Hancock began paddling her sea kayak in a clockwise loop around Australia. It took her 254 days to circumnavigate the continent, breaking the previous world record by more than two months. She shares the ups and downs of her 12,700-kilometer journey — including brushes with crocodiles, sharks and hypothermia — and how she learned to find resilience and beauty in the toughest moments.

Preparing for the inevitable chaos ahead: Notes on Session 9 of TED2023

As we barrel into the future at breakneck speed, there can be a sense of perilous vertigo. How do we prepare for constant upheaval and change? The answer may lie in a combination of close listening, careful thought and inspiration from people committed to creating peace and progress. In Session 9 of TED2023, seven speakers and performers took up this mantle, exploring topics ranging from reproductive justice and the future of girls’ education to rethinking parenting and the end of life.

The event: Talks from Session 9 of TED2023: Possibility, hosted by TED’s head of curation Helen Walters

When and where: Thursday, April 20, 2023, at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, BC, Canada

Speakers: Angeline Murimirwa, Carlos Rodriguez-Pastor, Mark Edwards, Jessie Reyez, Sean Goode, Becky Kennedy, Alua Arthur

We’ve all heard the story of how girls’ education is as close as we may get to a silver bullet for making the world a better place. But there’s more that needs to be done beyond putting a diploma in a girl’s hand, says education activist and 2023 Audacious Project grantee Angeline Murimirwa. Asking so much of young girls places an unimaginably heavy weight on them to beat the odds on their own and make the world a better place without radically reshaping the systems and environment that oppress them. That’s where Murimirwa’s organization CAMFED comes in, helping to lift the burden and ease the pressure by providing a strong social and financial network of 250,000 women mentors and supporters who have made the same difficult journey. A sisterhood, if you will, that not only works but also pays it forward to those who walk alongside them. Murimirwa is living proof, she shares, as one of the first in Zimbabwe helped by the organization years ago — and look where she is now, as its CEO.

If Peru is to become a fully developed country, Peruvian businesses must lead the way, says Intercorp founder Carlos Rodríguez-Pastor, one of Peru’s financial icons. By partnering with companies across the nation, he’s implementing numerous programs to nurture the country’s growing middle class. In conversation with TED business curator Corey Hajim, Rodríguez-Pastor breaks down Peru’s problems into three barriers: education, health care and infrastructure. Working on the ground rather than in the boardroom, he’s found innovative solutions to these problems, partnering with companies to build better schools that are also profitable (which, he says, equates to sustainable), bolstering health care through Peru’s existing pharmacy system and leveraging Peruvian tax law to funnel improvement funds directly to local infrastructure projects.

According to reproductive health advocate and 2023 Audacious Project grantee Mark Edwards, almost half of all pregnancies in the US are unplanned, and — astonishingly — six out of ten typical birth control pill users will become accidentally pregnant over a span of ten years. These jaw-dropping statistics underscore the sobering fact that many pregnancies occur not because women aren’t using birth control but because they aren’t using the most effective type for their particular circumstances.  In fact, there are 18 FDA-approved forms of birth control, all of which vary in effectiveness for different women and, more importantly, aren’t all available to the women who need it most. Edwards believes contraception is a basic health care right. With his organization Upstream USA, he’s improving birth control education and access for women who lack adequate health care in a post-Roe world where contraception has become critical for family planning.

Speaking during a break between powerful performances of her songs “STILL C U” and “Figures,” singer-songwriter Jessie Reyez tells us she’s “made a profound discovery: we’re born, we grow, we die, and life is suffering.” Indeed, her own struggles with suffering led her to write her music, with roots tapping both sadness and hope. She says we all need to create our own solace from the ruins at our feet — or more succinctly: “Life is what we make it.” Mirroring the message of her spoken words, Reyez’s songs illuminate their painful roots, showcasing her raw powers of creation in sparsely accompanied vocal vignettes that are direct, immediate and often incendiary.

“Will you forgive me, no matter what I do, no matter what I say?” asked TED community member Sean Goode. He believes saying yes to this question provides the opportunity for greater connection, giving space to discuss different experiences and disagreements without harm. By providing grace, says Goode, we’re able to look past difficult histories and envision a more hopeful future together.

Every parent loses their temper, but what comes next? As with any relationship, clinical psychologist and parenting whisperer Becky Kennedy believes the best choice is repair: go back to the moment of disconnection, take responsibility for your actions and state what you’ll do differently next time. Where a parent’s lack of repair can force the child to form unproductive coping mechanisms seeped in self-blame, a 15-second intervention can foster healthy emotional regulation and teach effective communication. Kennedy offers straightforward guidance on how to repair, with tips on self-forgiveness, accountability and seizing the opportunity for growth in all relationships — no matter how big the obstacle may seem.

Just as it’s healthy and helpful to think about our lives, so too is it healthy and helpful to think about how they’ll end, says death doula Alua Arthur. As someone who provides non-medical, holistic support for dying people as well as their friends and family, Arthur spends a lot of time thinking about the end of life. The central question she asks people through her work is this: “What must you do to be at peace with yourself so that you may live presently and die gracefully?” By encouraging people to view their present life from the vantage point of a graceful death, Arthur helps them retrofit their lives, seeing clearly who they want to be and what kind of legacy they want to leave behind. Humans are meaning-making machines, she says. Rather than waiting until our deathbeds to figure out our grand life purpose, why not make meaning and magic out of the daily mundane? “The greatest gift of mortality is the sheer wonder that we get to live at all,” she says.

Breathing deep and embracing humanity’s full potential: Notes on Session 7 of TED2023

In the soul-seeking Session 7 of TED2023 a group of extraordinary individuals considered counternarratives to the doom-and-gloom that pervades much of modern media and sought to recalibrate our thinking on what it means to be human.

The event: Talks from Session 7 of TED2023: Possibility, hosted by head of TED Chris Anderson and Audacious Project Executive Director Anna Verghese

When and where: Wednesday, April 19, 2023, at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, BC, Canada

Speakers: Natalie Cargill, Sixto Cancel, Richard V. Reeves, Coleman Hughes, Anne Morriss, Kevin Stone, Sarah Jones, Sheena Meade

Performance: Singer-songwriter Maria Arnal lit up the TED stage, weaving together folk and techno-pop to create a dazzling soundscape.

The talks in brief:

What would you do with 3.5 trillion dollars? Philanthropic mastermind Natalie Cargill has used this thought experiment, grounded in thousands of hours of expert research, to investigate what it would take to actually solve some of our most pressing problems. With this amount of money, she says, we could tackle extreme poverty, pandemic prevention, climate change, nuclear war, runaway AI and more – with just one year’s worth of funding. Where would this money come from, you may ask? If everyone in the global top one percent of earners (i.e., people making $60,000 a year or more after tax) gave away just ten percent of their income for a year, we’d be there. Cargill’s point is that we’re not doomed to suffer through unnecessary and avoidable issues. “Huge problems can be solved, and philanthropy can be good,” she says.

As adults, foster youth are two times more likely than war veterans to experience and suffer from PTSD, says child welfare advocate and 2023 Audacious Project grantee Sixto Cancel. He shares his story of entering foster care at 11 months old, being placed with a foster family at nine years old and then, at 15, collecting enough evidence to prove he was unsafe in that home and re-entering the system. Eventually, Cancel was reunited with relatives who happened to live only 58 miles away from where he grew up, and while he was grateful, he couldn’t help but think about how different his life could have been had he been raised by people who loved him all along. With this in mind, Cancel founded Think of Us: a nonprofit dedicated to engaging with youth, parents and relatives to redesign foster care into a system where children are raised by kin in supportive and safe environments. He shares three urgent messages: (1) Children should be raised by their families and the majority of foster care should be replaced with kinship care. (2) We need to center those who have been impacted by the system when redesigning it. (3) We all have a role to play in this cause. “Together … we can literally ensure that millions of children are living in a home where they can say, ‘I am loved,'” says Cancel.

While researching gender inequality in education, social mobility scholar Richard V. Reeves made a surprising discovery: when it comes to a school without barriers, girls have the academic advantage. It’s not a question of intelligence; it’s simply that the part of the brain associated with organization and impulse control develops later in boys than girls — meaning doing chemistry homework can be a lot more difficult for male students. Reeves suggests a more equitable school system would start boys a year after girls and makes the case for hiring more male teachers — particularly in English, where more young men struggle — to give boys role models in the classroom. “The future cannot be female. Nor of course, can the future be male. The future has to be for every single one of us … We have to rise together,” says Reeves.

The percentage of Black and white Americans who felt good about race relations nosedived from 2013 to 2021. Given this concerning trend, writer and podcast host Coleman Hughes thinks we need a new racial paradigm. Our current fixation on racial identity — where “we let racial essences define who we are” — does more harm than good, he says. He advocates for rehabilitating a now-controversial ideology: colorblindness. Far from being conservative or white supremacist, as some critics allege, Hughes says colorblindness has its roots in the US antislavery movement and is the “best principle with which to govern a multiracial, multiethnic democracy.” But wouldn’t a colorblind approach render us unable to fight racism, gutting key policies like affirmative action? Hughes thinks replacing race-based policies with class-based ones would both reduce inequality and ease racial tensions. Class is almost always a better proxy for disadvantage than race, he says, and class-based policies are less divisive because they “do not penalize anyone for immutable biological traits.”

Leadership visionary and cohost of the TED Audio Collective podcast Fixable Anne Morriss offers five steps to solve any workplace problem, starting with curiosity. First, she says, ask questions that get to the root of the issue, being open to the idea that it could be you. Next, formulate a “good enough plan,” and then talk to those with different perspectives to build trust and improve your plan. Finally, honor the past as you set a vision for the future, recognizing what people don’t want to lose. In the last step, take action with urgency, effectively putting into place everything you’ve learned in the previous steps. “The most effective leaders we know solve problems at an accelerated pace, while also taking responsibility for the success and the wellbeing of their customers and employees and shareholders,” says Morris. “They move fast and fix things.”

From synthetic embryos to lab-grown skin, we live in a brave new world of stem cell advances. So why can it still take years to recover from a knee injury? When you tear your ACL, the stem cells in your body produce daughter cells called progenitor cells that orchestrate the body’s healing response. But this response only activates after the initial injury and can prove insufficient over time. By strengthening this response, orthopedic surgeon and TED community member Kevin Stone hopes to make ACL injury recovery a matter of weeks, not months or years. 

With chameleonic ease, polymorphic filmmaker Sarah Jones slips into and out an array of characters in a talk exploring cancel culture, which she defines as when people (both powerful and marginalized) are “silenced, excluded, disempowered and disinvited from the larger conversation.” Jones shares her own painful experience being canceled ahead of the release of her 2022 film Sell/Buy/Date, digging into the nuances of this much-discussed, often nebulous phenomenon. In her view, cancellation doesn’t improve the larger culture of inequality but instead creates more hurt and angry people. She thinks the solution to actually holding others to account is to start by being self-accountable — noticing any tendencies in ourselves that could be hurtful and trying to unlearn them — and then doing the hard work of trying to help others see the biases they may be blind to.

“For many Americans, a criminal record — even for a petty offense — can hold them back forever,” says Desmond Meade, introducing his wife, Sheena Meade, CEO of the Clean Slate Initiative and a 2023 Audacious Project grantee. Like many, her future was heavily affected by a minor conviction (bouncing a check to pay for her family’s groceries), and this was enough to bar her from housing and education opportunities for years later. Around 100 million Americans — or one in three — have an arrest or conviction record. More than 30 million of them are eligible for clearance, but fewer than 10 percent pursue it because it’s expensive and many don’t even know it’s an option. Meade makes the case for clean slate laws that automate the sealing of arrest and conviction records after people have completed their sentence and remain crime-free for a set period of time. In the last three years, she and her team have helped pass laws in six states, helping millions move on with their lives. With the Audacious Project, they’re working towards passing these laws in 50 states, so an additional 14 million people get a true second chance.

Open: The talks of TED@DestinationCanada

When we come together with open hearts and open minds, anything is possible. It was in this spirit that TED partnered with Destination Canada for a day of talks and performances featuring new ideas on living, seeing the world and reimagining our shared future.

The event: TED@DestinationCanada: Open is the first event TED and Destination Canada have co-hosted to spotlight leading minds who embody the incredible breadth and depth of Canadian culture. The event was hosted by TED senior curator Cyndi Stivers.

When and where: Thursday, February 23, 2023, at the TED Theater in New York City

Opening and closing remarks: From the Honourable Randy Boissonnault, Minister of Tourism and Associate Minister of Finance for Canada, and Gloria Loree, chief marketing officer of Destination Canada

Speakers: Alysa McCall, Azim Shariff, Normand Voyer, Matricia Bauer, Lori McCarthy, Paul Bloom, Cohen Bradley, Alona Fyshe, Rebecca Darwent, Michael Green, Cameron Davis, Jiaying Zhao, Kevin Smith and Kris Alexander

Music: In the verbal version of a dance-off, the Inuit duo Silla (made up of Charlotte Qamaniq and Cynthia Pitsiulak) perform the ancient art form of katajjaq, a type of Inuit throat singing found only in the Canadian Arctic. Later in the show, singer-songwriter Mélissa Laveaux delivers a musical treat, performing two mesmerizing songs alongside bassist Sébastien Richelieu.

The talks in brief:

As Arctic sea ice melts, polar bears are being forced on land – and they’re hungry. Biologist and conservationist Alysa McCall shares what to do when you find a polar bear digging through your trash and offers inspiring solutions for protecting both the bear’s shrinking habitat and their human neighbors.

Why do we think people who work hard are “good” — even if they produce little to no results? Social psychologist Azim Shariff calls this “effort moralization”: the intuitive connection we make between hard work and moral worth, regardless of what the work produces. He explores how this mindset plays out in our work environments — leading to things like workaholism — and encourages a shift towards effort that produces something meaningful, rather than just work for work’s sake.

Take a trip to Canada’s Arctic as natural product chemist Normand Voyer explores the mysterious molecular treasures hidden in plants thriving in frigid environments. These scarcely investigated organisms could hold the key to the world’s next wonder drug, he says — so long as we work quickly enough to discover them before their ecosystems are altered by climate change.

Adopted by a white family as a child, Indigenous artist and entrepreneur Matricia Bauer, or Isko-achitaw waciy / ᐃᐢᑯ ᐃᐦᒋᑕ ᐘᒋᕀ (she who moves mountains), lost touch with her Cree heritage. Beat by beat and bead by bead, Bauer reconciled lost parts of herself by exploring the songs, stories and crafts of her culture. On a decades-long journey of re-Indigenizing herself, Bauer recites a moving poem on the ways of eagles and hawks — and illustrates the power of embracing one’s true self.

In a love letter to her native Newfoundland and Labrador, cultural storyteller Lori McCarthy shares the secret magic of this Canadian province: the rich connection between the people, the land and the food. Sharing a glimpse of the tastes, sights and generations-old stories that thrive there, McCarthy invites you to become a part of wherever you go — which could start with something as simple as sitting with a local for a cup of tea.

Have you ever done something just because you knew it was wrong? In an invitation to examine your contrarian streak, psychologist Paul Bloom shares findings from “The Perversity Project”: stories he gathered from the public of harmless (but intentional) everyday misdeeds. From sticking a finger in your friend’s ice cream to a urinal that sparked the birth of conceptual art, Bloom makes the case that, sometimes, freeing yourself from the constraints of rationality and morality can be clever, creative and even beautiful.

Haida storyteller Cohen Bradley, who holds the names of Taaydal (“coming in big”) and Gidin Kuns (“powerful eagle”) in his clan and nation, shares his culture’s perspective on legacy, weaving together stories passed on by his ancestors with his own recent story of raising a memorial pole in his ancestral village. He demonstrates the resilience of his people’s legacy despite the devastating impact of colonialism.

Is AI really as smart as people give it credit for? Researcher Alona Fyshe delves into the inner workings of AI and the human brain, breaking down how talkative tech (like ChatGPT) learns to communicate so convincingly — or not.

Boxhand. Susu. Tontine. Potlatch. These are just some of the names from around the world for philanthropy centered on formal and informal ways of giving back. Philanthropic adviser Rebecca Darwent shares how community-led practices can revolutionize and overcome the systemic racism of the financial industry — and offers lessons from collective giving that could change the ways good is done.

Architect Michael Green — a mass timber pioneer who helped spark a renaissance in constructing tall buildings out of wood — introduces a new material called “FIVE,” which is derived from natural materials and based on the structure of trees and vascular plants. FIVE could revolutionize the way we build buildings, providing a strong and organic alternative to the traditional materials of concrete, steel, masonry and wood.

In a quick, inspiring talk, youth activist Cameron Davis explains why his generation — Gen Z, with its exposure to differing viewpoints online from an early age — is uniquely positioned to create meaningful change in the world by using their voices to challenge systemic biases, advocate for inclusivity and promote justice.

Is it possible for climate action to make you feel happy? Behavioral scientist Jiaying Zhao believes that’s the only way we’ll create lasting, sustainable change. From treat meals to feng shui fridges, she offers eight tricks to lower your carbon emissions while increasing your happiness.

Coastal explorer Kevin Smith tells the story of how a group of eco-tourism businesses in the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia collaborated to create one of the biggest marine debris cleanups in history. The initiative was born during the COVID-19 pandemic, when tours were temporarily shut down, resulting in these once-competitive businesses coming together to propose a solution to clean up the coast and protect their livelihoods.

Where academia fails, video games often succeed, says professor of game design Kris Alexander. With high-quality audio, text and video focused with clear objectives, video games swiftly captivate minds and drive motivation — unlike a lecture hall. In an engaging display of the merits of digital play, Alexander calls for us to rethink the foundations of education and embrace the qualities of video games that can level up our learning.

Capitalism: Notes from Session 2 of TED2022

You can credit capitalism for pretty much everything you’ve touched, eaten or worn today. But you can also blame it for some of the world’s worst problems. Is it broken? Or in dire need of reimagining?

Session 2 of TED2022 featured five thought-provoking talks that took us to some interesting corners of the debate around capitalism — from deep rethinks of the government’s role in financial systems to rejuvenation projects in South Bronx, New York to the world of crypto. It also featured follow-up questions from past TED speakers Shari Davis, Maja Bosnic, Michael Tubbs and more, who challenged the session’s speakers after their talks.

The event: Talks and performances from TED2022, Session 2: Capitalism, hosted by TED’s Chris Anderson and Whitney Pennington Rodgers

When and where: Monday, April 11, 2022, at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, BC, Canada

Speakers: Katherine Mangu-Ward, Aaron Bastani, Majora Carter, Michael Novogratz, Manish Bhardwaj

The talks in brief:

Katherine Mangu-Ward, libertarian journalist

Big idea: Government meddling makes capitalism less effective.

How? Capitalism is not a designed system; it’s an emergent one, says Katherine Mangu-Ward, editor-in-chief of Reason magazine. Just as random mutations in a species produce successful new traits, “weirdos” with insane-sounding ideas solve problems that push capitalism — and society — forward. Mangu-Ward credits capitalism with humanity’s material progress over the past two centuries; it was free markets, after all, that encouraged and rewarded the risky schemes that led to cheap artificial fertilizers, electric light, vaccines, personal mobile phones and commercial aviation. She admits that capitalism has also produced plenty of bad ideas and failed projects, but she argues that failure is a necessary process of evolution. Big governments tend to disagree with Mangu-Ward and often interfere with the markets to prevent large, powerful corporations from going under. She asks us to reconsider our qualms about failure, corporate death and capitalism, using General Motors (who she thinks should’ve been sold for parts years ago) and Facebook (who craftily shrunk their company to avoid regulation) as examples of companies whose fates could have been decided better by the markets than by government intervention.

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Aaron Bastani, journalist

Big idea: We need state action — specifically universal basic services — to enable our self-determination in the face of technological change.

How? “We live in a world where capitalism has completely prevailed,” says journalist Aaron Bastani. But the current state of economic liberalism just is not working; what we know of as the pursuit of happiness and freedom of self-determination is severely limited for most of the global population. His solution lies in free, universal public services funded through progressive taxation. In the face of dizzying technological change and a worsening climate crisis, Bastani identifies housing, transport, education and health care as the four key areas where governments must install such programs. He makes the case for leveraging the technological revolution to confront global challenges — but only with intervention for the sake of the public good. And he envisions a world after capitalism, with rewilded forests, free schooling and self-driving electric buses. “Liberal ends of self-authorship, of determining how your life should unfold, require socialist means,” he says. “The state must get involved.”

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Majora Carter, urban revitalization strategist

Big idea: Economic growth and development in low-status communities can be enhanced using tools of capitalism, like talent retention, in order to ensure people don’t have to move out of their neighborhoods to live in better ones. 

How? In communities like the South Bronx, New York, where urban revitalization strategist Majora Carter grew up, there is a dire need for inclusive local development — a need made clear by the fact that many basic necessities like schools, hospitals and career opportunities are worse in some parts of town than others. Carter explains that the strategies being employed to improve livelihoods in these communities (gentrification and poverty maintenance among them) perpetuate the idea that they either can’t be improved or need outside intervention for any development to occur. She analyzes this dilemma through a historical lens, pointing to the trillion-dollar racial wealth gap in the US that results from the exploitative practices of slavery and the destruction of Black wealth. Under the weight of these trends, many people have left their neighborhoods in search of greener pastures, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Carter believes that through restorative economics, policymakers could encourage more people and talent to stay in the places they call home by building lifestyle infrastructure (think: cafes, bars, restaurants) that fosters positive community interaction, encourages real estate and business ownership and educates property owners on the true value of their assets. “There’s no sense in rebuilding the wheel,” she says. “The same tools of capitalism that were used to build white wealth can be used to build Black wealth.”

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Michael Novogratz, investor

Big idea: Cryptocurrency is a decentralized, transparent revolution that can help restore trust amidst a broken financial system. 

How? Since the 2008 financial crash, distrust in the system has grown massively, as once-trusted institutions have become tarnished by their contributions to the climate crisis, inequality and opaque economic markets. Michael Novogratz believes the decentralized, empowering nature of cryptocurrency can restore that lost trust on a global scale. By unlocking access to digital private property, these assets can expand to all markets, transparently and inclusively. NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, can take this radical expansion of value one step further, Novogratz explains, making ownership possible over virtually any property on the web. Artists have used this as a means of explosive creativity, trusting their work cannot be stolen thanks to each piece having its own unique code on the blockchain. Novogratz points to decentralized platforms like Uniswap that are flipping capitalism on its head by redistributing power amongst people, and rewarding them for everything they own, trade and stake. He paints a liberating vision that untethers value from the material world.

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Manish Bhardwaj, moral leader

Big idea: In order to undo the damage that capitalism has caused in the world, we need to integrate morality into business frameworks at the foundational level.

How? Capitalist modes of living and commerce have wreaked havoc worldwide, exacerbating oppression and injustice. Though models like stakeholder capitalism seek to rectify these inequities, it simply isn’t enough. Manish Bhardwaj believes we must invest in developing and incorporating moral clarity into our business structures. Moral clarity, he says, is about doing the right thing because it is right, and not out of fear of repercussions or in expectation of a reward. While stakeholder capitalism seeks diverse workplaces for the sake of employee retention, greater profit margins and innovation, moral clarity allows us to see that diverse workplaces are necessary because they are morally just. Importantly, Bhardwaj clarifies that moral clarity is not moral perfection — instead it is an awareness and a willingness to create space for moral language and arguments in business. The good news is that moral clarity works: Bhardwaj’s organization for neonatal and maternal health in rural India was able to cut neonatal mortality rates in half by centering the most vulnerable in all of their work. Though it won’t be easy, moral clarity requires us to shift perspectives: our business goals should never supersede the moral responsibilities we have to each other, ourselves and the world.

Up, up and away: Notes from Session 8 of TEDMonterey

TEDMonterey’s final session brought with it a reflection of the magic and generosity of spirit that grew with each talk throughout the week. In a town hall-style discussion, gratitude flooded the stage as attendees took to the spotlight to share which ideas from the conference inspired them most and how they plan to bring a brighter outlook back home and to their own communities. To close out the conference on a note of hope and possibility, five speakers shared a spectrum of uplifting ways to soar into the future.

The event: TEDMonterey: Session 8, hosted by TED’s Chris Anderson and Helen Walters on Wednesday, August 4, 2021

Speakers: Greg Brockman, Kevin Kelly, Amir Nizar Zuabi, Betül Kaçar, Alex Smith

Programmer and engineer Greg Brockman, in conversation with head of TED Chris Anderson

Big idea: The dawn of AI may not be playing out like people predicted, but it’s still developing promising applications.

How? Looking at current examples of artificial intelligence — head-scratching art, at-times laughable wordings — Greg Brockman believes that we should already view it as a time capsule, a moment froze in time when generative AI was young and naive. On the TEDMonterey stage, he shares the burgeoning potential displayed by these advancing neural networks and explains why these systems should be seen more like an “autocomplete” function rather than a declaration of unprecedented creativity. What really excites Brockman is the spark of understanding and glimmer of real intelligence already peeking through in these early days, and the how that can be directed and built upon. One such example is OpenAI Codex, an AI that has seen the entire internet and all the public source code it’s built from, which is being used to develop a helper product in partnership with GitHub and Microsoft for programmers. But one query hangs over the AI industry: How do you prevent unintended consequences with something that will one day be so powerful? Brockman believes this is a question in need of heavy consideration, an essential piece of the puzzle when it comes to moving forward with AI. So, while things like fabricated images of dogs giving TED Talks may seem like quaint and humble beginnings today, we must remember leading with humanity will be critical to society’s tomorrow.

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Kevin Kelly, editor, author

Big idea: We have a moral obligation to be optimists.

Why? Every great breakthrough has required some sense of optimism, says Kevin Kelly. Quite simply: if people didn’t believe something was possible, it would have never gotten off the ground. With this idea as his lodestar, Kelly is a proponent of what he calls a “protopia” — not a delusional utopia, but rather a world where things get better incrementally, yield more good than bad and supply us with more reasons to hope than to fear. Three factors support this form of optimism: first, from life expectancy to decreased rates of violence, it is a fact of history that things have been getting slightly better over the decades; second, our capacity to solve problems will grow as we pass on the world to future generations; and third, problems are opportunities in disguise, landscapes that help push humanity forward. If we want to shape the future for the better, Kelly says, we first have to believe we can do it.

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Amir Nizar Zuabi, theater writer, director

Big idea: New models of storytelling can help us re-engage with the global refugee crisis and honor the journey that hundreds of thousands of refugees have taken in search of safety. 

How? Amir Nizar Zuabi seeks to challenge the narrative around refugees. As a theater practitioner who works in Palestine, he tells stories that capture the complexity of the refugee experience — both its beauty and hardship. For his latest project, Zuabi partnered with the theater company Good Chance to create an experience that honors the hundreds of thousands of people who have traversed the European continent since the height of the refugee crisis in the summer of 2015. “The Walk” is a roaming festival that follows a nine-year-old girl from Syria named Amal, represented by a giant, life-like puppet, as she makes her way literally step-by-step across Europe from Syria’s border with Turkey to Manchester, England. It’s an uplifting portrayal of the refugee journey and a reminder of the creativity and community that shared experiences of art can provide.

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Betül Kaçar, NASA astrobiologist

Big Idea: Understanding the chemical circumstances that create life could help us seed it in other parts of the cosmos.

Why? “Life makes our planet an incredibly exotic place compared to the rest of the known universe,” says Betül Kaçar. Recognizing the unique opportunity we earthlings have to study how life forms from nonliving materials, she emphasizes how close we are to understanding the chemistry behind life, including how it develops under a broader array of circumstances — and in other parts of the universe. Kaçar and her lab engineer ancient DNA and environments to understand the recipe of life and the link between living and nonliving materials. Inviting us to imagine cultivating life on other planets, she asks: What if instead of bringing Earth’s life to other parts of the universe, life could be created from the materials that already exist there? With her extraordinary propositions come extraordinary quandaries that dig deep into the purpose of life — and bring with them the ethical dilemmas of spreading life throughout the cosmos. Kaçar asks us to look up and broaden our gaze, because the possibilities of life are endless.

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Alex Smith, former NFL quarterback 

Big idea: To get through the anxiety of life’s challenges and setbacks, hold onto the people and things that inspire you to dream and live fully.

How? As Alex Smith awoke in the hospital after a catastrophic injury that all but destroyed his leg, his doctor broke the bad news: “Flesh-eating bacteria is crawling up your leg,” he said. “It’s getting closer to your vital organs every minute.” At that moment, as at many points throughout his career, Smith felt deep anxiety and fear. Taking us on his road to recovery that required around-the-clock medical care and intense physical therapy, he shares how he was able to mentally recover by leaning on the wisdom and support of those around him. From his former coach Jim Harbaugh, he remembered to stop worrying about the pressure. From his teammate Blake Costanzo, he learned to focus on living  every moment as it came. From his wife, he understood that he needed to face his fears head-on in order to deal with them and move forward. “I’ve learned that so much of the anxiety that holds us back is self-inflicted. And it’s ok if we need someone else to help us,” he says. “You might not have a leg like this. But I bet you’ve got some scars. And my hope for you is this: look at them, own them. It’s the best reminder you’ll ever have that there’s a whole world out there, and we’ve got a whole lot of living left to do.”

Climate hope: Notes from Session 4 of TEDMonterey

The scale of the climate crisis is so daunting that it can be easy to get dragged down into pessimism. But at Session 4, six speakers — call them unexpected heroes of the future — told a different story of how we might beat this thing. They speak on an exciting range of phenomena and possibilities that could make a huge difference in our effort to draw down gigatons of CO2 and regain a livable environment.

The event: TEDMonterey: Session 4, hosted by TED’s Chris Anderson on Monday, August 2, 2021

Speakers: Ma Jun, Carlos M. Duarte, Maria Gallucci, Susan Graham, Jamie C. Beard

Special guest: Nigel Topping, the UK’s High-Level Climate Action Champion for COP26, chats with Chris Anderson about the prospects of increased climate ambition ahead of the UN climate conference this November and gives an update on Race to Zero, a global campaign to mobilize leadership on this crucial issue.

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Carlos M. Duarte, marine scientist

Big idea: Seagrass is an unsung hero in the fight against climate change. But disease, dredging and the deterioration of our oceans’ water quality threaten to wipe out this vital species — unless we take immediate action to protect it.

How? You’ve likely seen seagrass — it grows along the shore of every continent except Antarctica — but did you recognize this humble plant as a champion of carbon sequestration? According to Carlos M. Duarte, seagrass is responsible for drawing down one-third of the carbon that accumulates in the seafloor each year! Seagrass also filters plastic from our oceans and, during hurricanes and tropical storms, its massive roots and rhizomes reinforce the seafloor and act as the first line of defense for our coastlines. The bad news: a disease in the Atlantic killed off vast colonies of seagrass in the 1930s and, since then, water pollution, dredging, trawling and anchor damages have worsened this plant’s plight. But Duarte and the team at Beneath the Waves are working to save our seagrass. They are mapping seagrass locations across the world’s oceans (using turtles and tiger sharks!), promoting policies to improve water quality, restoring damaged seagrass meadows and planting new ones. With enough action, Duarte believes we can protect plant heroes like seagrass and rebuild marine life by 2050.

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Maria Gallucci, journalist

Big idea: The maritime shipping industry must become climate-friendly — but have no fear, green ammonia is here.

How? Every day, tens of thousands of cargo ships criss-cross the ocean carrying the food we eat, the clothes we wear and the cars we drive. At the same time, they spew fumes and black smoke from heavily polluting fossil fuels into the atmosphere. But Maria Galluci comes ferrying good news: there’s a way to clean up the industry, beyond reverting to pre-industrial sailing ships, that’s green, economically lean and can be made with planet-friendly machines. Green ammonia could be a game-changing way to turn the tides for the shipping industry, as it’s not carbon-based; rather, it’s made up of nitrogen and hydrogen (the molecules that make up air and water). Galluci lays out how this alternative fuel could become an industry-standard reality — from environment-friendly manufacturing processes combined with plunging renewable energy costs to combustion engines and fuel cells. So, what will it take to get an ammonia-powered shipping industry mainstream? She says a rough parallel can be found in the rise of electric cars. Hopefully, one day soon, the incoming freighters will not bring the smell of diesel and carbon emissions, but the scent of a fresh sea breeze.

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Susan Graham, environmentalist, entrepreneur

Big idea: We can use drone technology and ecology-trained AI to restore degraded land and revive complex, biodiverse ecosystems.

How? Land restoration is more than planting trees, says Susan Graham. If we want to revive the more than two billion hectares of degraded land on the planet, we need to embrace complex solutions. According to Graham, drones and AI can help us restore areas damaged by industrial activities, natural disasters and invasive species by planting the right mix of native vegetation. In Australia, for instance, Graham and her team are helping restore the forest ina territory depleted and degraded by coal mining. Plus, this technology can work at enormous scales — meaning we can use it to revive the beauty and complexity of native ecosystems both in a single forest and across the planet.

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Isha Datar, cellular agriculture ecosystem builder

Big idea: Cellular agriculture makes it possible to eat meat without the negative consequences of industrial farming and processing.

How? What if you could eat chicken nuggets without ever killing a chicken? Or a hamburger without killing a cow? It’s possible through cellular agriculture, says Isha Datar, and this new means of meat production will transform our food systems. Here’s how it works: scientists take a biopsy from a living animal (like a chicken), extract the cells and then put them in a liquid medium that provides everything these cells need to grow. Instead of cramped cages stuffed with genetically modified hens, large bioreactors will produce boneless, skinless white meat without byproducts like feathers, beaks and bones. But this process isn’t just better for the birds; it’s better for all of us. Early estimates suggest cultured meat would require 99 percent less land, produce 78 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions and use 82 percent less water than industrial meat farming and production. And meat is only the beginning! We could use this technology to grow vanilla without clear-cutting the rainforest or produce silk without silkworms. As Datar says, this isn’t a new product — this is our once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get a second chance at agriculture.

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Climate Action Tracker, a tracking initiative holding governments accountable for their Paris Agreement commitments

Big idea: The actions governments take in 2021 to reduce emissions will determine if the world is on track to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, so the time to act is now. Is there a way to hold them accountable for the goals set at the 2015 Paris Agreements?

An answer: In 2015, countries participating in the Paris Agreements agreed to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 and bring carbon dioxide emissions to net zero by 2050. Climate Action Tracker is a platform designed not only to keep track of our progress towards reaching the Paris benchmarks, but also to pinpoint exactly who isn’t shouldering their fair share of the burden. The platform gives us a status update on what’s working, and what isn’t.

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Ma Jun, environmentalist, scholar

Big idea: By making pollution information public in China, citizens can hold global brands accountable for pollution control. 

How? Transparency is the key to speeding environmental change at scale in China, says Ma Jun. He’s the creator of Blue Map, an app that tracks pollution violations and color codes factories based on their records of environmental contamination: green and blue are good; red and yellow are bad. This data makes it possible, at a glance, for citizens to monitor corporate violations and micro-report these offenses to government agencies. To help China achieve its goal of carbon neutrality by 2060, Ma and his team have also developed the Blue Map for Carbon Zero, which color codes cities and provinces based on carbon emissions. And he plans to expand the Blue Map project to include plastic, waste and even biodiversity to motivate more companies and more people to reduce their environmental impact and leave a healthier world for all of us. 

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Jamie C. Beard, technologist, climate activist

Big idea: Geothermal energy could provide us with a clean way to power the globe.

How? What if oil and gas companies could equip us with the infrastructure needed to clean our power grids? Jamie C. Beard advocates for geothermal energy, which requires drilling deep into the earth to access the planet’s natural heat, and explains how recent innovations in drill technology, such as the ability to drill in curves, have made this alternative energy feasible. But to bring geothermal energy to scale, we need to drill all over the world — and drill a lot. Fortunately, the oil and gas industry already has the technology, infrastructure and training to bring geothermal energy online fast. In fact, she says, many geothermal startups are founded by oil and gas veterans. The industry known for its dirty pollution could easily become a pioneer in curbing climate change. “We flip the switch, and we have green drilling,” she says. “This is simply a pivot — from hydrocarbons to heat.”

Onward! Notes from Session 3 of TEDWomen 2020

For the culminating session of TEDWomen 2020, we looked in one direction: onward! Hosted by TEDWomen curator Pat Mitchell and TEDx learning specialist Bianca DeJesus, the final session featured speakers and performers who shared wisdom on preparing for new challenges, turning fear into action and finding the way forward — even when the path isn’t clear.

Special appearance: Kirsty de Garis, organizer of TEDxSydney, and Safra Anver, organizer of TEDxColombo, introduced the final two TEDx speakers of the day.

The session in brief:

Gloria Steinem, feminist activist, writer

Big idea: Feminism is the radical yet essential idea that all human beings are equal. Now more than ever, unity and listening are the remedies to fear, discrimination and inequality.

Why? Feminism has been and always will be relevant and vital to all of humanity, says Gloria Steinem. Yet throughout history, the word — and its accompanying movement — have been misunderstood and criticized. Speaking on her lifelong legacy of feminist activism, Steinem shares how she’s fought for women’s rights and overcome her fears with the help of trusted friends and allies. She discusses the intersectionality of racism and sexism and how the fight against both has always been linked — and explains why unity is the key to overcoming them, especially in a world facing COVID-19. She urges future generations of women — or, as she calls them, “friends who haven’t been born yet” — to support each other and face their fears together. “Think of change as a tree,” she says. “You know it doesn’t grow from the top down, so we shouldn’t be waiting for somebody to tell us what to do. It grows from the bottom up. And we are the roots of change.”

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Jamila Gordon, AI advocate

Big idea: Artificial intelligence can break language, education and location barriers for disadvantaged people, giving them the opportunity to thrive. 

How? Born into a war-torn Somalia, Jamila Gordon has always considered herself to be lucky. When her family was separated and she was displaced in Kenya, Gordon’s journey eventually took her to Australia. There, she worked in a Japanese restaurant owned by a couple who showed her that amazing things are possible through hard work and perseverance. Now, she wants AI to do the same, at a massive scale, for disadvantaged people — giving them skills and tools to find work, be great at their jobs and do the work safely. In this way, Gordon believes software can open doors of opportunity for people who face cultural, social and economic barriers. For instance, Gordon’s platform, Lumachain, brings transparency to global supply chains, benefiting producers, enterprises and consumers, while also helping to end modern slavery.

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Julia Gillard, former Prime Minister of Australia, and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, former Finance Minister of Nigeria

Big idea: The sexism that women leaders face shouldn’t overshadow or discourage others from stepping forward and making a positive impact.

Why? In conversation, Julia Gillard and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala remark and reflect on their experiences in leadership — for better and worse. Their discussion runs the gamut of what it means to be a powerful woman in a sexist world: encountering unnecessary judgments based on appearance, enduring undue focus on personality over policy and facing criticism based solely on stereotypes. To be viewed as an acceptable leader, women must exude both strength and empathy, Okonjo-Iweala says. If they come across as too tough, they are viewed as hard and unlikeable. But if they seem too soft, they are seen to be lacking the backbone to lead. In fact, women leaders must also be thoughtful about how they portray their achievements to those who look up to and follow them. Emphasizing the positive makes a real difference to the power of role modeling, Gillard says. If the focus stays on the sexist and negative experiences, women may decide that being a leader isn’t for them. Conversely, if leaders shy away from speaking about their hardships, women and girls can be put off because they decide leadership is only for superwomen who never have any problems. It’s all about balance. For women looking to create space for themselves and others, Gillard and Okonjo-Iweala offer a list of six standout lessons to build solidarity: there’s no “right way” to be a woman leader, so be true to yourself; sit down with your trusted confidants and wargame how to deal with gendered moments; debunk gendered stereotypes; don’t wait for when you need help to support system changes that aid gender equality; network, but don’t shy away from taking up space in the world; and the last, but not least important: go for it!

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Kesha, musician, actress, activist

“I can’t tell you how to not be afraid, but I can tell you that I’ve experienced how to not be defined by my fears,” says Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Kesha. She shares a bit about how she faced her fears while living in the limelight over the last decade and delivers a powerful performance of “Shadow,” a song about courageously choosing positivity even when others are throwing shade. “Get your shadow outta my sunshine / Outta my blue skies / Outta my good times,” she sings. She’s accompanied by Mary Lattimore on harp, Karina DePiano on piano, and Skyler Stonestreet and Kenna Ramsey on background vocals.

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JayaShri Maathaa, monk

Big idea: There is a simple mantra you can say to calm yourself during troubled times: “Thank you.”

Why? As the world brims with fear, doubt and anxiety during the coronavirus pandemic, JayaShri Maathaa finds that two magical words — “thank you” — fill her life with bliss and grace. How so? When you say “thank you,” you bring your attention inward and, over time, create a feeling of gratitude in your heart that can help you navigate life with peace and joy. For Maathaa, these two words are like music in her mind: they’re the first thing she thinks upon awakening, and the last thing she thinks before falling asleep. By planting these good thoughts in her mind and heart over the years, she now finds them blossoming into something beautiful — creating a harmony within herself and to the world around her. Want to give it a try?

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Megan McArthur, NASA astronaut

Big idea: The day, life and mindset of an astronaut.

Tell us more: In conversation with TEDWomen curator Pat Mitchell, astronaut Megan McArthur offers a glimpse into what it’s like when space becomes your world, but not your entire life. As a mother and wife (she’s married to fellow astronaut Bob Behnken), McArthur strikes a balance between the emotional outpouring of her husband’s spaceflight and training for her own launch, while supporting their son for his reality as an earthbound child. But when it comes to work, the focus becomes singular in hundreds of hours of preparation, which McArthur emphasizes can be a mindset easily adjusted and applied to any professional role. Using her own example of tackling a new job, she reminds women that even if they come up against a situation they’ve never before encountered, they are ready and prepared from their life experiences to take on that challenge, learn quickly and succeed. 

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Closing out the final session with a flourish, a guitarist sets in motion delicate yet strident chords that reflect both the warmth and momentum of Apiorkor Seyiram Ashong-Abbey‘s poetry — paired with footage of her masked, standing statuesque in a deserted quarantine courtyard, motionless yet liquid all at once. Far from a mere diatribe, this piece proposes not a revolution, but a re-establishment of the majesty, magic and power of the matriarch, and the hidden traditions that have quietly sustained women for millenia — and that will someday soon renew the world once more.

Join us for TEDWomen 2020: Fearless on November 12

TEDWomen 2020 is nearly here! The day-long conference will take place on November 12 via TED’s new virtual conference platform. TEDWomen attendees will experience TED’s signature talks as well as an array of live, interactive sessions, community “idea dates,” small-group speaker Q&As and more. The talks featured in the program have been developed in collaboration with an incredible group of TEDx organizers from Lagos, Nigeria; Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago; Montreal, Canada; Colombo, Sri Lanka; and Sydney, Australia. TEDWomen will celebrate and amplify dynamic, multi-dimensional ideas from these communities and around the world.

In the midst of uncertainty, the greatest peril is to retreat or become immobilized. At TEDWomen, we’ll hear from bold leaders who are stepping forward and taking action.

TEDWomen 2020 speakers and performers include:

• Kluane Adamek, Assembly of First Nations Yukon Regional Chief
• Kylar W. Broadus, Human and civil rights attorney and advocate
• Kemi DaSilva-Ibru, Women’s health specialist
• Adie Delaney, Educator and performer
• Elizabeth Diller, Architect, artist and designer
• Julia Gillard, 27th Prime Minister of Australia
• Jamila Gordon, AI advocate
• Kesha, Musician, actress, activist
• María Teresa Kumar, Civic leader
• JayaShri Maathaa, Monk
• Megan McArthur, NASA astronaut
• Madison McFerrin, Singer and songwriter
• Renee Montgomery, WNBA champion and activist
• Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Economist and international development expert
• Angélique Parisot-Potter, Legal and business integrity leader
• Sophie Rose, Infectious disease researcher
• Apiorkor Seyiram Ashong-Abbey, Poet and author
• Gloria Steinem, Feminist activist and writer
• Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Politician
• Tracy Young, Builder
• View the full speaker lineup

TED has partnered with a number of organizations to support its mission and contribute to the idea exchange at TEDWomen 2020. These organizations are collaborating with the TED team on innovative ways to engage a virtual audience and align their ideas and perspectives with this year’s programming. This year’s partners include: Boston Consulting Group, Dove Advanced Care Antiperspirant, Project Management Institute and the U.S. Air Force.

TEDWomen 2020 is taking place on November 12, 11am – 6pm ET. TEDWomen applications will be accepted until 9am ET, November 9 (or until sold out). Learn more and apply now!

Leadership: Notes from Session 2 of the Countdown Global Launch

Countdown is a global initiative to accelerate solutions to the climate crisis. Watch the talks, interviews and performances from the Countdown Global Launch at ted.com/countdown.

The climate crisis demands leadership at every level. Governments, cities and businesses are three key players in designing and implementing the necessary transition. In Session 2 of the Countdown Global Launch, cohosted by climate advocate Al Gore and actor, musician and activist Jaden Smith, speakers discussed putting climate back on the political and social agenda, rethinking cities and what businesses can do to transform.

Gore and Smith opened the session by talking about how young people are at the forefront of climate activism, and discussed the global art collaboration between Countdown and Fine Acts: ten public artworks on the topic of climate change, аll launching on 10.10.2020 in ten cities around the world, all created by TED Fellows.

The talks in brief:

Severn Cullis-Suzuki, environmental educator

Big idea: Nearly 30 years ago, 12-year-old Severn Cullis-Suzuki spoke at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit in hopes of reversing the planet’s slide into ecological disaster. Some at the summit listened, producing the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, among other then-radical documents. But for the rest of the world, it was business, politics and full-steam-ahead economic growth. Now in 2020, with the Paris Agreement once again stoking the fervor to fight climate change, it’s time to make sure governments actually listen. 

How? Cullis-Suzuki believes that crises can show us not only the potential for societies to react decisively against existential threats, but also expose the inequities, injustices and weaknesses of our infrastructure. COVID-19 is one such crisis: it has sparked calls for social justice and shown just how deadly indecision can be. Cullis-Suzuki believes it’s a warning. She reminds us that if we don’t change, next time could be far worse. This time, if we can make our actions reflect our words around climate change, we can work towards a better world for our children.  

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Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission

Big idea: The European Union has committed to becoming the first carbon-free continent by 2050, with the goal of reducing emissions by at least 55 percent by 2030. These ambitious goals are vital — and possible — and they require everyone’s participation. 

How? The evidence of climate change is unfolding before us: melting glaciers, forest fires, unpredictable weather. This is only the beginning. Such extreme circumstances call for extreme action, and that is exactly what Ursula von der Leyen has laid out in response. Resolving not to be derailed by COVID-19, the EU’s commitment to climate action milestones is now stronger than ever, von der Leyen says. She details some of the 50 actions in the European Green Deal aimed at building a more sustainable world, such as planting trees, creating a circular economy, recycling and more. With the crisis escalating every day, she calls for action from every direction.

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Olafur Eliasson, artist

Big idea: Known for big, attention-grabbing installations — like his four towering waterfalls in New York’s East River — Olafur Eliasson has scaled down his latest project: an art platform for kids designed to spur budding climate activists to lead discussions on some of the biggest issues on the planet.

How? Inspired by world-shaping movements helmed by the planet’s youngest environmentalists, Eliasson built Earth Speakr, an app that helps concerned kids get serious messages in front of adults in a fun, novel way. The app uses AR to let kids animate photos of anything — trees, rocks, water — and record a message from nature, speaking in their own voices. These recorded messages help get the word out about the issues kids care about most — conservation, climate change, pollution and more.

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Rebecca Henderson, capitalism rethinker

Big idea: Capitalism is driving climate change — but for-profit businesses can also help fix it. 

How? “We let capitalism morph into something monstrous,” says economist Rebecca Henderson. Companies emit massive amounts of greenhouse gases that wreck the environment and harm human health, and governments don’t hold them accountable to pay for the damages. If governments won’t do it, Henderson says, it’s time for businesses themselves to step up on their own. Sound counterintuitive? Henderson thinks it may be the only option: it’ll be hard to stay in business if the world continues to be rocked by the negative effects of climate change. She’s confident that business leaders can start to marshal change with a four-pronged framework: start paying for the climate damage they cause; persuade competitors to do the same; let investors know there’s money to be made in a clean economy; and convince governments to implement these changes far and wide. “The truth is: business is screwed if we don’t fix climate change,” Henderson says.

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Elif Shafak, novelist and political scientist

Big idea: There is a sublime art at the heart of storytelling: the art of foregrounding silence, bringing to light things that we don’t talk about, and using these things to “speak louder than demagoguery and apathy.” Writers can learn to voice the unspoken loudly enough to inspire action.

How? “One of the many beauties of the art of storytelling is to imagine yourself inside someone else’s voice,” says writer Elif Shafak. Surprisingly, we can learn a lot from imagining the voices of trees, whose experience of time, stillness and impermanence are utterly different than our own. Listen to the trees, she says, and discover that “hidden inside [their] story is the past and the future of humanity.” 

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Jesper Brodin, CEO of Ingka Group (IKEA), in conversation with Pia Heidenmark Cook, CSO of Ingka Group (IKEA)

Big idea: Success in business doesn’t mean being at odds with the Earth. What’s good for climate can be good for business, too. 

How? Jesper Brodin and Pia Heidenmark Cook discuss the company’s ambitious commitment to go climate positive (going beyond net-zero emissions by actually removing carbon from the atmosphere) by 2030 — and still remain profitable. The popular Swedish furniture and design company is rethinking how to make their entire business sustainable, from their raw materials and supply chain and to their products’ disposal. Their plan includes sourcing sustainable cotton for fabrics, buying wood from solely sustainable sources by the end of 2020 and committing to fully renewable and recycled materials for all their products by 2030. They’re also thinking about how to extend the life of products, once people have already bought them, through reuse, repurposing or recycling. The exciting part about their plan, Brodin and Cook say, is that none of these innovations will affect the quality, form, function and affordability of their products.

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Dave Clark, SVP of worldwide operations at Amazon, and Kara Hurst, head of worldwide sustainability at Amazon

Big idea: Amazon is making a commitment to sustainability across its expansive array of businesses — and inviting other companies to do the same.

How? In 2019, Amazon cofounded the Climate Pledge, a commitment to become a net-zero carbon company by 2040. Dave Clark and Kara Hurst discuss how they’re working together to reduce Amazon’s carbon footprint across all aspects of business, from embedding sustainability teams throughout the organization to rethinking entire supply chains. For instance, last year Amazon ordered 100,000 electric delivery vehicles from the startup Rivian in an effort to begin converting the company’s fleet to renewable energy. The scale of transformation will be massive, Clark and Hurst say, and they’re encouraging other companies to follow suit. “One thing we know about the scale of the urgent challenge we have in front of us is that it’s going to take everyone. We cannot do it alone,” Hurst says, “It’s going to take companies and governments, communities and individuals, to come up with solutions, new innovations and technologies.”

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Aparna Nancherla, comedian

Big idea: Taking out the trash can be fun.

Why? If you love garbage, you can get an endless supply with “the stuff that our modernist, consumer, carbon-powered culture makes us buy endlessly, and often for no good reason,” says Aparna Nancherla. She runs through the pleasure and pain of garbage, from “micro-decluttering” by throwing things away, to the fact that only 10 percent of our plastic gets recycled. Nancherla shares the dire state of our recycling industry (imagining the Pacific garbage patch as a wedding destination), but there’s also plenty of humor around just how hard it is to stay green in a world that’s choking on ever-larger piles of trash.

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Carlos Moreno, scientific director, Panthéon Sorbonne University-IAE Paris

Big idea: Urban areas should be built to function as “15-minute cities,” so that inhabitants have access to all services they need to live, learn and thrive within their immediate vicinity.

How? City life has become more inconvenient than ever, with long commutes, underutilized spaces and lack of access. Our acceptance of this dysfunction has reached a peak. Carlos Moreno invites us to ask ourselves: “What do we need to create a 15-minute city?” This would mean access to necessities like school, work, parks, cultural centers, shops and living space all within a 15-minute walk, at all times. Moreno’s ideas to create cities like this are guided by four principles: ecology, proximity, solidarity and participation, with inhabitants actively taking part in their neighborhoods’ transformations. He calls for urban areas to adapt to humans, not the other way around. 

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Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, Mayor of Freetown, Sierra Leone

Big idea: Trees offer us a crucial way to trap carbon and save the climate. Get planting.

How? Driving home one day outside Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital, Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr gazed out at the landscape in horror. The lush green forest she used to know had disappeared, replaced with barren hills. The shock wasn’t merely visual. Without trees standing as a critical bulwark against land erosion, the citizens of Freetown — where more than 70 informal settlements have sprung up in the last two decades — are at great risk of catastrophic effects of climate change, a fact driven home in August 2017, when a massive landslide killed 1,000 people there in less than five minutes. In that moment, Aki-Sawyerr vowed to save her city in the most direct way she could — she ran for mayor, won and has now committed to making Freetown a “tree town” once again. She’s on track to increase vegetation cover in the city by 50 percent by the end of her term in 2022, planting one million trees along the way. Freetown citizens have planted half a million seedlings so far, all tracked using a custom app, setting the stage for a safer environment and stirring collective civic pride. “A million trees is our city’s small contribution to increasing the much-needed global carbon sink,” Aki-Sawyerr says.

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Actress and musician Yemi Alade joins the show to close out the session, singing and dancing to the upbeat tune “True Love.”

Conversations on the future of vaccines, tech, government and art: Week 5 of TED2020

Week 5 of TED2020 featured wide-ranging discussions on the quest for a coronavirus vaccine, the future of the art world, what it’s like to lead a country during a pandemic and much more. Below, a recap of insights shared.

Jerome Kim, Director General of the International Vaccine Institute

Big idea: There’s a lot of work still to be done, but the world is making progress on developing a COVID-19 vaccine. 

How? A normal vaccine takes five to 10 years to develop and costs about a billion dollars, with a failure rate of 93 percent. Under the pressure of the coronavirus pandemic, however, we’re being asked to speed things up to within a window of 12 to 18 months, says Jerome Kim. How are things going? He updates us on the varied field of vaccine candidates and approaches, from Moderna’s mRNA vaccine to AstraZeneca’s vectored vaccine to whole inactivated vaccines, and how these companies are innovating to develop and manufacture their products in record time. In addition to the challenge of making a sufficient amount of a safe, effective vaccine (at the right price), Kim says we must think about how to distribute it for the whole world — not just rich nations. The question of equity and access is the toughest one of all, he says, but the answer will ultimately lead us out of this pandemic.

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Nir Eyal, Bioethicist

Big idea: Testing vaccine efficacy is normally a slow, years-long process, but we can ethically accelerate COVID-19 vaccine development through human challenge trials.

How? Thousands of people continue to die every day from COVID-19 across the globe, and we risk greater death and displacement if we rely on conventional vaccine trials, says bioethicist Nir Eyal. While typical trials observe experimental and control groups over time until they see meaningful differences between the two, Eyal proposes using human challenge trials in our search for a vaccine — an approach that deliberately exposes test groups to the virus in order to quickly determine efficacy. Human challenge trials might sound ethically ambiguous or even immoral, but Eyal suggests the opposite is true. Patients already take informed risks by participating in drug trials and live organ donations; if we look at statistical risk and use the right bioethical framework, we can potentially hasten vaccine development while maintaining tolerable risks. The key, says Eyal, is the selection criteria: by selecting young participants who are free from risk factors like hypertension, for example, the search for a timely solution to this pandemic is possible. “The dramatic number of people who could be aided by a faster method of testing vaccines matters,” he says. “It’s not the case that we are violating the rights of individuals to maximize utility. We are both maximizing utility and respecting rights, and this marriage is very compelling in defending the use of these accelerated [vaccine trial] designs.”

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Ashraf Ghani, President of Afghanistan

Big Idea: Peacemaking is a discipline that must be practiced daily, both in life and politics. 

How? Having initiated sweeping economic, trade and social reforms, Afghanistan president Ashraf Ghani shares key facets of peacemaking that he relies on to navigate politically sensitive relationships and the ongoing health crisis: mutual respect, listening and humanity. Giving us a glimpse of Afghanistan that goes beyond the impoverished, war-torn image painted in the media, he describes the aspirations, entrepreneurship and industry that’s very much alive there, especially in its youth and across all genders. “What I hear from all walks of life, men and women, girls and boys, [is] a quest for normalcy. We’re striving to be normal. It’s not we who are abnormal; it’s the circumstances in which we’ve been caught. And we are attempting to carve a way forward to overcome the types of turbulence that, in interaction with each other, provide an environment of continuous uncertainty. Our goal is to overcome this, and I think with the will of the people, we will be able to,” he says. President Ghani also shares perspective on Afghanistan’s relationship to China, the Taliban and Pakistan — expressing a commitment to his people and long term peace that fuels every conversation. “The ultimate goal is a sovereign, democratic, united Afghanistan at peace with itself in the world,” he says. 

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Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp

Big idea: Tech platforms have a responsibility to provide privacy and security to users.

Why? On WhatsApp, two billion users around the world send more than 100 billion messages every day. All of them are protected by end-to-end encryption, which means that the conversations aren’t stored and no one can access them — not governments, companies or even WhatsApp itself. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more of our conversations with family, friends and coworkers have to occur through digital means. This level of privacy is a fundamental right that has never been more important, says Cathcart. To ensure their encryption services aren’t misused to promote misinformation or conduct crime, WhatsApp has developed tools and protocols that keep users safe without disrupting the privacy of all of its users. “It’s so important that we match the security and privacy you have in-person, and not say, ‘This digital world is totally different: we should change all the ways human beings communicate and completely upend the rules.’ No, we should try to match that as best we can, because there’s something magical about people talking to each other privately.”

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Anne Pasternak, Director of the Brooklyn Museum

Big idea: We need the arts to be able to document and reflect on what we’re living through, express our pain and joy and imagine a better future.

How? Museums are vital community institutions that reflect the memories, knowledge and dreams of a society. Located in a borough of more than 2.5 million people, the Brooklyn Museum is one of the largest and most influential museums in the world, and it serves a community that has been devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Pasternak calls on museums to take a leading role in manifesting community visions of a better world. In a time defined by dramatic turmoil and global suffering, artists will help ignite the radical imagination that leads to cultural, political and social change, she says. Museums also have a responsibility to uplift a wide variety of narratives, taking special care to highlight communities who have historically been erased from societal remembrance and artmaking. The world has been irreversibly changed and devastated by the pandemic. It’s time to look to art as a medium of collective memorializing, mourning, healing and transformation.

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Honor Harger, Executive Director of the ArtScience Museum

Big Idea: Cultural institutions can care for their communities by listening to and amplifying marginalized voices.

How: The doors of Singapore’s famed ArtScience Museum building are closed — but online, the museum is engaging with its community more deeply than ever. Executive director Honor Harger shares how the museum has moved online with ArtScience at Home, a program offering online talks, streamed performances and family workshops addressing COVID-19 and our future. Reflecting on the original meaning of “curator” (from the Latin curare, or “to care”), Harger shares how ArtScience at Home aims to care for its community by listening to underrepresented groups. The program seeks out marginalized voices and provides a global platform for them to tell their own stories, unmediated and unedited, she says. Notably, the program included a screening of Salary Day by Ramasamy Madhavan, the first film made by a migrant worker in Singapore. The programming will have long-lasting effects on the museum’s curation in the future and on its international audience, Harger says. “Art changes minds, shifts mentalities, changes the behavior of people and the way they think and how they feel,” she says. “We are seeing the power of culture and art to both heal and facilitate dramatic change.”

Wayfinders: Notes from Session 6 of TEDWomen 2019

The final session of TEDWomen 2019 is here! We can’t believe it; we won’t believe. But, if we must close out these three incredible days, it’s good we did it by hearing from a diverse range of “wayfinders” — incredible women who are using their wisdom and insight to light the way forward, tackle global problems and find the right balance of fear and courage to do so.

The event: TEDWomen 2019, Session 6: Wayfinders, hosted by Pat Mitchell, Helen Walters and Kelly Stoetzel

When and where: Friday, December 6, 2019, 9am PT, at La Quinta Resort & Club in La Quinta, California

Speakers: Valorie Kondos Field, Noeline Kirabo, Martha Minow, Agnes Binagwaho, Mary Ellen Hannibal, Jasmine Crowe, Cara E. Yar Khan, Pat Mitchell

Music: Singer-songwriter Butterscotch performs a virtuosic set, mixing beatboxing with her powerful voice to sing about love, life and everything in between.

The talks in brief:

Valorie Kondos Field, gymnastics coach

Big idea: Victory does not always equal success. Leaders need to consider the cost of winning to those under our care and redefine success in empathetic and positive terms.

How? Across the world, a pervasive “win at all costs” culture is creating emotional and physical crises. When Valorie Kondos Field first started working with the UCLA women’s gymnastics team, she mimicked other “winning” coaches by being relentless, unsympathetic and outright mean. One day, her team sat her down and made a firm case against her top-down, bullying approach. The years that followed — and her deeply personal, trust-based work with champion athletes like Katelyn Ohashi and Kyla Ross — were a lesson in the importance of an empathetic approach. True champions, she says, derive joy from their pursuits — win or lose.

Quote of the talk: “Instead of focusing maniacally on winning, we need to have the courage to develop champions through empathy, positivity, and accountability.”

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Noeline Kirabo, social entrepreneur

Big idea: Almost everyone dreams of turning their passion into a successful career — but to do so, you must first identify what your passion is.

How? Passion isn’t only for the rich or the retired, says Noeline Kirabo. When she dropped out of school because she couldn’t afford the tuition, she didn’t settle for a job she didn’t love — instead, she decided to follow her passion. She founded Kyusa, a nonprofit dedicated to addressing youth unemployment in Uganda by helping young people turn their interests into careers and profitable businesses. Her organization provides the necessary support for them to build the future of their dreams, including soft skills and entrepreneurial training. But how do you discover your passion? She poses two questions to help you find the answer: If you had all the money and time in the world, what would you spend your time doing; and what truly makes you happy or gives you a deep sense of fulfillment? To find these answers, she says, we must look inward — not outward. 

Quote of the talk: “We need to look inward to identify the things that give us a deep sense of fulfillment, the things that give us the deepest joy, and then weave them into the patterns of our daily routines. In so doing, we cease to work, and we start to live.”

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Martha Minow, law professor

Big idea: Our laws and legal system are focused on punishment, but they should make more room for forgiveness.

Why?: In her 40 years of teaching law, Martha Minow has found that law students are not taught much about forgiveness. While the law itself does contain tools like pardons, commutations and bankruptcy for debt, they are not adequately used. Or, when they are used, they reinforce existing social inequities along the lines of race and class. Yet the benefits of mercy have been widely shown, not just for our own individual health, but also for the health of communities affected by criminal activity. Restorative justice, which emphasizes accountability and service rather than punishment, can disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline that has become a prominent issue in parts of the US, Minow says. Although placing more of an emphasis on forgiveness comes with the risk of bias, it also comes with the promise of creating a fairer future.

Quote of the talk: “To ask how law may forgive is not to deny the fact of wrongdoing. Rather, it’s to widen the lens to enable glimpses of the larger patterns.”

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Agnes Binagwaho, pediatrician, former Minister of Health of Rwanda

Big idea: Educating women creates female leaders and establishes gender equity — which improves society in countless ways.

How? In 1996, Agnes Binagwaho returned to her home country of Rwanda to practice medicine in the aftermath of the country’s horrific genocide. The devastation was so pervasive she considered leaving, but resilient Rwandan women motivated her to stay and help rebuild. And she is glad she did. Today, Rwanda has the highest proportion of women in parliament — nearly 62 percent — and the most successful HPV vaccination campaign for children. More recently, Binagwaho helped open a medical school in Rwanda called University of Global Health Equity, which maintains gender parity and is free of charge, as long as students commit to working with vulnerable communities around the world.

Quote of the talk: “I have learned that if we focus on women’s education, we improve their lives positively, as well as the wellbeing of their community.”

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Mary Ellen Hannibal, science writer

Big idea: Around the world, insect species (including the monarch butterfly) are dying at an alarming rate. The looming demise of important pollinators (like bees and butterflies) will have dire consequences for human civilization. Citizen scientists could help save these insects — and the planet.

How? Citizen scientists — people without PhDs who leverage technology to collect data and organize initiatives to protect the natural world — are a crucial force for understanding complex natural phenomena. The same citizen scientists who documented plummeting monarch butterfly populations now work to save them (and other endangered species) through food-source cultivation, habitat preservation and efforts like the City Nature Challenge — a scalable data-gathering initiative supporting threatened species that cohabit our cities.

Quote of the talk: “Insect life is at the very foundation of our life-support systems. We can’t lose these insects.”

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Jasmine Crowe, social entrepreneur, hunger hero

Big idea: We’re doing hunger wrong in America. We can eliminate hunger, reduce food waste and give families their dignity back through innovative technology, instead of charity. 

How? While Food banks are beloved community institutions, they aren’t solving hunger, says Jasmine Crowe. They keep families dependent on their services and rarely offer a full meal. Scarcity isn’t the problem, Crowe reminds us: globally, one in nine people go hungry each day, yet food waste has increased by 50 percent since the 1970s. Crowe — who has spent her life giving back to the Atlanta community — is reengineering how cities handle hunger through Goodr, a tech-enabled sustainable food waste company. Their app gathers unused food from local businesses and distributes it to food deserts through nonprofits and popup grocery stores. Each of us has the power to join the movement to bring real food and dignity back to families.

Quote of the talk: “We wanted to change the way we think and approached the hunger fight, get people to believe that we could solve hunger — not as a charity, not as a food bank, but as a social enterprise with a goal of ending hunger and food waste.”

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Cara E. Yar Khan, humanitarian, disability activist

Big Idea: Courage is never instantaneous or easy. It’s a careful balance of bravery and fear. 

How? After being diagnosed with Hereditary Inclusion Body Myopathy, a genetic condition that deteriorates muscle, Cara E. Yar Khan heard repeatedly that she had to limit her career ambitions and quiet her dreams. Instead, she actively pursued and accomplished her goals, working as a humanitarian in Angola with the UN and as a disability advocate in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake. She decided to descend to the base of the Grand Canyon, embarking on a harrowing 12-day trip: four days descending the canyon via horseback, and eight days of white water rafting through the Colorado River. Though terrifying, the trip showed her how powerful her courage could be, she says. Courage isn’t just a burst of bravery that appears when needed — it arises when we’re willing to take risks, acknowledge and prepare for our fears and become devoted to bringing our dreams to life. 

Quote of the talk: “Without fear, you’ll do foolish things. Without courage, you’ll never step into the unknown. The balance of the two is where the magic lies, and it’s a balance we all deal with everyday.”

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Pat Mitchell, TEDWomen curator, self-proclaimed “dangerous woman”

Big idea: It’s time to embrace risk, speak out and live dangerously.

Why? We live in dangerous times, with nothing left to prove and much more to lose, says Pat Mitchell. The rise in sexism, racism and violence against women and girls, alongside the dire state of our planet, demands that we live dangerously. “I don’t mean being feared,” says Mitchell. “But I do mean being more fearless.” Mitchell knows this best from her own life blazing a path across media and television. On the TEDWomen stage, she shares how her own experiences informed her leadership decisions and vision of a future where women wield the power they already hold. (Read a full recap here.)

Quote of the talk: “At this point in my life’s journey, I am holding my splendid torch higher than ever, boldly and brilliantly — inviting you to join me in its dangerous light.”

Stages of Life: Notes from Session 5 of TEDSummit 2019

The penultimate session of TEDSummit 2019 had a bit of everything — new thoughts on aging, loneliness and happiness as well as breakthrough science, music and even a bit of comedy.

The event: TEDSummit 2019, Session 5: Stages of Life, hosted by Kelly Stoetzel and Alex Moura

When and where: Wednesday, July 24, 2019, 5pm BST, at the Edinburgh Convention Centre in Edinburgh, Scotland

Speakers: Nicola Sturgeon, Sonia Livingstone, Howard Taylor, Sara-Jane Dunn, Fay Bound Alberti, Carl Honoré

Opening: Raconteur Mackenzie Dalrymple telling the story of the Goodman of Ballengeich

Music: Yilian Cañizares and her band, rocking the TED stage with a jubilant performance that blends classic jazz and Cuban rhythms

Comedy: Amidst a head-spinning program of big (and often heavy) ideas, a welcomed break from comedian Omid Djalili, who lightens the session with a little self-deprecation and a few barbed cultural observations

The talks in brief:

Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister of Scotland

Big idea: It’s time to challenge the monolithic importance of GDP as a quality-of-life metric — and paint a broader picture that also encompasses well-being.

How? In 2018, Scotland, Iceland and New Zealand established the Wellbeing Economy Governments group to challenge the supremacy of GDP. The leaders of these countries — who are, incidentally, all women — believe policies that promote happiness (including equal pay, childcare and paternity rights) could help decrease alienation in its citizens and, in turn, build resolve to confront global challenges like inequality and climate change.

Quote of the talk: “Growth in GDP should not be pursued at any and all cost … The goal of economic policy should be collective well-being: how happy and healthy a population is, not just how wealthy a population is.”

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Sonia Livingstone, social psychologist

Big idea: Parents often view technology as either a beacon of hope or a developmental poison, but the biggest influence on their children’s life choices is how they help them navigate this unavoidable digital landscape. Society as a whole can positively impact these efforts.

How? Sonia Livingstone’s own childhood was relatively analog, but her research has been focused on how families embrace new technology today. Changes abound in the past few decades — whether it’s intensified educational pressures, migration, or rising inequality — yet it’s the digital revolution that remains the focus of our collective apprehension. Livingstone’s research suggests that policing screen time isn’t the answer to raising a well-rounded child, especially at a time when parents are trying to live more democratically with their children by sharing decision-making around activities like gaming and exploring the internet. Leaders and institutions alike can support a positive digital future for children by partnering with parents to guide activities within and outside of the home. Instead of criticizing families for their digital activities, Livingstone thinks we should identify what real-world challenges they’re facing, what options are available to them and how we can support them better.

Quote of the talk: “Screen time advice is causing conflict in the family, and there’s no solid evidence that more screen time increases childhood problems — especially compared with socio-economic or psychological factors. Restricting children breeds resistance, while guiding them builds judgment.”

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Howard Taylor, child safety advocate

Big idea: Violence against children is an endemic issue worldwide, with rates of reported incidence increasing in some countries. We are at a historical moment that presents us with a unique opportunity to end the epidemic, and some countries are already leading the way.

How? Howard Taylor draws attention to Sweden and Uganda, two very different countries that share an explicit commitment to ending violence against children. Through high-level political buy-in, data-driven strategy and tactical legislative initiatives, the two countries have already made progress on. These solutions and others are all part of INSPIRE, a set of strategies created by an alliance of global organizations as a roadmap to eliminating the problem. If we put in the work, Taylor says, a new normal will emerge: generations whose paths in life will be shaped by what they do — not what was done to them.

Quote of the talk: “What would it really mean if we actually end violence against children? Multiply the social, cultural and economic benefits of this change by every family, every community, village, town, city and country, and suddenly you have a new normal emerging. A generation would grow up without experiencing violence.”

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Sara-Jane Dunn, computational biologist

Big idea: In the 20th century, computer scientists inscribed machine-readable instructions on tiny silicon chips, completely revolutionizing our lives and workplaces. Today, a “living software” revolution centered around organisms built from programmable cells is poised to transform medicine, agriculture and energy in ways we can scarcely predict.

How? By studying how embryonic stem cells “decide” to become neurons, lung cells, bone cells or anything else in the body, Sara-Jane Dunn seeks to uncover the biological code that dictates cellular behavior. Using mathematical models, Dunn and her team analyze the expected function of a cellular system to determine the “genetic program” that leads to that result. While they’re still a long way from compiling living software, they’ve taken a crucial early step.

Quote of the talk: “We are at the beginning of a technological revolution. Understanding this ancient type of biological computation is the critical first step. And if we can realize this, we would enter into the era of an operating system that runs living software.”

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Fay Bound Alberti, cultural historian

Big idea: We need to recognize the complexity of loneliness and its ever-transforming history. It’s not just an individual and psychological problem — it’s a social and physical one.

Why? Loneliness is a modern-day epidemic, with a history that’s often recognized solely as a product of the mind. Fay Bound Alberti believes that interpretation is limiting. “We’ve neglected [loneliness’s] physical effects — and loneliness is physical,” she says. She points to how crucial touch, smell, sound, human interaction and even nostalgic memories of sensory experiences are to coping with loneliness, making people feel important, seen and helping to produce endorphins. By reframing our perspective on this feeling of isolation, we can better understand how to heal it.

Quote of talk: “I am suggesting we need to turn to the physical body, we need to understand the physical and emotional experiences of loneliness to be able to tackle a modern epidemic. After all, it’s through our bodies, our sensory bodies, that we engage with the world.”

Fun fact: “Before 1800 there was no word for loneliness in the English language. There was something called: ‘oneliness’ and there were ‘lonely places,’ but both simply meant the state of being alone. There was no corresponding emotional lack and no modern state of loneliness.”

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Carl Honoré, writer, thinker and activist

Big idea: Stop the lazy thinking around age and the “cult of youth” — it’s not all downhill from 40.

How? We need to debunk the myths and stereotypes surrounding age — beliefs like “older people can’t learn new things” and “creativity belongs to the young.” There are plenty of trailblazers and changemakers who came into their own later in life, from artists and musicians to physicists and business leaders. Studies show that people who fear and feel bad about aging are more likely to suffer physical effects as if age is an actual affliction rather than just a number. The first step to getting past that is by creating new, more positive societal narratives. Honoré offers a set of simple solutions — the two most important being: check your language and own your age. Embrace aging as an adventure, a process of opening rather than closing doors. We need to feel better about aging in order to age better.

Quote of the talk: “Whatever age you are: own it — and then go out there and show the world what you can do!”

It’s not about privacy — it’s about power: Carole Cadwalladr speaks at TEDSummit 2019

Three months after her landmark talk, Carole Cadwalladr is back at TED. In conversation with curator Bruno Giussani, Cadwalladr discusses the latest on her reporting on the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal and what we still don’t know about the transatlantic links between Brexit and the 2016 US presidential election.

“Who has the information, who has the data about you, that is where power now lies,” Cadwalladr says.

Cadwalladr appears in The Great Hack, a documentary by Karim Amer and TED Prize winner Jehane Noujaim that explores how Cambridge Analytica has come to symbolize the dark side of social media. The documentary was screened for TEDSummit participants today. Watch it in select theaters and on Netflix starting July 24.

Learn more about how you can support Cadwalladr’s investigation into data, disinformation and democracy.

10 years of TED Fellows: Notes from the Fellows Session of TEDSummit 2019

The event: TEDSummit 2019, Fellows Session, hosted by Shoham Arad and Lily Whitsitt

When and where: Monday, July 22, 2019, 9am BST, at the Edinburgh Convention Centre in Edinburgh, Scotland

Speakers: Carl Joshua Ncube, Suzanne Lee, Sonaar Luthra, Jon Lowenstein, Alicia Eggert, Lauren Sallan, Laura Boykin

Opening: A quick, witty performance from Carl Joshua Ncube, one of Zimbabwe’s best-known comedians, who uses humor to approach culturally taboo topics from his home country.

Music: An opening from visual artist and cellist Paul Rucker of the hauntingly beautiful “Criminalization of Survival,” a piece he created to explore issues related to mass incarceration, racially motivated violence, police brutality and the impact of slavery in the US.

And a dynamic closing from hip-hop artist and filmmaker Blitz Bazawule and his band, who tells stories of the polyphonic African diaspora.

The talks in brief:

Laura Boykin, computational biologist at the University of Western Australia

Big idea: If we’re going to solve the world’s toughest challenges — like food scarcity for millions of people living in extreme poverty — science needs to be more diverse and inclusive. 

How? Collaborating with smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, Laura Boykin uses genomics and supercomputing to help control whiteflies and viruses, which cause devastation to cassava crops. Cassava is a staple food that feeds more than 500 million people in East Africa and 800 million people globally. Boykin’s work transforms farmers’ lives, taking them from being unable to feed their families to having enough crops to sell and enough income to thrive. 

Quote of the talk: “I never dreamt the best science I would ever do would be sitting on a blanket under a tree in East Africa, using the highest tech genomics gadgets. Our team imagined a world where farmers could detect crop viruses in three hours instead of six months — and then we did it.”

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Lauren Sallan, paleobiologist at the University of Pennsylvania

Big idea: Paleontology is about so much more than dinosaurs.

How? The history of life on earth is rich, varied and … entirely too focused on dinosaurs, according to Lauren Sallan. The fossil record shows that earth has a dramatic past, with four mass extinctions occurring before dinosaurs even came along. From fish with fingers to galloping crocodiles and armored squid, the variety of life that has lived on our changing planet can teach us more about how we got here, and what the future holds, if we take the time to look.

Quote of the talk: “We have learned a lot about dinosaurs, but there’s so much left to learn from the other 99.9 percent of things that have ever lived, and that’s paleontology.”

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Suzanne Lee, designer, biofabricator

Big idea: What if we could grow bricks, furniture and even ready-made fabric for clothes?

How? Suzanne Lee is a fashion designer turned biofabrication pioneer who is part of a global community of innovators who are figuring how to grow their own materials. By utilizing living microbial organisms like bacteria and fungi, we can replace plastic, cement and other waste-generating materials with alternatives that can help reduce pollution.

Quote of the talk: “If we applied the same energy we currently do suppressing forms of life towards cultivating life, we’d turn the negative image of the urban jungle into one that literally embodies a thriving, living ecosystem.”

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Sonaar Luthra, founder and CEO of Water Canary

Big idea: We need to get better at monitoring the world’s water supplies — and we need to do it fast.

How? Building a global weather service for water would help governments, businesses and communities manage 21st-century water risk. Sonaar Luthra’s company Water Canary aims to develop technologies that more efficiently monitor water quality and availability around the world, avoiding the unforecasted shortages that happen now. Businesses and governments must also invest more in water, he says, and the largest polluters and misusers of water must be held accountable.

Quote of the talk: “It is in the public interest to measure and to share everything we can discover and learn about the risks we face in water. Reality doesn’t exist until it’s measured. It doesn’t just take technology to measure it — it takes our collective will.”

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Jon Lowenstein, documentary photographer, filmmaker and visual artist

Big idea: We need to care about the humanity of migrants in order to understand the desperate journeys they’re making across borders.

How? For the past two decades, Jon Lowenstein has captured the experiences of undocumented Latin Americans living in the United States to show the real stories of the men and women who make up the largest transnational migration in world history. Lowenstein specializes in long-term, in-depth documentary explorations that confront power, poverty and violence. 

Quote of the talk: “With these photographs, I place you squarely in the middle of these moments and ask you to think about [the people in them] as if you knew them. This body of work is a historical document — a time capsule — that can teach us not only about migration, but about society and ourselves.”

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Alicia Eggert, interdisciplinary artist

Big idea: A brighter, more equitable future depends upon our ability to imagine it.  

How? Alicia Eggert creates art that explores how light travels across space and time, revealing the relationship between reality and possibility. Her work has been installed on rooftops in Philadelphia, bridges in Amsterdam and uninhabited islands in Maine. Like navigational signs, Eggert’s artwork asks us to recognize where we are now as individuals and as a society, to identify where we want to be in the future — and to imagine the routes we can take to get there.

Quote of the talk: “Signs often help to orient us in the world by telling us where we are now and what’s happening in the present moment. But they can also help us zoom out, shift our perspective and get a sense of the bigger picture.”

Weaving Community: Notes from Session 1 of TEDSummit 2019

The stage is set for TEDSummit 2019: A Community Beyond Borders! During the opening session, speakers and performers explored themes of competition, political engagement and longing — and celebrated the TED communities (representing 84 countries) gathered in Edinburgh, Scotland to forge TED’s next chapter.

The event: TEDSummit 2019, Session 1: Weaving Community, hosted by Bruno Giussani and Helen Walters

When and where: Sunday, July 21, 2019, 5pm BST, at the Edinburgh Convention Centre in Edinburgh, Scotland

Speakers: Pico Iyer, Jochen Wegner, Hajer Sharief, Mariana Lin, Carole Cadwalladr, Susan Cain with Min Kym

Opening: A warm Scottish welcome from raconteur Mackenzie Dalrymple

Music: Findlay Napier and Gillian Frame performing selections from The Ledger, a series of Scottish folk songs

The talks in brief:

Pico Iyer, novelist and nonfiction author

Big idea: The opposite of winning isn’t losing; it’s failing to see the larger picture.

Why? As a child in England, Iyer believed the point of competition was to win, to vanquish one’s opponent. Now, some 50 years later and a resident of Japan, he’s realized that competition can be “more like an act of love.” A few times a week, he plays ping-pong at his local health club. Games are played as doubles, and partners are changed every five minutes. As a result, nobody ends up winning — or losing — for long. Iyer has found liberation and wisdom in this approach. Just as in a choir, he says, “Your only job is to play your small part perfectly, to hit your notes with feeling and by so doing help to create a beautiful harmony that’s much greater than the sum of its parts.”

Quote of the talk: “Seeming happiness can stand in the way of true joy even more than misery does.”

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Jochen Wegner, journalist and editor of Zeit Online

Big idea: The spectrum of belief is as multifaceted as humanity itself. As social media segments us according to our interests, and as algorithms deliver us increasingly homogenous content that reinforces our beliefs, we become resistant to any ideas — or even facts — that contradict our worldview. The more we sequester ourselves, the more divided we become. How can we learn to bridge our differences?

How? Inspired by research showing that one-on-one conversations are a powerful tool for helping people learn to trust each other, Zeit Online built Germany Talks, a “Tinder for politics” that facilitates “political arguments” and face-to-face meetings between users in an attempt to bridge their points-of-view on issues ranging from immigration to same-sex marriage. With Germany Talks (and now My Country Talks and Europe Talks) Zeit has facilitated conversations between thousands of Europeans from 33 countries.

Quote of the talk: “What matters here is not the numbers, obviously. What matters here is whenever two people meet to talk in person for hours, without anyone else listening, they change — and so do our societies. They change, little by little, discussion by discussion.”

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Hajer Sharief, activist and cofounder of the Together We Build It Foundation

Big Idea: People of all genders, ages, races, beliefs and socioeconomic statuses should participate in politics.

Why? Hajer Sharief’s native Libya is recovering from 40 years of authoritarian rule and civil war. She sheds light on the way politics are involved in every aspect of life: “By not participating in it, you are literally allowing other people to decide what you can eat, wear, if you can have access to healthcare, free education, how much tax you pay, when can you retire, what is your pension,” she says. “Other people are also deciding whether your race is enough to consider you a criminal, or if your religion or nationality are enough to put you on a terrorist list.” When Sharief was growing up, her family held weekly meetings to discuss family issues, abiding by certain rules to ensured everyone was respectful and felt free to voice their thoughts. She recounts a meeting that went badly for her 10-year-old self, resulting in her boycotting them altogether for many years — until an issue came about which forced her to participate again. Rejoining the meetings was a political assertion, and it helped her realize an important lesson: you are never too young to use your voice — but you need to be present for it to work.

Quote of talk: “Politics is not only activism — it’s awareness, it’s keeping ourselves informed, it’s caring for facts. When it’s possible, it is casting a vote. Politics is the tool through which we structure ourselves as groups and societies.”

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Mariana Lin, AI character designer and principal writer for Siri

Big idea: Let’s inject AI personalities with the essence of life: creativity, weirdness, curiosity, fun.

Why? Tech companies are going in two different directions when it comes to creating AI personas: they’re either building systems that are safe, flat, stripped of quirks and humor — or, worse, they’re building ones that are fully customizable, programmed to say just what you want to hear, just how you like to hear it. While this might sound nice at first, we’re losing part of what makes us human in the process: the friction and discomfort of relating with others, the hard work of building trusting relationships. Mariana Lin calls for tech companies to try harder to truly bring AI to life — in all its messy, complicated, uncomfortable glory. For starters, she says, companies can hire a diverse range of writers, creatives, artists and social thinkers to work on AI teams. If the people creating these personalities are as diverse as the people using it — from poets and philosophers to bankers and beekeepers — then the future of AI looks bright.

Quote of the talk: “If we do away with the discomfort of relating with others not exactly like us, with views not exactly like ours — we do away with what makes us human.”

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Carole Cadwalladr, investigative journalist, interviewed by TED curator Bruno Giussani

Big idea: Companies that collect and hoard our information, like Facebook, have become unthinkably powerful global players — perhaps more powerful than governments. It’s time for the public hold them accountable.

How? Tech companies with offices in different countries must obey the laws of those nations. It’s up to leaders to make sure those laws are enforced — and it’s up to citizens to pressure lawmakers to further tighten protections. Despite legal and personal threats from her adversaries, Carole Cadwalladr continues to explore the ways in which corporations and politicians manipulate data to consolidate their power.

Quote to remember: “In Britain, Brexit is this thing which is reported on as this British phenomenon, that’s all about what’s happening in Westminster. The fact that actually we are part of something which is happening globally — this rise of populism and authoritarianism — that’s just completely overlooked. These transatlantic links between what is going on in Trump’s America are very, very closely linked to what is going on in Britain.”

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Susan Cain, quiet revolutionary, with violinist Min Kym

Big idea: Life is steeped in sublime magic that you can tap into, opening a whole world filled with passion and delight.

How? By forgoing constant positivity for a state of mind more exquisite and fleeting — a place where light (joy) and darkness (sorrow) meet, known to us all as longing. Susan Cain weaves her journey in search for the sublime with the splendid sounds of Min Kym on violin, sharing how the feeling of yearning connects us to each other and helps us to better understand what moves us deep down.

Quote of the talk: “Follow your longing where it’s telling you to go, and may it carry you straight to the beating heart of the perfect and beautiful world.”

A first glimpse at the TEDSummit 2019 speaker lineup

With TEDSummit 2019 just two months away, it’s time to unveil the first group of speakers that will take to the stage in Edinburgh, Scotland, from July 21-25.

Three years ago, more than 1,000 members of the TED global community convened in Banff, Canada, for the first-ever TEDSummit. We talked about the fracturing state of the world, the impact of technology and the accelerating urgency of climate change. And we drew wisdom and inspiration from the speakers — and from each other.

These themes are equally pressing today, and we’ll bring them to the stage in novel, more developed ways in Edinburgh. We’ll also address a wide range of additional topics that demand attention — looking not only for analysis but also antidotes and solutions. To catalyze this process, half of the TEDSummit conference program will take place outside the theatre, as experts host an array of Discovery Sessions in the form of hands-on workshops, activities, debates and conversations.

Check out a glimpse of the lineup of speakers who will share their future-focused ideas below. Some are past TED speakers returning to give new talks; others will step onto the red circle for the first time. All will help us understand the world we currently live in.

Here we go! (More will be added in the coming weeks):

Anna Piperal, digital country expert

Bob Langert, corporate changemaker

Carl Honoré, author

Carole Cadwalladr, investigative journalist

Diego Prilusky, immersive media technologist

Eli Pariser, organizer and author

Fay Bound Alberti, historian

George Monbiot, thinker and author

Hajer Sharief, youth inclusion activist

Howard Taylor, children safety advocate

Jochen Wegner, editor and dialogue creator

Kelly Wanser, geoengineering expert

Ma Yansong, architect

Marco Tempest, technology magician

Margaret Heffernan, business thinker

María Neira, global public health official

Mariana Lin, AI personalities writer

Mariana Mazzucato, economist

Marwa Al-Sabouni, architect

Nick Hanauer, capitalism redesigner

Nicola Jones, science writer

Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister of Scotland

Omid Djalili, comedian

Patrick Chappatte, editorial cartoonist

Pico Iyer, global author

Poet Ali, Philosopher, poet

Rachel Kleinfeld, violence scholar

Raghuram Rajan, former central banker

Rose Mutiso, energy for Africa activist

Sandeep Jauhar, cardiologist

Sara-Jane Dunn, computational biologist

Sheperd Doeleman, black hole scientist

Sonia Livingstone, social psychologist

Susan Cain, quiet revolutionary

Tim Flannery, carbon-negative tech scholar

Tshering Tobgay, former Prime Minister of Bhutan

 

With them, a number of artists will also join us at TEDSummit, including:

Djazia Satour, singer

ELEW, pianist and DJ

KT Tunstall, singer and songwriter

Min Kym, virtuoso violinist

Radio Science Orchestra, space-music orchestra

Yilian Cañizares, singer and songwriter

 

Registration for TEDSummit is open for active members of our various communities: TED conference members, Fellows, past TED speakers, TEDx organizers, Educators, Partners, Translators and more. If you’re part of one of these communities and would like to attend, please visit the TEDSummit website.

In Case You Missed It: Highlights from TED2019

If we learned anything at TED2019, it’s that life doesn’t fit into simple narratives, and that there are no simple answers to the big problems we’re facing. But we can use those problems, our discomfort and even our anger to find the energy to make change.

Twelve mainstage sessions, two rocking sessions of talks from TED Fellows, a special session of TED Unplugged, a live podcast recording and much more amounted to an unforgettable week. Any attempt to summarize it all will be woefully incomplete, but here’s a try.

What happened to the internet? Once a place of so much promise, now a source of so much division. Journalist Carole Cadwalldr opened the conference with an electrifying talk on Facebook’s role in Brexit — and how the same players were involved in 2016 US presidential election. She traced the contours of the growing threat social media poses to democracy and calls out the “gods of Silicon Valley,” naming names — one of whom, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, sat down to talk with TED’s Chris Anderson and Whitney Pennington Rodgers the following day. Dorsey acknowledged problems with harassment on the platform and explained some of the work his team is doing to make it better.

Hannah Gadsby broke comedy. Her words, and she makes a compelling case in one of the most talked-about moments of the conference. Look for her talk release on April 29.

Humanity strikes back! Eight huge Audacious Project–supported ideas launched at TED this year. From a groundbreaking project at the Center for Policing Equity to work with police and communities and to collect data on police behavior and set goals to make it more fair … to a new effort to sequester carbon in soil … and more, you can help support these projects and change the world for good.

10 years of TED Fellows. Celebrating a decade of the program in two sessions of exuberant talks, the TED Fellows showed some wow moments, including Brandon Clifford‘s discovery of how to make multi-ton stones “dance,” Arnav Kapur‘s wearable device that allows for silent speech and Skylar Tibbits‘s giant canvas bladders that might save sinking islands. At the same time, they reminded us some of the pain that can exist behind breakthroughs, with Brandon Anderson speaking poignantly about the loss of his life partner during a routine traffic stop — which inspired him to develop a first-of-its-kind platform to report police conduct — and Erika Hamden opening up about her team’s failures in building FIREBall, a UV telescope that can observe extremely faint light from huge clouds of hydrogen gas in and around galaxies.

Connection is a superpower. If you haven’t heard of the blockbuster megahit Crazy Rich Asians, then, well, it’s possible you’re living under a large rock. Whether or not you saw it, the film’s director, Jon M. Chu, has a TED Talk about connection — to his family, his culture, to film and technology — that goes far beyond the movie. The theme of connection rang throughout the conference: from Priya Parker’s three easy steps to turn our everyday get-togethers into meaningful and transformative gatherings to Barbara J. King’s heartbreaking examples of grief in the animal kingdom to Sarah Kay’s epic opening poem about the universe — and our place in it.

Meet DigiDoug. TED takes tech seriously, and Doug Roble took us up on it, debuting his team’s breakthrough motion capture tech, which renders a 3D likeness (known as Digital Doug) in real time — down to Roble’s facial expressions, pores and wrinkles. The demo felt like one of those shifts, where you see what the future’s going to look like. Outside the theater, attendees got a chance to interact with DigiDoug in VR, talking on a virtual TED stage with Roble (who is actually in another room close by, responding to the “digital you” in real time).

New hope for political leadership. There was no shortage of calls to fix the broken, leaderless systems at the top of world governments throughout the conference. The optimists in the room won out during Michael Tubbs’s epic talk about building new civic structures. The mayor of Stockton, California (and the youngest ever of a city with more than 100,000 people), Tubbs shared his vision for governing strategies that recognize systems that place people in compromised situations — and that view impoverished and violent communities with compassion. “When we see someone different from us, they should not reflect our fears, our anxieties, our insecurities, the prejudices we have been taught, our biases. We should see ourselves. We should see our common humanity.”

Exploring the final frontier. A surprise appearance from Sheperd Doeleman, head of the Event Horizon Telescope — whose work produced the historic, first-ever image of a black hole that made waves last week — sent the conference deep into space, and it never really came back. Astrophysicist Juna Kollmeier, head of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, shared her work mapping the observable universe — a feat, she says, that we’ll complete in just 40 years.  “Think about it. We’ve gone from arranging clamshells to general relativity in a few thousand years,” she says. “If we hang on 40 more, we can map all the galaxies.” And in the Fellows talks, Moriba Jah, a space environmentalist and inventor of the orbital garbage monitoring software AstriaGraph, showed how space has a garbage problem. Around half a million objects, some as small as a speck of paint, orbit the Earth — and there’s no consensus on what’s in orbit or where.

Go to sleep. A lack of sleep can lead to more than drowsiness and irritability. Matt Walker shared how it can be deadly as well, leading to an increased risk of Parkinson’s, cancer, heart attacks and more. “Sleep is the Swiss army knife of health,” he says, “It’s not an optional lifestyle luxury. Sleep is a non-negotiable biological necessity. It is your life support system, and it is mother nature’s best effort yet at immortality.”

In Case You Missed It: Highlights from day 1 of TED2019

The theme of TED2019 is “Bigger than us,” and day 1 did not disappoint. Even though it had just three sessions, they were chock full of compelling ideas and calls for action. Here are seven takeaways: 

We’re shining light into some really dark places. Sheperd Doeleman, head of the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, takes us inside the new (and iconic) black hole image and the epic effort involved in making it. The petabytes (1 petabyte = 1 million GB) of data that were used to construct the image came from a network of telescopes operated by 200 people in 60 countries who, he says, “effortlessly sidestepped the issues that divide us.” (Here’s a thought: Let’s get competing political candidates to work on science projects … together!) And two TED Fellows showed documentary projects that exposed hidden truths: Taghi Amirani shares footage from his just-finished Coup 53, which reveals the British and American conspiracy that overthrew the Iranian government in 1953 and shaped the country’s fate (and his family’s), while Nanfu Wang speaks about One Child Nation, her film about the traumas caused by China’s one-child policy.

And some places still need illumination. British journalist Carole Cadwalladr describes her investigation into the Facebook ads that targeted people with lies prior to the 2016 Brexit vote, but most of the evidence of what occurred remains locked in the “black boxes” of Facebook, Google and Twitter. She urges them to release their data, saying: “It’s a crime scene, and you have the evidence.” Writer Baratunde Thurston shares examples of people in the US who had the police called on them because they were “living while black” — when they went to a swimming pool, donated food to the homeless or played golf, “concerned” observers phoned 911 to report them. Systemic racism underlies these 911 calls, and even though changing it may sound impossible, Thurston has hope. He believes that if we can see the humanity of people targeted by racism, we can change our actions; when we change our actions, we change the story; and when we change the story, we can change the system.

The words we use matter. We’re living in polarizing times, and many fractures occur during our conversations. By tweaking what we say, political pollster Frank Luntz shows how to keep our discussions open and respectful. One standout from his suggestions: instead of saying the passive “I’m listening,” try the active, empathic “I get it.”

Businesses need to look beyond balance sheets and focus on their people. TED Fellow Jess Kutch created coworker.org, a platform that helps employees organize. While it tends to scare executives, Kutch says corporate leaders should view organizing as a positive — it’s what she calls “productive conflict,” offering “an opportunity to build a better workplace, a stronger business and an economy that works for all of us.” (Besides, she notes, the people most passionate about changing their workplace tend to be the people who love their workplace the most.) … Creating a company that puts employees first is part of what Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya calls his “anti-CEO playbook.” Other actions in his playbook: Asking communities what they need instead of demanding tax breaks and concessions from them; being accountable to one’s customers rather than one’s shareholders; and taking sides on political issues — because, he says, businesses should use their power to make a difference.

Ethics shouldn’t be an afterthought. While Cadwalladr calls out the tech giants and Ulukaya calls for humanity in business, a slew of TED Fellows echo the theme of responsibility. MIT researcher Arnav Kapur demos a technology that can communicate a person’s thoughts — but he stressed it’s not mind reading. It picks up only “deliberate speech” while “control resides with the user.” … Cofounder and executive director of The Good Food Institute Bruce Friedrich says humans have a responsibility to the earth not to tax it with the consequences of meat consumption. He’s championing research and investment into plant-based and cell-based meat. … Finally, astrodynamicist Moriba Jah speaks about our planet’s responsibility to, well, the rest of the universe. There are more than 500,000 objects in space put there by humans — “most of us what we launch never comes back,” he says. The world’s nations should pool their efforts and data to track the trash.  

Music can be used to teach history and biology. Teachers might want to take a lesson from these TED Fellows. Amma Ghartey-Tagoe Kootin shares a rousing excerpt from her in-progress musical At Buffalo, which examines black identity through the events of the 1901 World’s Fair in Buffalo, New York. And biologist Danielle N. Lee led the crowd in a version of Naughty by Nature’s “O.P.P.” to illustrate the concept of “extra-pair copulation.” (Trust us — it was amazing.)  

Fishing cats are the cutest cat you’ve never heard of. Oh yes, they are.

That concludes this highly abbreviated rundown of the day’s doings, which also included walking Easter Island statues, innovative ways of creating new medications, a Kenyan music festival with the winning name of “Blankets and Wine” (sign us up!), an astrophysicist who is taking how she studies stellar explosions and applying them to city lights and the criminal justice system, restoring the Maldives with canvas “bladders,” spoken word from the sublime Sarah Kay and Marc Bamuthi Joseph, and much more.

Truth: Notes from Session 1 of TED2019

The world feels fragile these days, a bit wobbly. How do we figure out a way forward? At TED2019, we’re taking a painfully honest look at what’s going on, laying out shared values, exploring a common purpose — and seeing how we can build something meaningful together: an idea, vision, ambition that’s bigger than us.

The event: Talks and performances from TED2019, Session 1: Truth, hosted by TED’s Chris Anderson and Helen Walters.

When and where: Monday, April 15, 2019, 5pm, at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, BC.

Speakers: Sarah Kay, Sheperd Doeleman, Carole Cadwalladr, Frank Luntz, Baratunde Thurston and Hamdi Ulukaya.

Music: Swedish folk duo First Aid Kit, performing three original songs: “King of the World,” “Nothing Has to Be True” and “My Silver Lining.”

The talks in brief:

Sarah Kay, poet and educator

• Big idea: What does it mean to embrace the beauty of life around us?
• How? In a thoughtful and stirring spoken-word piece, Sarah Kay encourages us to welcome the beauty of the universe, however it may appear. From starlings bursting into flight to the enormous heart of a blue whale, the poetry of life is within our reach.
• Quote of the talk: “Maybe it’s not my job to invent something new. Maybe, instead, it’s my job to listen to what the universe is showing me.”

Sheperd Doeleman, director of the Event Horizon Telescope project

• Big idea: We have the first image of a black hole … and that’s awesome!
• How? 100 years ago, Einstein predicted we would see a circle of bright light around a black hole, should we ever image one. Last week, Doeleman’s global team of 200 researchers across 60 countries announced just that. Using an international array of telescopes synced with atomic clocks, the Event Horizon Telescope imaged the supermassive black hole that lies at the center of a galaxy 55 million light years away. The ring of light we see in the image is the orbit of photons (particles of light) around the black hole. The dark region in the center is the event horizon, and our entire solar system would fit inside it. Doeleman discusses his team’s findings with TED’s Chris Anderson. (You can learn more about how this image was created from Katie Bouman, who created an algorithm central to the project’s success.)
• Quote of the talk: “Black holes really are the central mystery of our age because that’s where the quantum world and the gravitational world come together.”

Carole Cadwalladr, investigative journalist for the Guardian and Observer and Pulitzer Prize finalist

• Big idea: Online platforms need to be accountable for their potential to influence voters.
• How? Targeted Facebook ads played a decisive role in the Brexit referendum. But when Cadwalladr and her colleagues wanted to see what British voters saw in the leadup to the 2016 referendum, they found that while some people mentioned seeing “quite scary stuff about immigration” on Facebook, it was difficult to know what ads they had been shown, or how they had been targeted. Cadwalladr uncovered that a company called Cambridge Analytica used data illegally harvested from Facebook to target these ads at voters deemed most susceptible to influence. As she says: “It was the biggest electoral fraud in Britain for 100 years.” Cadwalladr calls for Mark Zuckerberg and other social media leaders to stand accountable for how their platforms can be used to influence democracy. Read a full recap of her talk here.
• Quote of the talk: “It is not about left or right, or Leave or Remain, or Trump or not. It’s whether it’s actually possible to have a free and fair election ever again. As it stands … I don’t think it is.”

Frank Luntz, communications advisor, pollster and wordsmith whose work coining terms like “climate change” and the “death tax” helped to define contemporary American politics

• Big idea: It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear. To effectively communicate, we need to change the words we use that alienate people we disagree with.
• How? Luntz provides a list of words to lose and words to use — for those on both the left and right. For example, instead of saying “tolerance,” which implies mere acceptance without embracing, we should be talking about “mutual respect,” which says that you have something to learn from everyone. And instead of “human capital,” which communicates that people are just a profit center, we should be talking about “human talent,” which respects individuals. Luntz also calls on American presidential candidates in 2020 to commit to no-negativity campaigns, and he urges each of us listen, learn and use language to lead.
• Quote of the talk: “Populism is a great way to get elected, and it is a horrible way to govern.”

Baratunde Thurston, humorist, activist and writer of the New York Times bestseller How to Be Black

• Big idea: White supremacy isn’t confined to those who consciously believe it. It’s implicit in the structure of our society — from the police to white people who call the cops on people of color merely because they make them feel uncomfortable. But we can change that structure — by changing our narratives.
• How? By making a game out of analyzing all-too-familiar headlines — e.g., “White Woman Calls Police on Eight-Year-Old Black Girl Selling Water” or “White Woman Calls Cops on Black Woman Waiting for Uber” — Thurston shows how African Americans are being punished for their mere existence. And by rewriting the headlines, we can imagine new outcomes for those narratives, change our behavior accordingly and, perhaps, begin to dismantle white supremacy.
• Quote of the talk: “Systems are just collective stories we all buy into. When we change them, we write a better reality for us all to be a part of. I am asking us to use our power to choose.”

Hamdi Ulukaya, founder and CEO of Chobani

• Big idea: The CEO playbook that has powered corporate America for decades is broken. We need a new playbook — an “anti-CEO playbook” — that benefits employees and local communities, instead of making shareholders rich. And consumers can use their power to help create it.
• How? There are four key values of the anti-CEO playbook: community, responsibility, gratitude and accountability. Companies can — and should — help build up struggling communities, instead of simply seeking out areas with tax breaks or incentives. That’s why Ulukaya built his second yogurt factory in a rural town in Idaho. Anti-CEOs should also hold themselves accountable to their consumers. After all, Ulukaya says, consumers have the buying power to support brands that treat their employees well. Taken together, when consumers refuse to buy from companies that put profit in front of people — and when CEOs follow the new playbook — we can create a better way of doing business.
• Quote of the talk: “Today’s playbook says: business exists only to maximize profit and make shareholders rich. I think that’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard. The truth is: business should take care of employees first.”

Social media is a threat to democracy: Carole Cadwalladr speaks at TED2019

The day after the Brexit referendum, British journalist (and recently announced Pulitzer Prize finalist) Carole Cadwalladr went to her home region of South Wales to investigate why so many voters had elected to leave the European Union.

She asked residents of the traditionally left-wing town of Ebbw Vale, a place newly rejuvenated by EU investment, why they had voted to leave. They talked about wanting to take back control — a Vote Leave campaign slogan — and being fed up with immigrants and refugees.

Cadwalladr was taken aback. “Walking around, I didn’t meet any immigrants or refugees,” she says. “I met one Polish woman who told me she was practically the only foreigner in town. When I checked the figures, I discovered that Ebbw Vale actually has one of the lowest rates of immigration in the country. So I was just a bit baffled, because I couldn’t really understand where people were getting their information from.”

A reader from the area got in touch with her after her story ran, to explain that she had seen things on Facebook, which she described to Cadwalladr as “quite scary stuff about immigration, and especially about Turkey.” This was misinformation that Cadwalladr was familiar with — the lie that Turkey was going to join the EU, accompanied by the suggestion that its population of 76 million people would promptly emigrate to current member states.

She describes trying to find evidence of this content on Facebook: “There’s no archive of ads that people see, or what had been pushed into their news feeds. No trace of anything … This entire referendum took place in darkness because it took place on Facebook.” And Mark Zuckerburg has refused multiple requests from the British parliament to come and answer questions about these ad campaigns and the data used to create them, she says.

“What I and other journalists have uncovered is that multiple crimes took place during the referendum, and they took place on Facebook,” Cadwalladr says.

The amount of money you can spend on an election is limited by law in Britain, to prevent “buying” votes. It has been found that the Vote Leave campaign laundered £750,000 shortly before the referendum, which they spent on these online disinformation campaigns.

“This was the biggest electoral fraud in Britain for a hundred years, in a once-in-a-generation vote that hinged on just 1 percent of the electorate,” Cadwalladr says.

Cadwalladr embarked on a complex and painstaking investigation into the ad campaigns used in the referendum. After spending months tracking down an ex-employee, Christopher Wylie, she found that a company called Cambridge Analytica “had profiled people politically in order to understand their individual fears, to better target them with Facebook ads, and it did this by illicitly harvesting the profiles of 87 million people from Facebook.”

Despite legal threats from both Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, Cadwalladr and her colleagues went public with their findings, publishing them in the Observer.

“Facebook: you were on the wrong side of history in that,” Cadwalladr says. “And you are on the wrong side of history in this. In refusing to give us the answers that we need. And that is why I am here. To address you directly. The gods of Silicon Valley; Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg and Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Jack Dorsey, and your employees and your investors, too … We are what happens to a western democracy when a hundred years of electoral laws are disrupted by technology … What the Brexit vote demonstrates is that liberal democracy is broken, and you broke it.”

Cadwalladr offers a challenge to tech companies: “It is not about left or right, or Leave or Remain, or Trump or not. It’s about whether it’s actually possible to have a free and fair election ever again. As it stands, I don’t think it is. And so my question to you is: Is this what you want? Is this how you want history to remember you? As the handmaidens to authoritarianism that is on the rise all across the world? You set out to connect people and you are refusing to acknowledge that the same technology is now driving us apart.”

And for everyone else, Cadwalladr has a call to action: “Democracy is not guaranteed, and it is not inevitable. And we have to fight. And we have to win. And we cannot let these tech companies have this unchecked power. It’s up to us: you, me and all of us. We are the ones who have to take back control.”

TED announces Carla Zanoni as first Director of Audience Development

TED, the nonprofit organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading, has tapped Carla Zanoni as its first-ever Director of Audience Development, effective April 1, 2019. Formerly the Editor of Audience and Analytics at the Wall Street Journal, Zanoni will lead TED’s audience acquisition and growth strategies across its global, multi-channel footprint, with an emphasis on expanding analytics, social media and digital community development. Zanoni will report to Colin Helms, TED’s Head of Media.

“With an audience reach of over 120 million people worldwide, TED has built an incredible community centered around watching, listening, sharing and discussing powerful ideas,” said Helms. “We’re evolving from being simply being known for ‘TED talks’ to a multifaceted ideas platform that includes a half-dozen hit podcasts, thousands of community-organized TEDx events, and a growing library of over 100,000 talks. This is in addition to animated TED-Ed videos and original short-form shows. With the exponential growth of our content library, it’s become vital that we deepen our audience relationships and empower their discovery of ideas worth spreading. We’re thrilled to have Carla join TED and help us imagine the future of our globally connected community.”

“TED knows audience inside out, and they know how to grow community,” said Zanoni. “I am inspired to lead the charge of this next era of their audience engagement — and to create new ways for us to come together, which is vital in today’s divided landscape. I’m thrilled to join the visionary and thoughtful team at TED.”

Zanoni brings more than a decade of experience in audience development. Prior to joining TED, she was the first global Audience & Analytics Editor to be named on the masthead of the Wall Street Journal, where she worked to transform the newsroom to be data-informed in its daily work and strategic decisions. During her tenure, she created and led the audience engagement, development, data analytics and emerging media team focused on diversifying and growing the Journal’s readership. She also launched the Wall Street Journal on multiple storytelling platforms including Snapchat Discover, the Facebook Messenger bot and Amazon Echo.

Zanoni previously led national digital and social strategy at DNAinfo.com. She wrote for numerous regional and national publications and helped launch the first newspaper dedicated to New York City politics (now called City and State). Zanoni is a graduate of Columbia University’s School of General Studies and School of Journalism. She is working on her first book.

Imagine If: A session of talks in partnership with the U.S. Air Force

The event: TED Salon: Imagine If, curated by Bryn Freedman and Amanda Miller, TED Institute

The partner: U.S. Air Force

When and where: Thursday, February 21, 2019, at the TED World Theater in New York City

Music: Rapper Alia Sharrief, performing her songs “My Girls Rock” and “Girl Like Me”

The big idea: Imagination is a superpower — it allows us to push beyond perceived limits, to think beyond the ordinary and to discover a new world of possibilities.

New idea (to us anyway): We may be able to vaccinate against PTSD and other mental illnesses.

Good to be reminded: Leaders shouldn’t simply follow the pack. They need to embrace sustainability, equality, accountability — not just the whims of the market.

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Brenda Cartier, Director of Operations at Headquarters Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) and the first female Air Commando selected for the rank of general

• Big idea: “Precision-guided masculinity” allows us to maintain a killer instinct without discarding the empathetic, “feminine” traits that mitigate the “collateral damage” of toxic masculinity.
• How? Viewing gender as a spectrum of femininities and masculinities allows us to select traits as they fit each situation, without tying our identities to them. As we learn to balance our personalities, we become well-rounded human beings and create more just societies.
• Quote of the talk: “This new narrative breaks us out of a one-size-fits-all approach to gender, where we link male bodies and masculinity and female bodies and femininity. ‘Precision-guided masculinity’ begs us to ask the question: ‘Who is it that is employing those masculine traits to protect and defend?'”

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Rebecca Brachman, neuroscientist, TED Fellow and pioneer in the emerging field of preventative psychopharmacology

• Big idea: Brachman and her team have discovered a new class of drugs called “resilience enhancers” that could change the way we treat mental illness like depression and PTSD. These drugs wouldn’t just treat symptoms of the diseases, she says — they could prevent them from developing in the first place.
• How? Brachman’s research applies the fundamental principle of vaccination to mental illness, building up a person’s ability to recover and grow after stress. For example, imagine a Red Cross volunteer going into an earthquake zone. In addition to the typhoid vaccine, she could take a resilience-enhancing drug before she leaves to protect her against PTSD. The same applies to soldiers, firefighters, ER doctors, cancer patients, refugees — anyone exposed to trauma or major life stress. The drugs have worked in preliminary tests with mice. Next up, humans.
• Quote of the talk: “This is a paradigm shift in psychiatry. It’s a whole new field: preventative psychopharmacology.”

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Michele Wucker, finance and policy strategist, founder and CEO of Gray Rhino & Company

• Big idea: Catastrophic events sometimes catch us by surprise, but too often we invite crises to barrel right into our lives despite countless, blaring warning signs. What keeps us from facing the reality of a situation head-on?
• How? Semantics, semantics, semantics — and a healthy dose of honesty. Wucker urges us to replace the myth of the “black swan” — that rare, unforeseeable, unavoidable event — with the reality of the “gray rhino,” the common obvious catastrophes, like the bursting of a financial bubble or the end of a tempestuous relationship, that are predictable and preventable. She breaks down the factors that determine whether we run from problems or tackle them, and lays out some warning signs that you may be ignoring one of those charging rhinos right now.
• Quote of the talk: “Think about the obvious challenges in your own life and how you deal with them. Do you stick your head in the ground like an ostrich and ignore the problems entirely? Do you freak out like Chicken Little over all the tiny things, but miss the big giant wolf coming at you? Or do you manage things when they’re small to keep them from going out of control?”

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Halla Tómasdóttir, CEO of Richard Branson’s B Team and former Icelandic presidential candidate, interviewed by curator Bryn Freedman

• Big idea: Corporate leaders — and the businesses they run — are in a crisis of conformity that favors not rocking the boat and ignores big issues like climate change and inequality. We need new leadership to get us out of this crisis.
• How? It’s not enough for corporate leaders to simply follow the pack and narrowly define the missions of their organizations. If CEOs want to avoid the pitchforks of the masses, they must also ensure that their businesses are global citizens that embrace sustainability, equality, accountability — not just the markets.
• Quote of the talk: “At the end of the day, we need to ask ourselves who are we holding ourselves accountable for — and if that isn’t the next generation, I don’t know who.”

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Sarah T. Stewart, planetary scientist at the University of California, Davis, and 2018 MacArthur “Genius” fellow

• Big idea: How did the Moon form? Despite its proximity, we don’t actually know! Adding to the mystery: the Earth and Moon are composed of the same stuff, a rarity we’ve found nowhere else in the universe. In trying to solve the mystery, Sarah T. Stewart discovered an entirely new not-quite-planet.
• How? Stewart and her team smash planets together in computer simulations to learn more about how they were created. While trying to uncover the Moon’s origin, they discovered that the early Earth may have been involved in a massive collision with a Mars-sized planet, which then created a “synestia:” a super-heated doughnut of molten material previously unknown to science, out of which the Moon was born.
• Quote of the talk: “I discovered a new type of astronomical object. It’s not a planet; it’s made from planets.”

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Kashfia Rahman, Intel International Science and Engineering Fair winner and Harvard freshman

• Big idea: Teenagers aren’t necessarily chasing thrills when they make bad decisions. Rather, repeated exposure to risk actually numbs how they make choices.
• How? After wondering why her peers were constantly making silly and irresponsible decisions, Kashfia Rahman decided to conduct an experiment testing how her fellow high school students responded to risk. She found that habituation to risk — or “getting used to it” — impacts how teenagers make choices beyond their cognitive control. With this insight, she believes we can create policies that more holistically tackle high-risk behavior among teenagers.
• Quote of the talk: “Unforeseen opportunities often come from risk-taking — not the hazardous negative risk-taking I studied, but the good ones, the positive risks,” she says. “The more risks I took, the more I felt capable.”

Showing off: Notes from Session 5 of TEDWomen 2018

The term “showing off” gets a bad rap. But for Session 5 of TEDWomen 2018, a lineup of speakers and performers reclaimed the phrase — showing off their talents, skills and whole extraordinary selves. Hosted by TED’s head of conferences, Kelly Stoetzel, and head of curation, Helen Walters, the talks ranged from architecture and the environment to education and grief, taking on the fundamental challenges that we face as humans. The session featured Ane Brun, Kotchakorn Voraakhom, Kate E. Brandt, Danielle R. Moss, Carla Harris, Helen Marriage and Nora McInerny.

It all starts with a dramatic opening. The session starts with an air of anticipation, thanks to multi-instrumentalist Ane Brun‘s opening number, “It All Starts With One.” This cabaret workout for piano and string quartet is based on “the revolution of dreams” of the Arab Spring, written to celebrate “small victories … that little drop that I, as an individual, can add to the flood of change.” Her intimate follow-up number, “You Light My Fire,” is “a statue in the shape of a song” dedicated to the unacknowledged warriors who fight for women’s rights.

Our sinking cities. At this very moment, 48 major cities across the globe are sinking — cities like New York City, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, Shanghai and Bangkok, built on the soft ground alongside their rivers. Landscape architect and TED Fellow Kotchakorn Voraakhom comes from Bangkok herself and was displaced, along with millions of others, by the devastating flood that hit Thailand in 2011. “Our city’s modern infrastructure — especially our notion to fight floods with concrete — has made us extremely vulnerable to climate uncertainty,” she says. In the years since, she’s worked to combine the ingenuity of modern engineering with the reality of rising sea levels to help cities live with climate change. She and her team designed the Chulalongkorn Centenary Park, a big green crack in the heart of Bangkok and the city’s first new public park in more than three decades. The park is not only a site for recreation and beautification; it also helps the city deal with water through some ingenious design. Bangkok is a flat city, so by inclining the whole park, it harnesses the power of gravity to collect every drop of rain — holding and collecting up to a million gallons of water during severe floods. “This park is not about getting rid of flood water,” she says. “It’s about creating a way to live with it.” In a sinking city where every rainfall is a wake-up call, this “amphibious design” provides new hope of making room for water.

“Greening” Google with a circular approach. “What if, like nature, everything was repurposed, reused and reborn for use again?” asks Google’s head of sustainability, Kate E. Brandt, who is in charge of “greening” the tech giant. Every time someone completes a search on Google or uploads a video to YouTube, Google’s data centers are hard at work — filled with servers using a significant amount of energy. And with demand for energy and materials only continuing to grow, Brandt’s work is to figure a sustainable path forward. Her idea? To create a circular economy grounded in three tenets: designing out waste, keeping products and materials in use, and transitioning to renewable energy. In this circular world, all goods would be designed to be easily repaired and remanufactured. She imagines, for instance, that even clothes and shoes could be leased and returned — with old clothes going back to the designer to reuse the materials for a new batch of clothing. “If we each ask ourselves, ‘What can I do to positively impact our economy, our society, our environment?’ — then we will break out of the global challenges that have been created by our take-make-and-waste economy, and we can realize a circular world of abundance,” she says.

Tapping into the forgotten middle. We all know “the forgotten middle” — “they’re the students, coworkers and plain old regular folks who are often overlooked because they’re seen as neither exceptional nor problematic,” says activist and former educator Danielle R. Moss. But, she says, there is more here. “I think there are some unclaimed winning lottery tickets in the middle,” Moss says. “I think the cure for cancer and the path to world peace might very well reside there.” Moss has spent much of her career trying to help this group reach their full potential. In middle school, she herself was languishing in that strata, until her mother noticed and set her on a different path. Later, in New York City, Moss helped create a program to work with the forgotten middle and identified some of the core elements of a formula to motivate them. These include holding kids to high expectations (instead of asking, “Hey, do you want to go to college?”, ask, “What college would you like to attend?”), giving them “the hidden curriculum” needed to succeed (study skills, leadership development, liberal-arts coursework and adult support), and making them accountable to themselves, each other and their communities (seeing themselves as belonging to a group of young people who came from the same backgrounds and who were all aspiring for more). Moss says, “When I think of my kids, and I think of all the doctors, lawyers, teachers, social workers and artists who came from our little nook in New York City, I hate to think what wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t invested in the kids in the middle.”

In our careers, we all need a sponsor. Corporate America insists it is a meritocracy — a place where those who succeed simply “put their heads down and work really hard.” But former Wall Street banker Carla Harris tells us this simple truth: that’s not the case. To really move forward and be recognized for your work, you need someone else to make a case for you — especially in those pivotal decisions that are often made behind closed doors. This person isn’t a mentor, champion or advocate — but a sponsor, someone who is “carrying your paper into the room … pounding the table on your behalf.” Sponsors need three things: a seat at the table, power in the decision-making process and an investment in you and your work. Harris says you can attract a sponsor by utilizing two forms of social capital: performance currency, which you gain when you perform beyond expectations, and relationship currency, which you gain by engaging meaningfully with the people around you. “You can survive a long time in your career without a mentor,” Harris says, “but you are not going to ascend in any organization without a sponsor.”

A moment when curiosity triumphs over suspicion, and delight banishes anxiety. Designer Helen Marriage brings people together through larger-than-life art and spectacle. “I want to take you to a different kind of world — a world of the imagination where using this most powerful tool that we have, we can transform our physical surroundings,” she says. With Artichoke, the company she cofounded in 2006, Marriage seeks to create moving, ephemeral moments that reveal beauty among ruins, reexamine history and whimsically demonstrate what’s possible. Why? “In doing so, we can change forever how we feel, and how we feel about the people we share the planet with.” On the TEDWomen stage, Marriage tells the tale of three cities she transformed into spaces of culture and connection. In Salisbury, French actors performed Faust on stilts with handheld pyrotechnics; in London, she conjured magic by shutting down the city streets for four days to tell the story of a little girl and an elephant. And in Derry (also known as Londonderry) — a town still gripped by Northern Ireland’s Protestant/Catholic conflict — she helped address community tribalism in Burning Man fashion, building a wooden temple that housed written hopes, thoughts, loves and losses — then burning it down. Reminiscent of a town ritual that usually deepens rifts, the work brought thousands of people together on both sides to share and experience a deeply profound moment. As she says: “In the end, this is all about love.”

Moving forward doesn’t mean moving on. In a heartbreaking, hilarious talk, writer and podcaster Nora McInerny shares her hard-earned wisdom about life and death. In 2014, soon after losing her second pregnancy and her father, McInerny’s husband Aaron died after three years fighting brain cancer. Since then, McInerny has made a career of talking about life’s hardest moments — not just her own, but also the losses and tragedies that others have experienced. She started the Hot Young Widows Club, a series of small gatherings where men and women can talk about their partners who have died and say the things that other people in their lives aren’t yet willing to hear. “The people who we’ve lost are still so present for us,” she says. Now remarried, McInerny says that we need to change how we think about grief — that it’s possible to grieve and love in the same year and week, even the same breath. She invites us to stop talking about “moving on” after the death of a loved one: “I haven’t moved on from Aaron, I’ve moved forward with him,” she says. And she encourages us to remind one another that some things can’t be fixed, and not all wounds are meant to heal.

Society 5.0: Talks from TED and Samsung

We live in an interconnected world where boundaries between physical and digital spaces are blurring. We can no longer think about innovation in isolation, but must consider how emerging technologies — like artificial intelligence, augmented reality, the Internet of Things, 5G networks, robotics and the decentralized web — will combine to create (we hope!) a super-smart society.

At TEDSalon: Society 5.0, presented by TED and Samsung, seven leaders and visionaries explored the new era of interconnectivity and how it will reshape our world.

Do you know how your data is being used? We tap on apps and devices all day long, not quite grasping that our usage is based on a “power imbalance,” says Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, director of digital policy at the Norwegian Consumer Council. Most of us automatically click “yes” to terms and conditions without realizing we have agreed to let companies collect our personal information and use it on a scale we could never imagine, he explains. To demonstrate, Myrstad introduces Cayla, a Bluetooth-connected doll. According to Cayla’s terms, its manufacturer can use the recordings of children and relatives who play with the doll for advertising, and any information it gathers can be shared with third parties. Myrstad and his team also looked at the terms for a dating app, finding that users had unwittingly forked over their entire dating history — photos, chats and interactions — to the app creator forever. After the Council’s investigations, Cayla was pulled from retailers and the app changed its policies, but as Myrstad points out, “Organizations such as mine … can’t be everywhere, nor can consumers fix this on their own.” Correcting the situation requires ongoing vigilance and intention. Companies must prioritize trust, and governments should constantly update and enforce rules. For the rest of us, he says: “Be the voice that constantly reminds the world that technology will only truly benefit society if it respects basic rights.”

How the Internet of Things is solving real problems. You’re surrounded by things connected to the internet — from cars and smart elevators to parking meters and industrial machines used for manufacturing. How can we use the data created by all of these connected devices to make the world safer and healthier? Aruna Srinivasan, executive director at the mobile communication trade group GSMA, shows how the Internet of Things (IoT) is helping to solve two pressing issues: pollution and food production. Using small IoT-connected sensors on garbage trucks in London, Srinivasan and her team created a detailed map showing pollution hotspots and the times of day when pollution was worst. Now, the data is helping the city introduce new traffic patterns, like one-way streets, and create bicycle paths outside of the most highly polluted areas. In the countryside, IoT-enabled sensors are being used to measure soil moisture, pH and other crop conditions in real time. Srinivasan and her team are working with China Agricultural University, China Mobile and Rothamsted Research to use the information gathered by these sensors to improve the harvest of grapes and wheat. The goal: help farmers be more precise, increasing food production while preventing things like water scarcity. “The magic of the IoT comes from the health and security it can provide us,” Srinivasan says. “The Internet of Things is going to transform our world and change our lives for the better.”

Internet by the people, for the people. Web builder Tamas Kocsis is worried about the future of the internet. In its current form, he says, the internet is trending toward centralization: large corporations are in control of our digital privacy and access to information. What’s more, these gatekeepers are vulnerable to attacks and surveillance, and they make online censorship easier. In China, for instance, where the government tightly controls its internet, web users are prohibited from criticizing the government or talking about protests. And the recent passage of EU copyright directive Article 13, which calls for some platforms to filter user-generated content, could limit our freedom to openly blog, discuss, share and link to content. In 2015, Kocsis began to counteract this centralization process by developing an alternative, decentralized network called ZeroNet. Instead of relying on centralized hosting companies, ZeroNet — which is powered by free and open-source software — allows users to help host websites by directly downloading them onto their own servers. The whole thing is secured by public key cryptography, ensuring no one can edit the websites but their owners — and protecting them from being taken down by one central source. In 2017, China began making moves to block Kocsis’s network, but that hasn’t deterred him, he says: “Building a decentralized network means creating a safe harbor, a space where the rules are not written by political parties and big corporations, but by the people.”

The augmented reality revolution. Entrepreneur Brian Mullins believes augmented reality (AR) is a more important technology than the internet — and even the printing press — because of the opportunities it offers for revolutionizing how we work and learn. At a gas turbine power plant in 2017, Mullins saw that when AR programs replaced traditional training measures, workers slashed their training and work time from 15.5 hours to an average of 50 minutes. Mullins predicts AR will bring a cognitive literacy to the world, helping us transition to new careers and workplaces and facilitating breakthroughs in the arts and sciences. Ultimately, Mullins says, AR won’t just change how we work — it’ll change the fundamentals of how we live.

A genre-bending performance. During a musical interlude, French-Vietnamese artist MAI LAN holds the audience rapt with a performance of “Autopilote” and “Pumper.” Alternating between French and English lyrics, lead singer Mai-Lan Chapiron sings over diffuse electronic beats and circular synths, bringing her cool charisma to the stage.

Robotic reflections of our humanity. We’re far from developing robots that feel emotions, but we already feel for them, says researcher Kate Darling — and an instinct like that can have consequences. We’re biologically hardwired to project intent and life onto any movement that seems autonomous to us, which sometimes makes it difficult to treat machines (like a Roomba) any differently from the way we treat our own pets. But this emotional connection to robots, while illogical, could prove useful in better understanding ourselves. “My question for the coming era of human-robot interaction is not: ‘Do we empathize with robots?'” Darling says. “It’s: ‘Can robots change people’s empathy?'”

Humans belong in the digital future. Author, documentarian and technologist Douglas Rushkoff isn’t giving up on humans just yet. He believes humans deserve a place in the digital future, but he worries that the future has become “something we bet on in a zero-sum, winner-takes-all competition,” instead of something we work together to create. Humans, it sometimes seems to him, are no longer valued for their creativity but for their data; as he frames it, we’ve been conditioned to see humanity as the problem and technology as the solution. Instead, he urges us to focus on making technology work for us and our future, not the other way around. Believing in the potential and value of humans isn’t about rejecting technology, he says — it’s about bringing key values of our pre-digital world into the future with us. “Join Team Human. Find the others,” Rushkoff says. “Together let’s make the future that we always wanted.”

Moving healthcare forward: The talks of TED Salon: Catalyst

Healthcare is at a turning point. Big data, evolving consumer preferences and shifting cost structures are just a few of the many complex factors shaping the opportunities and challenges that will define the future. How can we all become forces for positive change and progress?

For the first time, TED partnered with Optum, a health services and innovation company, for a salon focused on what happens when we trust our ideas to change health and healthcare for the better. At the salon, held on July 31 at the ARIA Las Vegas, six speakers and a performer shared fresh thinking on how we can make a health system that works better for everyone.

How we can put empathy back in healthcare. Many in healthcare believe that empathy — imagining another person’s feelings and then doing something to help them — is a “soft skill,” and not an important factor in the success or failure of medical treatments. But according to Adrienne Boissy, chief experience officer for the Cleveland Clinic Health System, empathy is a critical part of healthcare that, when cultivated, delivers proven, positive impacts to everything from controlling high blood pressure to the outcomes of diabetes. Best of all, it’s something that healthcare workers can learn, in order to “bake caring fixes back into every single part of the healthcare system.” Boissy knows that patients and doctors both suffer under current healthcare systems and their long wait times, communications gaps, and the endemic pressures that lead to staff burnout. To address these problems in her health system, Boissy implemented some big fixes, like same-day appointments for patients, communications training for doctors and less bureaucratic pressure. Her strategies are designed to build empathy back into the healthcare system and “transform the human experience into something much more humane.”

The myth of obesity and the need for a social movement. The global obesity crisis has reached epidemic proportions — but its root cause may not be what you think. Obesity expert Lee Kaplan has studied the issue for nearly 20 years, and the misconceptions around obesity have remained fairly constant throughout: if people simply ate less and exercised more, the thinking goes, they’d be able to control their weight. But the reality is much more complex. “Numerous studies demonstrate that each of our bodies has a powerful, and very accurate, system for seeking and maintaining the right amount of fat,” Kaplan says. “Obesity is the disease in which that finely tuned system goes awry.” There are many types of obesity, with many causes — genetics, brain damage, sleep deprivation, medications that promote weight gain — but in the end, all obesity reflects the disruption of this internal system (controlled by the body’s adipostat). In order to begin solving this massive health crisis, Kaplan calls for us to stop stigmatizing obesity and take collective action to improve the lives of those affected. “We need to change the public perception of blame and responsibility, and support a social movement that will lead to real progress,” Kaplan says. “In so doing, we will begin to see society shrink before our eyes.”

Innovating the healthcare funding and distribution model. While working in an eye care clinic in Kenya, Andrew Bastawrous was frustrated to find that because of rigid funding regulations, he wasn’t able to help people in desperate need who didn’t have “the right problems.” Though specific resource allocation makes business sense, Bastawrous says, inflexible rules often block healthcare organizations from adapting to shifting situations on the ground. This makes it difficult to deliver even simple medical treatments — for example, though we’ve had glasses for over 700 years, 2.5 billion people still don’t have access to them. That’s why Peek Vision, the eye care organization Bastawrous co-founded and leads, is set up as both a company and a charity — an innovation that allows them to sustainably create healthcare products and serve the communities who need them most. Peek Vision’s successful partnership with the Botswana government to screen and treat every child in the country by 2021 shows that this model can work — now, it needs to be scaled globally. If we design health care systems with trust, innovation and ambition, Bastawrous says, we can create solutions that fulfill the needs of financial partners and improve the lives of millions of people worldwide.

One pill to rule them all? We live in the age of the “quantified self,” where it’s possible to measure, monitor and track much of our physiology and behavior with a few taps of a finger. (Think smartwatches and fitness trackers.) With all this information, says Daniel Kraft, we should be able to make the shift into “quantified health” and design truly personalized medicine that allows us to synthesize many of our medications into a single pill. Onstage, Kraft revealed a prototype that would not only engender an easier time taking medications but also print the drugs he envisions right in the home. “I’m hopeful that with the help of novel approaches like this, we can move from an era of intermittent data, reactive one-size-fits-all therapy,” he says, “improving health and medicine across the planet.”

Divided on healthcare, united on health. The American conversation around healthcare has long been divisive. Yet as health services innovator Rebecca Onie reveals in new research, people in the US are not as polarized as they think. She launched a new initiative to ask voters around the country one question: “What do you need to be healthy?” As it turns out, across economic, political and racial divides, Americans are aligned when it comes to their healthcare priorities: healthy food, safe housing and good wages. “When you ask the right questions, it becomes pretty clear: our country may be fractured on healthcare, but we are unified on health,” she says. The insights from her research demonstrate how our common experience can inform our approach to pressing healthcare questions — and even bring people across the political spectrum together.

Medicine isn’t made by miracles. Our narratives of our greatest medical and healthcare advances all follow the same script, Darshak Sanghavi says: “The heroes are either swashbuckling doctors fighting big odds and taking big risks, or miracle drugs found in the unlikeliest of places.” We love to hear — and tell — stories based on this script. But these stories cause us to redirect our resources toward creating hero doctors and revolutionary medications, and by doing so, “we potentially harm more people than we help,” Sanghavi says. He believes we should turn away from these myths and focus on what really matters: teamwork. Incremental refinements in treatments, painstakingly assembled by healthcare workers pooling their resources over time, are what really lead to improved survival rates and higher-quality lives for patients. “We don’t need to wait for a hero in order to make our lives better,” Sanghavi says. “We already know what to do. Small steps over time will get us where we need to go.”

She has decided to live. Poet, performer and artist Jessica Care Moore closes out the salon with a performance of “Gratitude Is a Recipe for Survival” — a vigorous, personal, lyrical journey through the mind and life of a professional poet raising a young son in a thankless world.