Bridge-Builders: Notes on Session 6 of TED2024

In Session 6 of TED2024, we heard from bridge-builders — inspiring speakers working to unite people across political divides, conflicts, differences and more.

The event: Talks from Session 6 of TED2024: The Brave and the Brilliant, hosted by TED’s Helen Walters and Dave Isay, the founder of StoryCorps and winner of the 2015 TED Prize

When and where: Wednesday, April 17, 2024, at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, BC, Canada

Speakers: Gabrielle Rifkind, David Finnigan, Ketakandriana Rafitoson, Spencer J. Cox, Daniel Lubetzky

Performance: The Jerusalem Youth Chorus (JYC) is a choral and dialogue program for Palestinian and Israeli youth in Jerusalem. JYC’s founder Micah Hendler and executive director Amer Abu Arqub discuss the impetus behind the program, how music creates cross-cultural understanding and introduce the chorus itself for a rousing performance.

Gabrielle Rifkind is director of the Oxford Process, an organization devoted to ending armed conflict with the tools of mass psychology and geopolitics, rather than the weapons of war. With inclusive negotiating strategies, she believes we can create a world where nations rush to the bargaining table rather than to their guns.

In the wake of his production Kill Climate Deniers, playwright David Finnigan received countless messages from everyday individuals defending their beliefs. While climate deniers still refuse to believe science, says Finnigan, they’re right about one thing: climate action requires us to change how we live — and that’s something we all should embrace.

In Madagascar, activist Ketakandriana Rafitoson empowers citizens to protect their rights in the face of systemic exploitation. In the absence of strong democratic traditions, her grassroots toolkit of citizen assemblies, legal aid and collective action is helping to organize Madagascar, one community at a time.

​​When he felt his faith in the peaceful transfer of power in the US eroding, Governor of Utah Spencer J. Cox reached out to his political opponent to produce a campaign ad — together. It sparked a nationwide conversation about bridging political divides and fostering a united society. On the TED stage, he shares three things we can all do to disagree without hate.

We’re being programmed to think every issue is binary: “us versus them.” But Daniel Lubetzky says the real enemy is not a person but a mindset: extremism that hijacks the agenda and foments division. He previews a new initiative that aims to bring together “builders” (instead of “dividers”) from around the world and across the political spectrum, to replace eternal conflict with practical problem-solving.

TED2024, held April 15-19, 2024, in Vancouver, BC, Canada, is a week of talks, discovery sessions, excursions, dinners, performances and more celebrating “The Brave and the Brilliant.” Special thanks to our strategic partners PwC, Adobe, Schneider Electric and Northwestern Mutual.

System Changers: Notes on Session 3 of TED2024

Many of the world’s systems, big and small, could use an upgrade. In a dynamic Session 3 at TED2024, six speakers explore how to do just that — taking on everything from global development and capitalism to robots and vertical farming.

The event: Talks from Session 3 of TED2024: The Brave and the Brilliant, hosted by TED’s Helen Walters

When and where: Tuesday, April 16, 2024, at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, BC, Canada

Speakers: Karthik Muralidharan, Daniela Rus, Rumman Chowdhury, Hiroki Koga, Zeynep Ton, Pete Stavros

Special appearance: Lily James Olds, the director of the TED Fellows program, announces the 2024 cohort of TED Fellows, whose work spans five continents and represents 11 countries — including, for the first time, Georgia. Read more about them here.

The talks in brief:

Spoiler: There is such a thing as a free lunch in global development, says economics professor Karthik Muralidharan. Although key indicators like school enrollment rates reached historic highs, most children are surviving, not thriving. He explains that with smarter resource allocation and evidence-based interventions, we can achieve more — without spending more.

Despite breathtaking advances, the worlds of AI and robotics remain siloed. Roboticist and computer scientist Daniela Rus describes how “liquid networks” — a more flexible, efficient and sustainable AI paradigm — promise to shatter the barrier between AI and robotics, creating a future where bespoke machines shape our everyday lives.

Will AI systems dominate our lives, or will they enhance human agency? Rumman Chowdhury, CEO and cofounder of Humane Intelligence, says that for AI to achieve its full potential, we must invite non-experts into the development process and empower people to shape and train new technologies.

Inside a vertical farming facility, you can control every environmental factor (temperature, humidity, light, pollination, etc.). You can also experiment regularly, improving practices to generate the sweetest strawberries year-round, says Hiroki Koga, CEO of Oishii. He shares how innovations in big data are making vertical farming an affordable, eco-friendly alternative to traditional farming.

Essential work doesn’t pay well, but MIT management professor Zeynep Ton believes it should. She points to companies like Costco or the Spanish supermarket chain Mercadona, which have reduced costs and worker turnover — and increased profits and productivity — by paying their workers decent, livable wages.

What if all employees had stock ownership in the companies they worked for? Investor Pete Stavros turned over stock ownership of a manufacturing company to its 800 workers, drastically improving the company’s productivity, profitability and the lives of its workers — a testament to the power of employee ownership.

TED2024, held April 15-19, 2024, in Vancouver, BC, Canada, is a week of talks, discovery sessions, excursions, dinners, performances and more celebrating “The Brave and the Brilliant.” Special thanks to our strategic partners PwC, Adobe, Schneider Electric and Northwestern Mutual.

40 Hygge Movies to Get You Through the Long Dark Winter

There’s comfort viewing, and then there are movies in which the characters are comfortable. They’re not always the same thing. Some of these movies are comfy, cozy watches—though tastes vary wildly. For some, a Hallmark holiday movie is the gold standard to relax by. For others, a Scream movie will serve the same…

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Evil Week: How to Sell Your Soul to the Devil

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The 20 Best Thrillers on Netflix Right Now

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Meredith's Training Diary: Running Slower Than You Think You Should

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What's New on Prime Video and Freevee in October 2023

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Lessons: Notes from Session 2 of TED Countdown Summit 2023

What lessons are already available to us as we tackle climate change? For Session 2 of TED Countdown Summit 2023, science, solutions and the role of industry in stemming the threat of the climate emergency took center stage.

The event: Talks from Session 2 of TED Countdown Summit 2023, hosted by TED’s Lindsay Levin and David Lammy, Member of Parliament for Tottenham, England and Shadow Foreign Secretary

When and where: Wednesday, July 12, 2023, at the Fillmore Detroit in Detroit, Michigan

Speakers: Jonathan Foley, Emma Nehrenheim, Cedrik Neike, Susan Lozier, Morten Bo Christiansen, Bo Cerup-Simonsen, Mike Duggan, Laprisha Berry Daniels

To solve climate change, the International Monetary Fund estimates that the global community needs to invest between three and six trillion dollars annually in climate solutions. Where should that money go and which projects should we fund? Jonathan Foley, executive director of Project Drawdown, uses a science-based framework to outline a plan for investing with maximum impact. First, we need to prioritize immediate actions with cumulative benefits, like stopping deforestation and cutting methane leaks. Next, we should focus our spending on cutting carbon emissions now over investing in distant high-tech solutions. Third, we must prioritize geographical hotspots with an outsized effect on climate change, like the Amazon rainforest or high-emission factories. And finally, we should invest in solutions that benefit people’s well-being, promote food security and increase access to clean water and sanitation.

Batteries will be fundamental to powering a sustainable world — but only if we don’t repeat the same mistakes of past industrialization, says battery recycler Emma Nehrenheim. She outlines the environmentally intensive impact of battery production — particularly from the extraction of minerals for lithium-ion batteries, which provide energy for electric vehicles and other key aspects of life — and proposes a shift towards a circular battery economy that uses and reuses already existing materials, vastly reducing the industry’s carbon footprint and need for mineral extraction.

We are running out of time to save our planet from climate change — and the metaverse can help. Using virtual tools like AI to cheat time in the real world, Cedrik Neike explains how “digital twin technology” (think simulated giga factories that are one-for-one digital copies of real ones) can help solve real-world problems more efficiently by providing a digital space to test solutions, without pollution. Using the example of virtually ideating the production of safer and faster-charging batteries and then bringing those learnings to the physical world, Neike points to the potential of industrial metaverses to revolutionize industries and redesign entire cities — from transportation, agriculture and housing — addressing massive challenges and avoiding the creation of excess waste at the same time.

Oceanographer Susan Lozier dives into the importance of the ocean’s natural circulation, which overturns water in a way that naturally captures carbon and regulates global temperatures. She shares the incredible research being done internationally to track changes in this overturn, as warming global temperatures could slow the circulation, lessen carbon uptake and increase the rate of climate-related disasters. While a collapse in this age-old system isn’t likely until 2100, Lozier warns of the dangers faced by future generations if we don’t change course now, calling for climate action to lower temperatures within the next 10 years.

As leader of the decarbonization team for A.P. Moller – Maersk, Morten Bo Christiansen is drawing an organizational roadmap to net zero that could help transform the global shipping industry. In conversation with TED’s Lindsay Levin, Christiansen shares his company’s ambitious goal to decarbonize their heavy-emitting business by 2040, highlighting how they’ve started implementing solutions like using green methanol as fuel in their container ships and deploying electric trucks in the US. He also points out the challenges in scaling green fuel production, price issues due to the high cost of green fuels and the need for collaborations across the value chain to manage these obstacles. Despite these challenges, Christiansen remains optimistic, making the case that the added cost to consumers for using green shipping methods is far outweighed by the urgently needed environmental benefits.

In conversation with TED’s Lindsay Levin, Bo Cerup-Simonsen, CEO of the Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Center for Zero Carbon Shipping, discusses the essential role of their center in orchestrating systemic, global collaboration to tackle large-scale environmental challenges. Discussing the center’s origins, purpose and the strides it’s made in technological, commercial and regulatory spaces, Cerup-Simonsen highlights the push towards green alternatives, like green methanol and ammonia, in global shipping. Through tangible initiatives like “green corridors,” which enable end-to-end zero-carbon shipping between selected ports, they’re fostering cross-industry collaboration to accelerate the green transition and sharing lessons learned in combating the uncertainty hindering decisive action from companies and nations.

Mike Duggan is serving his third term as mayor of Detroit, and he’s dead set on building the city’s climate responsiveness. His proposal is a unique one: to transform blighted, vacant lots into solar farms throughout the city. He describes how, with the buy-in of Detroiters themselves, he plans to start building these farms in different neighborhoods with the aim of powering all of Detroit’s municipal buildings and cleaning up dilapidated, vacant land from the city’s manufacturing past.

Like many cities, Detroit is already feeling the effects of climate change. In the past 10 years, two major floods have cost the city more than a billion dollars in damages. The challenge of climate change may be daunting, but human beings have moved from place to place and adapted to changes in climate (both environmental and social) throughout history. For inspiration, public health social worker Laprisha Berry Daniels mines the survival strategies her grandparents learned after leaving the Jim Crow South to settle in Detroit. The climate crisis may be unprecedented, but Daniels says we can still prepare for it by embracing the lessons of the past. First, we must accept the reality of climate change and prepare for it. Second, we should embrace the power of mutual aid. Lastly, we should empower communities to adapt through community-led planning.

Celebrating the unbridled power of imagination: Notes on Session 11 of TED2023

Session 11 of TED2023 was a celebration of the unbridled power of imagination. What is imagination, exactly? According to poet and session co-host Sarah Kay, it’s the ability to notice, see and observe what is — and then to dream, build and expand on what is not but could be. Eight speakers and one performer led the way in doing just that for this classically eclectic evening session.

The event: Talks from Session 11 of TED2023: Possibility, hosted by poet Sarah Kay and TED’s head of curation Helen Walters

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

Speakers: Lonneke Gordijn, Vinu Daniel, Misan Harriman, Melissa Villaseñor, Imran Chaudhri, Lucas Rizzotto, Ersin Han Ersin

Opening poem: Poet Sarah Kay shares some of the amazing things she sees “wandering the streets of Bewilderville” in New York City, encouraging us all “to pick up when the universe calls.”

Performance: A self-described “dance floor demon,” singer-songwriter Tolliver rocks the house with a performance of “Say What” and “I’m Nervous.”

The talks in brief:

Nature is never static, says experiential artist Lonneke Gordijn, whose work with creative partner Ralph Nauta is informed by that principle. Together they’ve created artworks that evoke nature and border on magic, founding Studio Drift to tap into the world’s mysteries. Gordijn describes Shylight, an installation of lights that float down from the ceiling, opening and closing, interacting like flowers, and how it became an ongoing art piece exploring different mechanisms and rhythms that spark different reactions in their audience. Fascinated by murmurations (creatures going places, leaderless, moving together), Gordijin shares the evolving process of their research-backed, software-driven environmental art piece made of a building-sized swarm of drones that flew across the desert at Burning Man, enchanting all. Unexpectedly, she reveals a massive block of concrete hiding in the shadows of the TED Theater, as — like magic — it becomes weightless and begins to float over Gordijn … over the audience … almost like it came to life and was trying to find its way back home.

What if we could put waste to work building a better world? Climate-responsive architect Vinu Daniel is doing exactly that, having developed new, natural building techniques that utilize local, discarded materials such as plastic, tires and mud to create magnificent yet utilitarian spaces. His design firm, Wallmakers, builds dreamlike homes, schools and more that blend with the landscape, showing what’s possible when we build with our planet in mind.

Given a warm video introduction by his friend, Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle, arts advocate Misan Harriman‘s love for rich cultural experiences was ignited in his youth by the internet. It was an “endless library of the extraordinary,” he says, especially for a dyslexic Nigerian boy like himself who felt under-stimulated in his boarding school classes. Harriman went from observer of content to artist after he saw an image of Coretta Scott King at the funeral of her late husband Martin Luther King Jr. — it showed him that photography had the power to expose the work we need to do in this life. When George Floyd was murdered, Harriman took his camera to the protests that erupted in London and captured one of the greatest civil rights movements in our lifetimes — and Martin Luther King III shared one of his images on social media and millions saw what his work illuminated. Pointing to the hunger crisis in the Horn of Africa, he urges us all to take an unflinching look at what needs to be done in the world around us — and then do something.

While Saturday Night Live alum Melissa Villaseñor earned comedic success through her uncanny celebrity impressions, too often she felt the laughs weren’t for her but rather for the characters. She shares how she learned to combine personal vulnerability with her classic voice bits (think: Sandra Bullock, Britney Spears, Dolly Parton and many more), centering her identity and family story on stage. Through her touching, hilarious journey, Villaseñor encourages everyone to be themselves and believe in their dreams — even if you don’t know what to do after you achieve them.

From the desktop computer to the laptop to the smarthphone to the smartwatch, in recent decades our devices have grown smaller and more powerful. User experience visionary and Humane cofounder Imran Chaudhri says the next step in this progression will be far more radical. Using the power of AI, our devices will disappear completely, and the human-technology relationship will become “screenless, seamless and sensing.” To make his point, Chaudhri previews his company’s unreleased device, which sits in his breast pocket and can translate his words — and voice — into French, ask for local shopping suggestions and assess if a chocolate bar meets his dietary restrictions. He forecasts a future where AI-powered tech will do away with screens, helping us to be more present and efficient in our everyday lives.

What is the relationship between art and technology? In the past, says mixed reality experiential artist Lucas Rizzotto, artists often imagined new realities that engineers later built (think of the influence of sci-fi writers, for instance). But as powerful technology grows more accessible, Rizzotto wants to reverse this formula by encouraging artists to express themselves through technology — because it’s perspective, even more than technical skill, that leads to a vision worth creating. He shares how his own free-ranging exploration has led to various unexpected and delightful innovations: a suit you can play like an instrument and a game for lonely people now being adapted as group therapy. “When you take the technology we don’t understand and approach it as an artist, you do things a conventional engineer would never do,” Rizzotto says.

What’s it like to be a tree — to host a vast web of relationships that anchor an entire ecosystem? In a mind-blowing talk, artist Ersin Han Ersin asks us to step into a giant sequoia tree, peering through its bark into the tapestry of life within. He gives a tour of his multisensory, mixed-reality installations — co-created with the art collective Marshmallow Laser Feast along with teams of scientists, programmers, structural engineers and more — and shares how they explore the concept of umwelt, or the unique sensory world of different organisms. The work is an effort to rethink the primordial relationship between plants, animals and fungi — and to dismantle the myth of human separation from the natural world. “We are as much trees as trees are us,” he says.

The talks of TED@BCG 2022

The world is facing an unprecedented pace of change. In a day of talks and performances, a diverse group of experts explore how to stay ahead of the curve — covering everything from the value of purpose in business to the democratization of storytelling and the exciting potential of human-AI collaboration.

The event: TED@BCG 2022 is the twelfth event TED and Boston Consulting Group have co-hosted to spotlight leading thinkers from around the globe. Hosted by TED’s Head of Partnerships Lisa Choi Owens, with opening remarks from Christoph Schweizer, CEO of BCG.

Special feature: For this event, TED reached out to five past speakers (all brilliant business leaders) and asked them one question: What idea in business is not being embraced fast enough? The five speakers — Margaret Heffernan, Angela Duckworth, Danielle Moss, Jacqueline Novogratz and Tim Leberecht — gave diverse, enlightening answers.

Music: Singer-songwriter Lex Land treats the audience to a performance of her Texas mid-century swing.

The talks in brief:

Ashley M. Grice, purpose expert

Big idea: Purpose can embed meaning and authenticity into every aspect of a company, from the top floor to the shop floor. 

How? Ashley M. Grice thinks a lot about how companies can live and breathe their “why.” Different from mission statements or visions, which naturally change over time, a company’s “why” (or purpose) is timeless and impacts its entire ethos. She shares the example of a flight attendant who went above and beyond by thoughtfully giving Grice extra snacks on a busy day, a kind gesture that reflected the airline’s culture of purpose. Sharing useful advice for businesses, Grice details three important things to know about making purpose part of your company’s muscle memory: 1) Be authentic and uphold values; 2) Purpose exists in the crossroads of idealism and realism — and it’s supposed to be uncomfortable; 3) Purpose must impact every layer of a company, from a CEO’s strategy to middle management’s decision-making to frontline workers’ visibility. By continuously reflecting on the journey to purpose, it becomes the norm — and everyone’s role is important. 

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Shervin Khodabandeh, human and AI visionary

Big idea: We often think of artificial intelligence as technology that will one day replace human skill sets — but AI alone can’t solve all our problems. What if, instead of overinvesting in advanced algorithms, we combined the data-driven strengths of AI with the unique capabilities of human thinking? Shervin Khodabandeh shows how fostering a symbiotic relationship between people and AI creates more financial value for companies, a happier workforce and an ideal middle ground upon which challenging problems can be solved.

How? Even though companies across the world spend billions of dollars building AI capabilities, Khodabandeh says that only about ten percent of them see meaningful returns on their investments. He believes that one way to solve this problem is to use AI in conjunction with the creativity, judgment, empathy and ethics that humans offer. But how exactly can companies achieve mutually beneficial human-AI relationships? First, Kodabandeh says companies should identify the unique role AI systems could play in their organization — not simply as replacements for humans but as illuminators of innovative solutions or recommenders to improve decision-making. Next, companies should take advantage of feedback loops, through which humans and AI can learn from each other. Finally, they should use this knowledge to determine which combination of human-AI roles and skills best suits specific business needs. When that happens, an organization’s overall rate of learning increases, making it more agile, resilient and adaptable. “It is the human touch that will bring out the best in AI,” Kodabandeh says.

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Ken Chenault, business leader, in conversation with Whitney Pennington Rodgers, TED current affairs curator

Big idea: During times of crisis, leaders have a responsibility to inspire hope, remain grounded in core values and, ultimately, serve and empower the people they lead. 

How? “The best leaders recognize that leadership is both a responsibility and a privilege,” says Ken Chenault, who believes that if you want to lead, you have to be willing to serve. This mindset is especially crucial during times of crisis, when people depend on leaders to perform two key responsibilities: contextualizing challenges and emphasizing the potential to overcome them. Chenault says that one of the most important leadership strategies a company can have is understanding how to empower the people it serves — from employees and customers to investors and stakeholders. Working with organizations like General Catalyst, which centers technology in building companies, and OneTen, which helps Black Americans secure family-sustaining careers, he advocates for responsible innovation: a principle that says companies can and should meet the needs of their followers in an inclusive way, while making investments in new technologies. By upholding their integrity, fostering creative change and challenging the status quo, leaders have the opportunity to transform the workforce and give people opportunities to embark on their own leadership journeys.

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Hyeonmi Kim, strategy consultant 

Big idea: The next great stories are coming from the bizarre and fantastical world of webtoons.

How? Pop culture is changing with a different kind of storytelling, says Hyeonmi Kim. They’re called webtoons: stories told using comic-like illustrations that are published in short segments (usually on a weekly basis) and meant to be read on a smartphone in five to ten minutes. Originating in Korea, webtoons have leapt out of niche platforms and onto the big screen, as with Netflix’s Hellbound, which hit the platform’s top ten list in 2022 after being released as webtoon in South Korea in 2019. Kim sees webtoons as a democratization of storytelling — anyone can share a story and find an audience — and an opportunity for up-and-coming creators to potentially hit on big-time success. What’s more, webtoons are breaking through mainstream media’s closed ecosystem of scriptwriters, where the same writers script (suspiciously similar) blockbusters, laying down a fresh pipeline of rich, varied storytelling. “The writers are diverse and creative, and so are their stories,” Kim says.

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Bernhard Kowatsch, social entrepreneur

Big idea: Big global challenges are no different than global business challenges.

How? Why do we think so traditionally about some of the world’s biggest challenges? Bernhard Kowatsch points to issues like global hunger, for example. After he and his business partner developed a successful app for easily donating meals to hungry children around the world, Kowatsch was inspired to do more. The opportunity arrived in leading the World Food Programme’s Innovation Accelerator, replicating what Silicon Valley does well but for global social good — in this case, supporting start-up and non-profit innovations worldwide and helping them scale successfully to disrupt hunger. Since 2015, the program has positively impacted the lives of more than eight million people, doubling year over year with initiatives such as Building Blocks (a blockchain-supported way for aid organizations to provide food to refugees) and the invention of a machine that fortifies flour with nutrients. Kowatsch asks: Can accelerated innovation and technology help tackle some of the world’s issues? He absolutely believes so — and has the evidence to prove it. The only barrier now is our own thinking.

What Now … for health and happiness? Notes from Session 2 of TEDWomen 2021

For Session 2 of TEDWomen 2021, seven speakers shared ideas and insights on everything from mental health and family structures to how to uplift personal and collective dignity.

The event: TEDWomen 2021: Session 2, hosted by TED’s head of curation Helen Walters in Palm Springs, California on December 2, 2021

Speakers: Charles C. Daniels, Jr., Smita Sharma, Zarlasht Halaimzai, Kaz, Francisca Mutapi and Diana Adams

Music and comedy: For a bit of comic relief, Marcia Belsky has some fun with a song about scrolling back through a date’s Instagram feed as well as “100 Tampons,” which lampoons NASA’s notorious decision to provide astronaut Sally Ride with an egregious supply of tampons for her six-day trip to the space in 1983. “And they asked: Will that be enough?” she sings.

The talks in brief:

Charles C. Daniels, Jr., scholar, therapist

Big idea: In order to be present and connected to their children, fathers need to learn and be empowered to parent themselves. 

How? An estimated 10 million children in the US see their fathers less than once a month, and research has shown that poverty rates, emotional and behavioral issues and school dropout and crime rates all increase when kids inconsistently see their fathers. Sharing his personal journey, Charles C. Daniels, Jr. recounts the profound impact of not seeing his own father — and explores the complex reasons a parent could have for not being there. The reasons that don’t get talked about are the ones that exacerbate the problem, he explains. That’s why he created Father’s UpLift, an organization that helps dads love, forgive and heal themselves and their children. They work with fathers to navigate shame, guilt and other challenges through group therapy, mentorship, coaching and support. Daniels, Jr. helps fathers reconnect with their kid and learn how to parent themselves so they, in turn, can be better parents.

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Smita Sharma, TED Fellow, photojournalist, visual storyteller

Big idea: Throughout the world, women are cast aside as unworthy of education or self-determination, relegated to tasks of parenting, household duties — and, sometimes, trafficked or enslaved. Through her moving photographs, Smita Sharma shares their stories.

How? By blending into her subjects’ lives and communities (sometimes under the guise of a researcher on “female hygiene,” something men are typically loathe to discuss), Smita Sharma gains the trust of her subjects: women born into poverty who are denied education, become victims of abduction, sexual violence or child marriage. With their consent, Sharma creates powerful visual narratives that depict these forgotten lives with grace and compassion, and that seek to inspire action around systemic issues of gender inequality.

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Zarlasht Halaimzai, writer, advocate for refugee rights

Big idea: Understanding the emotional fallout of violence and displacement is more important than ever.

Shaping the future: Notes from the TED Fellows Session of TEDMonterey

The TED Fellows are known to be a range of multifaceted souls, making possible the impossible. The eight speakers and one performance on stage at TEDMonterey exemplified this year’s (and every year’s) cohort of amazing people shaping the future and rising to the challenge of making the world better than it’s been left.

The event: TEDMonterey: Fellows Session, hosted by TED’s Shoham Arad and Lily James Olds on Monday, August 2, 2021

Speakers: Daniel Alexander Jones, Tom Osborn, Jenna C. Lester, Alicia Chong Rodriguez, Jim Chuchu, Germán Santillán, Lei Li, Nithya Ramanathan

Opening the session, performance artist and writer Daniel Alexander Jones evoked the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement with an abridged, rousing performance of the Black National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and closed with a holistic, poetic summary of the talks and the spirit they contained.

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Tom Osborn, mental health innovator

Big idea: In areas with limited access to psychologists and psychiatrists, youth trained in evidence-based mental health care can provide support for their peers.

How? Growing up in rural Kenya, Osborn faced enormous pressure to succeed in school and chart a path out of poverty for his family. He suffered from symptoms he now recognizes as anxiety and depression but went without any resources to help him navigate these difficult emotions. As an adult, Osborn works to ensure that the youth in Kenya today have access to mental health support through his organization, the Shamiri Institute. With too few clinicians to serve the population (only two for every one million citizens), the organization trains 18 to 22-year-old Kenyans to deliver evidence-based mental healthcare to their peers. Youth treated through the institute pay under two dollars a session and have already reported reductions in symptoms of anxiety and depression. As Osborn looks to the future, he hopes to use this community-first, youth-oriented model as a template to help kids across the globe lead successful, independent lives.

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Jenna C. Lester, dermatologist

Big idea: Dermatologists need to get comfortable with all types of skin colors — and that starts with changing what they learn.

How? Just under half of new dermatologists admit they don’t feel comfortable identifying health issues that make themselves known via skin indicators — such as Lyme disease’s “bullseye” — that may show up differently on darker skin. Lester believes this discomfort leads to poorer health outcomes for people with dark skin and proves ultimately detrimental to the patient-physician relationship. So, she founded the Skin of Color Clinic, a program on a mission to help doctors unlearn the harmful patterns and limited scope of diagnosis taught in textbooks and perpetuated in classes around dark skin. She hopes that with her efforts, combined with other similar initiatives around the US, to right the equilibrium of over- and underrepresentation in the dermatological field so that everyone — no matter their skin tone — can have access to quality health and wellness.

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Alicia Chong Rodriguez, health care technology entrepreneur

Big idea: A smart bra that can track and support women’s heart health.

How? About 44 million women in the US live with heart disease, but helpful data is severely lacking. Why? Because most cardiovascular research is performed on men, resulting in therapies largely designed for male bodies. Rodriguez wants to close that data gap — with a bra. By wearing an everyday bra fit with special biomarker sensors, life-saving data could be gathered continuously in real time. The sensors track heart rhythm, breathing, temperature, posture and movement and update this information to the wearer’s records — so that doctors can understand their health better with troves of information to back it up. By simply wearing a bra, she says, we could close the data divide and finally usher women’s health care into the 21st century.

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Jim Chuchu, filmmaker

Big idea: Stolen African art and artifacts showcased around the world should be returned to museums and cultural institutions on the African continent.

Why? Why are stolen African artifacts still in the possession of Western museums? Chuchu reminds us, many of these cultural artifacts wound up in cities like London and New York because they were looted by colonial forces. Working to return Kenya’s material heritage to the country, he and the International Inventories Programme, an organization he co-founded, are rectifying these injustices. They have created a database of cultural objects held outside of Kenya — locating over 32,000 items so far. Beyond tracking these precious artifacts, Chuchu also hopes to start a public conversation about the morality of holding stolen African art in foreign institutions. “We’re asking for the return of our objects,” he says, “to help us remember who we are.”

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Germán Santillán, cultural chocolatier

Big idea: By training a new generation in Indigenous cacao cultivation and culinary methods, Germán Santillán is helping revive the culinary tradition of Oaxacan chocolate.

How? The Mixtec people in Oaxaca, Mexico have been cultivating and consuming chocolate — in ceremonies like marriage or politics — for over 800 years. However, in Mexico today, four out of five chocolate bars are produced using foreign cocoa. Santillán grew up in a Mixtec village in Oaxaca and watched as ancient Mixtec methods long-used to grow cocoa beans and prepare chocolate fell out of use. To revive the rich culinary tradition of chocolate in his region, Santillán and a small group of locals started Oaxacanita Chocolate. Unlike commercial chocolate bars, their Oaxacan chocolate uses native cocoa beans and traditional farming and roasting methods. Not only does their company produce a delicious product, but it has also helped boost his region economically and train a new generation of farmers and cooks in once-disappearing Indigenous techniques. It’s a powerful reminder of how Indigenous knowledge and practices can thrive in a modern context.

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Lei Li, medical imaging innovator

Big idea: Advanced imaging using light and sound will transform how we see inside our bodies, elevating our ability to detect, track and diagnose disease.

How? The foundation of advanced photoacoustic imaging converts light energy into sound energy, also known as the photoacoustic effect. The process goes like this: Li and his team pulse painless, gentle lasers into living tissue (in this example, he used a mouse), which absorbs the light and rises in temperature, leading to the generation of acoustic waves — or sound — that medical sensors interpret into a high-resolution image. Li shows how the clarity and detail of these images far exceeds those produced by a traditional MRI, CT scan or ultrasound. The applicability of this technology is wide-reaching, from breast cancer diagnosis and human brain imaging to potentially steering medicine-delivering microrobots inside our bodies. Photoacoustic imaging is a fast-growing research field, he says, and the promise for global health is reason enough to sound-off.

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Nithya Ramanathan, technologist

Big Idea: Smart sensors are a game changer when it comes to preserving life-saving vaccines.

How? After life-saving technology is deployed to countries with limited infrastructure, Ramanathan realized it is often left unsupported from thereon. Take vaccines for example, if they get too hot or cold on their journey or in storage, they could be ruined before use. Ramanathan talks through real-world examples — one case in particular took place in Stanford Children’s Hospital, where a refrigerator malfunctioning for 8 months meant that over 1,500 kids needed to be re-vaccinated — and the stakes are even higher now with COVID-19. Her solution? Smart sensors in refrigerators where vaccines are stored that monitor temperatures and send out alerts when they are unsafe — as well as data on the best routes to use in an emergency. Ramanathan and her team at Nexleaf, a non-profit she co-founded, have implemented this scalable, cost-effective and vital technology in thousands of locations in Asia and Africa. These simple yet extremely effective tools show what is possible when we invest in collecting and utilizing data.

Editor’s Picks: A (non-exhaustive) list of our favorite TED Talks of 2020

As we usher out 2020 — the (enter superlative of your choice) year — let’s take a moment to look back before we close the door for good. What captured our imaginations, reflected our emotions and sparked our hope for a better tomorrow? From the wisdom of Dolly Parton to the life-saving potential of snail venom to the transformative work of antiracism, here are some of the TED Talks that stayed with us as the world shifted beneath our feet.

Why do people distrust vaccines? Anthropologist Heidi Larson describes how medical rumors originate, spread and fuel resistance to vaccines worldwide.

Host of Radiolab Jad Abumrad gives a captivating talk on truth, difference, storytelling — and Dolly Parton.

A more equal world starts with you. Yes, it’s that simple, says equity advocate Nita Mosby Tyler.

Housewife-turned-politician Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya shares a beautiful meditation on the link between fearlessness and freedom.

Backed by the real, often-untold story of Rosa Parks, professor David Ikard makes a compelling case for the power and importance of historical accuracy.

Racism makes our economy worse — and not just for people of color. Public policy expert Heather C. McGhee offers a crucial rethink on how we can create a more prosperous world for all.

In a talk that’s part cultural love letter, part history lesson, France Villarta details the legacy of gender fluidity in his native Philippines — and emphasizes the universal beauty of all people, regardless of society’s labels.

For the poor and vulnerable, the health impacts of climate change are already here. Physician Cheryl Holder calls on doctors, politicians and others to build a health care system that incorporates economic and social justice.

Venom can kill … or it can cure. A fascinating talk from marine chemical biologist Mandë Holford on the potential of animal venom to treat human diseases.

Why has there been so little mention of saving Black lives from the climate emergency? David Lammy, a Member of Parliament for Tottenham, England, talks about the link between climate justice and racial justice.

“It shouldn’t be an act of feminism to know how your body works,” says gynecologist and author Jen Gunter. The era of menstrual taboos is over.

Scientists predict climate change will displace more than 180 million people by 2100. Disaster recovery lawyer Colette Pichon Battle lays out how to prepare for this looming crisis of “climate migration.”

In a talk brimming with original illustrations and animations, visual artist Oliver Jeffers offers observations on the “beautiful, fragile drama of human civilization.”

Prince William, The Duke of Cambridge, calls on us all to rise to our greatest challenge ever: the “Earthshots,” a set of ambitious objectives to repair the planet.

If you: do laundry, are (or have been) pregnant, shop for your household or do similar labor, then by GDP standards, you’re unproductive. Economist Marilyn Waring explains her vision for a better way to measure growth.

The fossil fuel industry is waiting for someone else to pay for climate change. Climate science scholar Myles Allen shares a bold plan for the oil and gas companies responsible for the climate crisis to clean up the mess they made — and reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

Just like the rest of 2020, the aftermath of the US presidential election was unprecedented. Learn why the concession speech is one of the most important safeguards for democracy in this prescient talk from lawyer and political commentator Van Jones.

The way we’ve been doing business is hurting us and the environment. What’s the fix? Economist Rebecca Henderson calls for a reimagined capitalism where companies pay for the climate damage they cause.

Author and historian Ibram X. Kendi explains how the concept of antiracism can help you actively uproot injustice and inequality in the world — and replace it with love.

A stunning talk and performance from theater artist Daniel Alexander Jones on how coming undone can be the first step toward transformation.

How do we eradicate racial bias? Psychologist Jennifer L. Eberhardt explores how interrupting and adding friction to our thought processes could address the unfair targeting Black people face at all levels of society.

“Complete silence is very addictive,” says Rebecca Knill, a writer who has cochlear implants that enable her to hear. With humor and charm, she explores the evolution of assistive listening technology — and how we could build a more inclusive world.

Starbucks COO Rosalind G. Brewer invites business leaders to rethink what it takes to create a truly inclusive workplace — and lays out how to bring real, grassroots change to boardrooms and communities alike.

It takes more than rhetoric or elegance to win a dispute. US Supreme Court litigator Neal Katyal shares stories of some of his most impactful cases — and the key to crafting a persuasive and successful argument in (and out of) court.

Get the inside story behind Thomas Crowther’s headline-making research on reforestation — and the platform he created to help restore the biodiversity of Earth, everywhere.

Beauty everywhere: Notes from Session 6 of TED2020

We’re six weeks into TED2020! For session 6: a celebration of beauty on every level, from planet-trekking feats of engineering to art that deeply examines our past, present, future — and much more.

Elizabeth “Zibi” Turtle, planetary scientist 

Big idea: The Dragonfly Mission, set to launch in 2026, will study Titan, the largest moon orbiting Saturn. Through this mission, scientists may discover the secrets of the solar system’s origin, the history of life on Earth — and even the potential for life beyond our planet.

How? Launched in 1997, the Cassini-Huygens Mission provided scientists with incredible information about Titan, a water-based moon with remarkable similarities to Earth. We learned that Titan’s geography includes sand dunes, craters and mountains, and that vast oceans of water — perhaps 10 times as large as Earth’s total supply — lie deep underneath Titan’s surface. In many ways, Titan is the closest parallel to pre-life, early Earth, Elizabeth Turtle explains. The Cassini-Huygens Mission ended in 2017, and now hundreds of scientists across the world are working on the Dragonfly Mission, which will dramatically expand our knowledge of Titan. Unlike the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, Dragonfly will live within Titan’s atmosphere, flying across the moon to gather samples and study its chemical makeup, weather and geography. The data Dragonfly sends back may bring us closer to thrilling discoveries on the makeup of the solar system, the habitability of other planets and the beginnings of life itself. “Dragonfly is a search for greater understanding — not just of Titan and the mysteries of our solar system, but of our own origins,” Turtle says.

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Ethan Hawke, actor, writer, director

Big idea: Creativity isn’t a luxury; it’s vital to the human experience.

How? We often struggle to give ourselves permission to be creative because we’re all a little suspect of our own talent, says Ethan Hawke. Recounting his own journey of creative discovery over a 30-year career in acting — along with the beauty he sees in everyday moments with his family — Hawke encourages us to reframe this counterproductive definition of human creativity. Creative expression has nothing to do with talent, he says, but rather is a process of learning who you are and how you connect to other people. Instead of giving in to the pull of old habits and avoiding new experiences — maybe you’re hesitant to enroll in that poetry course or cook that complicated 20-step recipe — Hawke urges us to engage in a rich variety of creative outlets and, most importantly, embrace feeling foolish along the way. “I think most of us really want to offer the world something of quality, something that the world will consider good or important — and that’s really the enemy,” Hawke says. “Because it’s not up to us whether what we do is any good. And if history has taught us anything, the world is an extremely unreliable critic. So, you have to ask yourself, do you think human creativity matters?”

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Keeping the beauty of the session flowing, singer-songwriter Bob Schneider performs “Joey’s Song,” “The Other Side” and “Lorena.”

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Julia Watson, architect, landscape designer, author

Big idea: Ancient Indigenous technology can teach us how to design with nature, instead of against it, when facing challenges. We just need to look and listen. 

How? In her global search for ancient design systems and solutions, Julia Watson has encountered wondrous innovations to counter climate challenges that we all can learn from. “High-tech solutions are definitely going to help us solve some of these problems, but in our rush towards the future, we tend to forget about the past in other parts of the world,” she says. Watson takes us to the villages of Khasi, India, where people have built living bridges woven from ancient roots that strengthen over time to enable travel when monsoon season hits. She introduces us to a water-based civilization in the Mesopotamian Marshlands, where for 6,000 years, the Maʻdān people have lived on manmade islands built from harvested reeds. And she shows us a floating African city in Benin, where buildings are stilted above flooded land. “I’m an architect, and I’ve been trained to seek solutions in permanence, concrete, steel, glass. These are all used to build a fortress against nature,” Watson says. “But my search for ancient systems and Indigenous technologies has been different. It’s been inspired by an idea that we can seed creativity in crisis.”

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TED Fellow and theater artist Daniel Alexander Jones lights up the (virtual) stage by channeling Jomama Jones, a mystical alter ego who shares some much-needed wisdom. “What if I told you, ‘You will surprise yourself’?” Jomama asks. “What if I told you, ‘You will be brave enough’?”

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Titus Kaphar, artist

Big idea: Beauty can open our hearts to difficult conversations.

How? A painting’s color, form or composition pulls you in, functioning as a kind of Trojan horse out of which difficult conversations can emerge, says artist Titus Kaphar. (See for yourself in his unforgettable live workshop from TED2017.) Two weeks after George Floyd’s death and the Movement for Black Lives protests that followed, Kaphar reflects on his evolution as an artist and takes us on a tour of his work — from The Jerome Project, which examines the US criminal justice system through the lens of 18th- and 19th-century American portraiture, to his newest series, From a Tropical Space, a haunting body of work about Black mothers whose children have disappeared. In addition to painting, Kaphar shares the work and idea behind NXTHVN, an arts incubator and creative community for young people in his hometown of Dixwell, Connecticut. “It takes creativity to be able to imagine a future that is so different from the one before you,” he says.

The Big Rethink: Notes from Session 3 of TEDSummit 2019

In an incredible session, speakers and performers laid out the biggest problems facing the world — from political and economic catastrophe to rising violence and deepfakes — and some new thinking on solutions.

The event: TEDSummit 2019, Session 3: The Big Rethink, hosted by Corey Hajim and Cyndi Stivers

When and where: Tuesday, July 23, 2019, 5pm BST, at the Edinburgh Convention Centre in Edinburgh, Scotland

Speakers: George Monbiot, Nick Hanauer, Raghuram Rajan, Marco Tempest, Rachel Kleinfeld, Danielle Citron, Patrick Chappatte

Music: KT Tunstall sharing how she found her signature sound and playing her hits “Miniature Disasters,” “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree” and “Suddenly I See.”

The talks in brief:

George Monbiot, investigative journalist and self-described “professional troublemaker”

Big idea: To get out of the political mess we’re in, we need a new story that captures the minds of people across fault lines.

Why? “Welcome to neoliberalism, the zombie doctrine that never seems to die,” says George Monbiot. We have been induced by politicians and economists into accepting an ideology of extreme competition and individualism, weakening the social bonds that make our lives worth living. And despite the 2008 financial crisis, which exposed the blatant shortcomings of neoliberalism, it still dominates our lives. Why? We haven’t yet produced a new story to replace it — a new narrative to help us make sense of the present and guide the future. So, Monbiot proposes his own: the “politics of belonging,” founded on the belief that most people are fundamentally altruistic, empathetic and socially minded. If we can tap into our fundamental urge to cooperate — namely, by building generous, inclusive communities around the shared sphere of the commons — we can build a better world. With a new story to light the way, we just might make it there.

Quote of the talk: “We are a society of altruists, but we are governed by psychopaths.”

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Nick Hanauer, entrepreneur and venture capitalist.

Big idea: Economics has ceased to be a rational science in the service of the “greater good” of society. It’s time to ditch neoliberal economics and create tools that address inequality and injustice.

How? Today, under the banner of unfettered growth through lower taxes, fewer regulations, and lower wages, economics has become a tool that enforces the growing gap between the rich and poor. Nick Hanauer thinks that we must recognize that our society functions not because it’s a ruthless competition between its economically fittest members but because cooperation between people and institutions produces innovation. Competition shouldn’t be between the powerful at the expense of everyone else but between ideas battling it out in a well-managed marketplace in which everyone can participate.

Quote of the talk: “Successful economies are not jungles, they’re gardens — which is to say that markets, like gardens, must be tended … Unconstrained by social norms or democratic regulation, markets inevitably create more problems than they solve.”

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Raghuram Rajan, economist and former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India

Big idea: As markets grow and governments focus on solving economic problems from the top-down, small communities and neighborhoods are losing their voices — and their livelihoods. But if nations lack the tools to address local problems, it’s time to turn to grass-roots communities for solutions.

How? Raghuram Rajan believes that nations must exercise “inclusive localism”: giving communities the tools to turn themselves around while establishing standards tp prevent discrimination and corruption. As local leaders step forward, citizens become active, and communities receive needed resources from philanthropists and through economic incentives, neighborhoods will thrive and rebuild their social fabric.

Quote of the talk: “What we really need [are] bottom-up policies devised by the community itself to repair the links between the local community and the national — as well as thriving international — economies.”

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Marco Tempest, cyber illusionist

Big idea: Illusions that set our imaginations soaring are created when magic and science come together.

Why? “Is it possible to create illusions in a world where technology makes anything possible?” asks techno-magician Marco Tempest, as he interacts with his group of small flying machines called quadcopters. The drones dance around him, reacting buoyantly to his gestures and making it easy to anthropomorphize or attribute personality traits. Tempest’s buzzing buddies swerve, hover and pause, moving in formation as he orchestrates them. His mind-bending display will have you asking yourself: Was that science or magic? Maybe it’s both.

Quote to remember: “Magicians are interesting, their illusions accomplish what technology cannot, but what happens when the technology of today seems almost magical?”

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Rachel Kleinfeld, democracy advisor and author

Big idea: It’s possible to quell violence — in the wider world and in our own backyards — with democracy and a lot of political TLC.

How? Compassion-concentrated action. We need to dispel the idea that some people deserve violence because of where they live, the communities they’re a part of or their socio-economic background. Kleinfeld calls this particular, inequality-based vein of violence “privilege violence,” explaining how it evolves in stages and the ways we can eradicate it. By deprogramming how we view violence and its origins and victims, we can move forward and build safer, more secure societies.

Quote of the talk: “The most important thing we can do is abandon the notion that some lives are just worth less than others.”

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Danielle Citron, professor of law and deepfake scholar

Big idea: Deepfakes — machine learning technology used to manipulate or fabricate audio and video content — can cause significant harm to individuals and society. We need a comprehensive legislative and educational approach to the problem.

How? The use of deepfake technology to manipulate video and audio for malicious purposes — whether it’s to stoke violence against minorities or to defame politicians and journalists — is becoming ubiquitous. With tools being made more accessible and their products more realistic, what becomes of that key ingredient for democratic processes: the truth? As Danielle Citron points out, “Not only do we believe fakes, we are starting to doubt the truth.” The fix, she suggests, cannot be merely technological. Legislation worldwide must be tailored to fighting digital impersonations that invade privacy and ruin lives. Educational initiatives are needed to teach the media how to identify fakes, persuade law enforcement that the perpetrators are worth prosecuting and convince the public at large that the future of democracy really is at stake.

Quote of the talk: “Technologists expect that advances in AI will soon make it impossible to distinguish a fake video and a real one. How can truths emerge in a deepfake ridden ‘marketplace of ideas?’ Will we take the path of least resistance and just believe what we want to believe, truth be damned?”

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Patrick Chappatte, editorial cartoonist and graphic journalist

Big idea: We need humor like we need the air we breathe. We shouldn’t risk compromising our freedom of speech by censoring ourselves in the name of political correctness.

How? Our social media-saturated world is both a blessing and a curse for political cartoonists like Patrick Chappatte, whose satirical work can go viral while also making them, and the publications they work for, a target. Be it a prison sentence, firing or the outright dissolution of cartoon features in newspapers, editorial cartoonists worldwide are increasingly penalized for their art. Chappatte emphasizes the importance of the art form in political discourse by guiding us through 20 years of editorial cartoons that are equal parts humorous and caustic. In an age where social media platforms often provide places for fury instead of debate, he suggests that traditional media shouldn’t shy away from these online kingdoms, and neither should we. Now is the time to resist preventative self-censorship; if we don’t, we risk waking up in a sanitized world without freedom of expression.

Quote of the talk: “Freedom of expression is not incompatible with dialogue and listening to each other, but it is incompatible with intolerance.”

A new malaria vaccine begins testing in Malawi and more TED news

The TED community is brimming with new projects and updates. Below, a few highlights.

Malaria vaccine begins wide-scale testing in Malawi. RTS,S — the only malaria vaccine to successfully pass clinical trials — will be made available to 360,000 children in Kenya, Malawi and Ghana in the first round of implementation testing. Immunologist Faith Osier spoke to the Sierra Leone Times about the process and next steps for her work, tracking the efficacy and potential side effects of the vaccine, the results of which are expected in 3-5 years. “While we wait, the scientific effort to develop a more effective vaccine will continue as vigorously as ever,” she said. “Researchers like myself are energized by the limited success of the current vaccine and are convinced that we can do better.” (Watch Osier’s TED Talk.)

A new set of clean standards for the final frontier. Space environmentalist Moriba Jah and space engineer Danielle Wood will join an international team of scientists to design the Space Sustainability Rating (SSR), a new system to help reduce space debris. The SSR plans to create and distribute guidelines and models to space tech manufacturers to encourage low-waste production and highlight the importance of sustainability. “We need to ensure that the environment around Earth is as free as possible from trash left over from previous missions,” Wood said in a statement. “Creating the Space Sustainability Rating with our collaborators is one key step to ensure that all countries continue to increase the benefits we receive from space technology.” (Watch Wood’s TED Talk.)

TEDsters honored at 2019 Webby Awards. Climate change advocate Greta Thunberg and anti-bullying activist Monica Lewinsky were among those honored by this year’s Webby Awards. Lewinsky received the Webby Award for Best Influencer Endorsements on behalf of her campaign, #DefyTheName. Thunberg was given the Special Achievement Webby Social Movement of the Year to recognize her work in climate activism, including her #FridaysForFuture campaign, School Strike for Climate and for “igniting a global movement for climate justice led by youth activists, and for using the Internet to draw the world’s attention to the urgent issue of climate change,“ according to a statement on the Webby Awards website. (Check out the full lineup of winners and watch Thunberg’s and Lewinsky’s TED Talks.)

Meet 2019’s Stephen Hawking Science Medal Awardee. For his work promoting and furthering space travel, entrepreneur Elon Musk has been awarded the Stephen Hawking Science Medal by biennial science festival STARMUS. Other 2019 honorees include musician Brian Eno and the film Apollo 11. Musk will be presented the award by astrophysicist and Queen guitarist Brian May for “his astounding accomplishments in space travel and for humanity.” The winners will receive their medals in June at the STARMUS Science Communications Festival in Zurich. (Watch Musk’s latest TED Talk.)

Vanity Fair profiles Brené Brown. On the heels of her groundbreaking Netflix special, vulnerability researcher Brené Brown spoke to Vanity Fair about how success has changed her life — and how she wants to help change yours. Brown’s TED Talks, books and new Netflix special encourage people to embrace vulnerability as vital superpowers, instead of bottling it up in fear. (Watch Brown’s TED Talks on vulnerability and on shame.)

Have a news item to share? Write us at contact@ted.com and you may see it included in this round-up.

Wonder: Notes from Session 11 of TED2019

Session 11 of TED2019 amazed, enriched, inspired and dazzled — diving deep into the creative process, exploring what it’s like to be a living artwork and soaring into deep space.

The event: Talks and performances from TED2019, Session 11: Wonder, hosted by TED’s Helen Walters and Kelly Stoetzel

When and where: Thursday, April 18, 2019, 5pm, at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, BC

Speakers: Beau Lotto with performers from Cirque du Soleil, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jon Gray, Daniel Lismore, Richard Bona, Es Devlin and Juna Kollmeier

Music: Multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter Richard Bona, mesmerizing the audience with his “magic voodoo machine” — weaving beautiful vocal loops into a mesh of sound

Beau Lotto, neuroscientist, accompanied by performers and artists from Cirque du Soleil

• Big idea: Awe is more than an experience; it’s a physiological state of mind, one that could positively influence how we approach conflict and uncertainty.
• How? Humans possess a fundamental need for closure that, when unmet, often turns to conflict-heavy emotions like fear and anger. The antidote may be one of our most profound perceptual experiences: awe. Lotto and his team recorded the brain activity of 280 people before, during and after watching a Cirque du Soleil performance, discovering promising insights. In a state of awe, research shows that humans experience more connection to others and more comfort with uncertainty and risk-taking. These behaviors demonstrate that a significant shift in how we approach conflict is possible — with humility and courage, seeking to understand rather than convince. Read how this talk was co-created by Beau Lotto’s Lab of Misfits and the Cirque du Soleil.
• Quote of the talk: “Awe is neither positive nor negative. What’s really important is the context in which you create awe.”

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, actor, filmmaker and founder of HITRECORD

• Big idea: If your creativity is driven by a desire to get attention, you’re never going to be creatively fulfilled. What drives truly fulfilling creativity? Paying attention.
• How? Social media platforms are fueled by getting attention, and more and more people are becoming experts at it — turning creativity from a joyous expression into a means to an end. But while Joseph Gordon-Levitt certainly knows what it feels like to get attention — he’s been in show business since he was 6, after all — he realized that the opposite feeling, paying attention, is the real essence of creativity. He describes the feeling of being locked in with another actor — thinking about and reacting only to what they’re doing, eliminating thoughts about himself. So get out there and collaborate, he says. Read more about Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s talk here.
• Quote of the talk: “It’s like a pavlovian magic spell: ​rolling, speed, marker ​(clap)​, set and action​. Something happens to me, I can’t even help it. My attention narrows. And everything else in the world, anything else that might be bothering, or that might otherwise grab my attention, it all goes away.”

Jon Gray, designer, food lover, entrepreneur and cofounder of Ghetto Gastro

• Big idea: We can bring people together, connect cultures and break stereotypes through food.
• How? Jon Gray is a founder of Ghetto Gastro, a collective based in the Bronx that works at the intersection of food, art and design. Their goal is to craft products and experiences that challenge perceptions. At first, Gray and his co-creators aimed to bring the Bronx to the wider world. Hosting an event in Tokyo, for example, they served a Caribbean patty made with Japanese Wagyu beef and shio kombu — taking a Bronx staple and adding international flair. Now Ghetto Gastro is bringing the world to the Bronx. The first step: their recently opened “idea kitchen” — a space where they can foster a concentration of cultural and financial capital in their neighborhood.
• Quote of the talk: “Breaking bread has always allowed me to break the mold and connect with people.”

Daniel Lismore, London-based artist who lives his life as art, styling elaborate ensembles that mix haute couture, vintage fabrics, found objects, ethnic jewelry, beadwork, embroidery and more

• Big idea: We can all make ourselves into walking masterpieces. While it takes courage — and a lot of accessories — to do so, the reward is being able to express our true selves.
• How? Drawing from a massive, 6,000-piece collection that occupies a 40-foot container, three storage units and 30 IKEA boxes, Lismore creates himself anew every day. His materials range from beer cans and plastic crystals to diamonds, royal silks and 2,000-year-old Roman rings. And he builds his outfits from instinct, piling pieces on until — like a fashion-forward Goldilocks — everything feels just right.
• Quote of the talk: “I have come to realize that confidence is a concept you can choose. I have come to realize that authenticity is necessary and it’s powerful. I have spent time trying to be like other people; it didn’t work. it’s a lot of hard work not being yourself.”

Es Devlin, artist and stage designer

• Big idea: Art is about communication and expression, and designers have the power to foster lasting connections and deep empathy with their work.
• How? Es Devlin weaves boundless thinking into her stunning stage designs, emphasizing empathy, intimacy and connection for the performers and the audience. As a set designer for some of the world’s most iconic performers and events — including Beyoncé’s Formation tour, Adele’s first live concert in five years, U2 and Kanye West, among many others — Devlin dives into the heart of each performer’s work. She sculpts visual masterpieces that reflect the shape and sound of each artist she works with. Audiences come to shows for connection and intimacy, Devlin says, and it’s the task of set designers, directors and artists to deliver it for the fans.
• Quote of the talk: “Most of what I’ve made over the last 25 years doesn’t exist anymore — but our work endures in memories, in synaptic sculptures in the minds of those who were once present in the audience.”

Juna Kollmeier, astrophysicist

• Big idea: Mapping the observable universe is … a pretty epic proposition. But it’s actually humanly achievable.
• How? We’ve been mapping the stars for thousands of years, but the Sloan Digital Sky Survey is on a special mission: to create the most detailed three-dimensional maps of the universe ever made. Led by Kollmeier, the project divides the sky into three “mappers” that it documents: galaxies, black holes and stars. Our own Milky Way galaxy has 250 billion(ish) stars. “That is a number that doesn’t make practical sense to pretty much anybody,” says Kollmeier. We’re not going to map all of those anytime soon. But galaxies? We’re getting there. On our current trajectory, we’ll map every large galaxy in the observable universe by 2060, she says.
• Quote of the talk: “Black holes are among the most perplexing objects in the universe. Why? Because they are literally just math incarnate in a physical form that we barely understand.”

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.

Looking at stars: Notes from Session 2 of TED2019 Fellows talks

The event: An afternoon session of talks and performances from TED Fellows, hosted by TED Fellows director Shoham Arad and TED Senior Fellow Jedidah Isler.

When and where: Monday, April 15, 2019, 2pm, at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, BC.

The talks, in brief:

Erika Hamden, an astrophysicist who builds telescopes at the University of Arizona.

• Big idea: When we look at the universe we can see stars, but what we can’t see are most of the known atoms that form the universe. Learning more about those atoms, such as hydrogen, would go a long way in telling us how galaxies and stars are created, and how the universe evolved.
• How? Over the past 10 years, Hamden and her team have been building FIREBall, a UV telescope that can observe extremely faint light from huge clouds of hydrogen gas in and around galaxies. It hangs on a cable from a giant balloon from 130,000 feet in the stratosphere, at the very edge of space, for one night, to help observe these atoms. 
• Quote of the talk: “I work on FIREBall because what I want to take our view of the universe from one of mostly darkness, with just light from stars, to one where we can see and measure nearly every atom that exists.”

Christopher Bahl, molecular engineer and protein designer.

• Big idea: New, exciting kinds of medicine made from very small and stable proteins, called constrained peptides, are nontoxic and highly potent for the treatment of disease. However, it’s expensive and time-consuming to reengineer constrained peptides found in nature to work as drugs.
• How? Bahl solves this problem by using computational design to build constrained peptides totally from scratch, using open source design software. The software can position individual atoms incredibly accurately, so that the peptide molecules are custom-tailored for drug development. So far, constrained peptides have been designed to safely neutralize influenza virus, protect against botulism poisoning and block cancer cells from growing.
• Quote of the talk: “Ultimately, I believe that designed peptide drugs will allow us to break free from the constraints of our diseases.”

Alexis Gambis, a filmmaker and biologist, as well as founder and executive director of film festival Imagine Science Films and creator of streaming film platform Labocine.

• Big idea: Storytelling through film can playfully help explain important scientific advancements and social issues, and science can be used as a lens through which to understand our own humanity.
• How? Gambis makes surreal, magical realist films grounded in real scientific fact while straddling experimental, documentary and fiction genres. Son of Monarchs tells a story of immigration and identity while incorporating current evolutionary biology research on the colors, patterns of a butterfly wing, climate justice and CRISPR. His heartfelt portrayal of scientists shifts stereotypes to make them more human and relatable.
• Quote of the talk: “We need more real science in fictional movies to create more eclectic, more inclusive, more poetic portrayals of science and scientists in the world.”

Hiromi Ozaki, an artist who explores the social and ethical implications of emerging technologies.

• Big idea: Recent developments in biotechnology and genetic engineering have made things possible that in the past we attributed only to gods and mythologies. Today, we have the knowledge of the pragmatics of science to create the magic of art.
• How? To create a real-life version of the Red String of Fate – string that binds romantic partners in an Asian lore – Ozaki worked with a geneticist to genetically engineer a silkworm with the DNA of a red glowing coral, adding the love hormone oxytocin. After rendering the mythical real, Ozaki brought it back into the realm of pop culture, making a bio-mythical film featuring an aspiring genetic engineer who creates the Red Silk to win the heart of her crush.
• Quote of the talk: “We managed to create something that we thought only existed in the world of mythology, through science.”

Muthoni Drummer Queen, musician and founder of two East African festivals: Blankets & Wine and Africa Nouveau.

• Big idea: Kenya is suffering from an identity crisis that, at its heart, has an attitude of exclusionism of otherness — a relic of its colonial past. It needs cultural spaces that celebrates and embraces its misfits.
• How? Muthoni Drummer Queen argues that Kenya’s creative industries have a huge role to play in building an inclusive, national pride. She points to examples in Kenyan film, radio, television music and fashion, as well as the music festivals she founded that have offered a platform to a diversity of talents and identities while creating a creative economy, and calls for more progress in these areas so that jobs can be created and Kenyan ideas exported world-wide.
• Quote of the talk: “We cannot build a nation unless we truly love it, and we cannot love it until we love ourselves.”

Moreangels Mbizah, a lion conservationist and founder of Carnivore Conservation Zimbabwe.

• Big idea: Most conservationists working to protect wildlife in Zimbabwe are not from the countries or communities they serve. Yet the communities that live near this wildlife are the people best positioned to protect them.
• How? While local people grow up near wildlife, they often don’t come into contact with it unless they travel out to nature preserves. Mbizah suggests that conservationists should bring schoolchildren to national parks for a chance to connect with wildlife, while offering environmental education and teaching conservation skills. Most of all, conservation must include the economies of the people who share the land with wildlife. Locals play an important role in fighting poaching and illegal wildlife trade, so it’s important to embed conservation skills into these communities.
• Quote of the talk: “Sometimes change can only come when the people most affected and impacted take charge.”

Leila Pirhaji, a biotech entrepreneur and founder of ReviveMed, an AI-driven metabolomics platform focused on discovering drugs for metabolic diseases.

• Big idea: Many diseases, including fatty liver disease, are driven by metabolites – small molecules in our body like fat, glucose or cholesterol. To develop therapies that treat metabolic disorders, we need to study and understand metabolites, but identifying the vast numbers of metabolites in our bodies would require many experiments, which could take decades and billions of dollars.
• How? Pirhaji is developing an AI platform that can identify and understand a large set of metabolites from individual patients’ blood or tissues. It’s now working to develop treatments for diseases driven by metabolic dysregulation.
• Quote of the talk: “By collecting more and more data from metabolites and understanding how changes in metabolites lead to developing diseases, our algorithms will get smarter and smarter to discover the right therapeutics for the right patients.”

Moriba Jah, a space environmentalist and inventor of the orbital garbage monitoring software AstriaGraph.

• Big idea: We have a space 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. 
• How? The ever-growing density of untracked flying debris poses a danger to the satellites and space vehicles being launched, yet we don’t yet have tools or policies to monitor and manage them. Jah’s AstriaGraph is an open and transparent database of space objects that aggregates multiple sources of space information. The database lets scientists quantify, assess and predict the behaviors of objects in space, to inform evidence-based space policy and decision-making.
• Quote of the talk: “In the absence of a framework to monitor activity in space, we risk losing the ability to use space for humanity’s benefit.”

Brandon Anderson, a data entrepreneur and inventor of the police-reporting platform Raheem.

• Big idea: People in the United States interact with police nearly 63 million times a year, but with 18,000 separate police departments in the US, those interactions aren’t methodically tracked — too often with tragic results. That needs to change.
• How? The majority of people who experience police violence, says Anderson, do not report it. So when he lost his life partner to police violence during a routine traffic stop, the former military engineer built Raheem, a platform that lets citizens log interactions with police, including the officer’s identity. During its pilot run in San Francisco, Raheem collected twice as many reports in three months as the city had collected in a year. This data is used by police oversight boards to write policies governing police performance, while public defenders use it as evidence against violent police officers.
• Quote of the talk: “We all deserve a world where we feel safe to live freely, a world where we feel safe to love freely. We are not only fighting for our right to live. We are fighting for our right to love.”

Skylar Tibbits, a designer, computational architect and founder of the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT.

• Big idea: As we react to climate change, how can we adapt and build resilience? Perhaps by studying natural materials that assemble themselves and adapt to their environment
• How? Tibbits’ lab was asked to weigh in on this question: Could self-assembly be used to tackle sea level rise in the fragile islands of the Maldives, where climate change is causing land loss? As they watched the motion of the waves and the topography of the reef cause natural sandbars to form, Tibbits and his colleagues realized they could use these natural forces to build sandbars where they’re needed, by assembling underwater forms that work with the tides to pick up the sand where it can accumulate. Think of it as a movable, adaptable reef.
• Quote of the talk: “It’s a different model for climate change: One that’s about adaptation and resilience rather than resistance and fear.” 

Danielle N. Lee, a behavioral biologist, educator and STEM advocate.

• Big idea: Lee uses hip hop to communicate science concepts and terms to audiences that popular science often overlooks.
• How? Take “O.P.P.” by Naughty By Nature, released in 1991 – a song whose lyrics about monogamy (or lack of it) perfectly mirror an evolutionary biology discovery of around the same time: that songbirds – once thought to be strictly monogamous – engaged in what’s politely called Extra Pair Copulation. “You down with EPC? / Yeah, you know me!”
• Quote of the talk: “Hip hop song references are a really good tool for teaching concepts to students from hip hop culture or urban communities. I use it intentionally, tapping into vocabulary they already know and systems they already comprehend. In the process is it ratifies them – us, our culture – as knowledge purveyors.”

Andrew Nemr, tap dancer and dance oral historian, artistic director of the Vancouver Tap Dance Society

• Big idea: The audio aspect of the craft of tap dance is just as essential as the visual.
• How? Dancing us into TED2019, Nemr and ensemble perform a choose-your-own-adventure dance, inviting audience members to close their eyes and open them throughout the piece, as they feel led.
• Quote of the talk: “I want the audience to experience the form without the visual component, so that they can understand that the music-making part of tap dance is equally important.”

Education Everywhere: A night of talks about the future of learning, in partnership with TED-Ed

The event: TED Salon: Education Everywhere, curated by Cloe Shasha, TED’s director of speaker development; Stephanie Lo, director of programs for TED-Ed; and Logan Smalley, director of TED-Ed

The partner: Bezos Family Foundation and ENDLESS

When and where: Thursday, January 24, 2019, at the TED World Theater in New York City

Music: Nora Brown fingerpicking the banjo

The big idea: We’re relying on educators to teach more skills than ever before — for a future we can’t quite predict.

Awesome animations: Courtesy of TED-Ed, whose videos are watched by more than two million learners around the world every day

New idea (to us anyway): Poverty is associated with a smaller cortical surface of the brain. 

Good to be reminded: Education doesn’t just happen in the classroom. It happens online, in our businesses, our social systems and beyond.

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The talks in brief:

Kimberly Noble, a neuroscientist and director of the Neurocognition, Early Experience and Development Lab at Columbia University

• Big idea: We’ve learned that poverty has a measurable effect on the cortical surface of the brain, an area associated with intelligence. What could we do about that?
• How: Experience can change children’s brains, and the brain is very sensitive to experience in early childhood. Noble’s lab wants to know if giving impoverished families more money might change brain function in their preschool kids.
• Quote of the talk: “The brain is not destiny, and if a child’s brain can be changed, then anything is possible.”

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Olympia Della Flora, associate superintendent for school development for Stamford Public Schools in Connecticut, and the former principal at Ohio Avenue Elementary School in Columbus, Ohio

• Big idea: Healthy emotional hygiene means higher academic scores and happier kids.
• How: With help from local colleges and experts, the teachers at Ohio Avenue Elementary learned new ways to improve kids’ behavior (which in turn helped with learning). Rather than just reacting to kids when they acted out, teachers built healthy coping strategies into the day — simple things like stopping for brain breaks, singing songs and even doing yoga poses — to help kids navigate their emotions in and out of the classroom.
• Quote of the talk: “Small changes make huge differences, and it’s possible to start right now. You don’t need bigger budgets or grand, strategic plans. You simply need smarter ways to think about using what you have, where you have it.”

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Marcos Silva, a TED-Ed Innovative Educator and public school teacher in McAllen, Texas; and Ana Rodriguez, a student who commutes three hours every day to school from Mexico

• Big idea: Understanding what’s going on with students outside of school is important, too.
• How: Silva grew up bringing the things he learned at school about American culture and the English language back to his parents, who were immigrants from Mexico. Now a teacher, he’s helping students like Ana Rodriquez to explore their culture, community and identity.
• Quote of the talk: “Good grades are important, but it’s also important to feel confident and empowered.”

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Joel Levin, a technology teacher and the cofounder of MinecraftEdu

• Big idea: Educators can use games to teach any subject — and actually get kids excited to be in school.
• How: Levin is a big fan of Minecraft, the game that lets players build digital worlds out of blocks with near-endless variety. In the classroom, Minecraft and similar games can be used to spark creativity, celebrate ingenuity and get kids to debate complex topics like government, poverty and power.
• Quote of the talk: “One of my daughters even learned to spell because she wanted to communicate within the game. She spelled ‘home.'”

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Jarrell E. Daniels, criminal justice activist and Columbia University Justice-In-Education Scholar

• Big idea: Collaborative education can help us create more justice.
• How: A few weeks before his release from state prison, Daniels took a unique course called Inside Criminal Justice, where he learned in a classroom alongside prosecutors and police officers, people he couldn’t imagine having anything in common with. In class, Daniels connected with and told his story to those in power — and has since found a way to make an impact on the criminal justice system through the power of conversation.
• Quote of the talk: “It is through education that we will arrive at a truth that is inclusive and unites us all in a pursuit of justice.”

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Liz Kleinrock, third-grade teacher and diversity coordinator at a charter school in Los Angeles

• Big idea: It’s not easy to talk with kids about taboo subjects like race and equity, but having these conversations early prevents bigger problems in the future.
• How: Like teaching students to read, speaking about tough topics requires breaking down concepts and words until they make sense. It doesn’t mean starting with an incredibly complex idea, like why mass incarceration exists — it means starting with the basics, like what’s fair and what isn’t. It requires practice, doing it every day until it’s easier to do.
• Quote of the talk: “Teaching kids about equity is not about teaching them what to think. It’s about giving them the tools, strategies and opportunities to practice how to think.”

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.

The art of possibility: The talks of TED@Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany

The possibilities life affords us are endless. We can find them everywhere, at the micro and macro levels and across all fields. Do you see them? Look closer: they are there every time we use our curiosity and imagination to explore and try new things.

For a second year, TED and Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, have partnered to explore the art of possibility. At this year’s TED@Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, hosted by TED’s international curator Bruno Giussani at Staatstheater Darmstadt on November 26, 2018, a lineup of 13 visionaries, dreamers and changemakers shared the possibilities of past, present and future.

After opening remarks from Stefan Oschmann, Chairman of the Executive Board and CEO of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, the talks of Session 1 kick off.

Can sharks help us fight cancer? The time-worn cliché, “If you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras,” is meant to remind us that the most obvious solution is usually the correct ones. Yet antibody researcher Doreen Koenning has dedicated her career to doing exactly the opposite — and in the process, she’s uncovered surprising weapons that may help us fight cancer. Koenning studies sharks — specifically, their antibodies, which are unusually stable and robust, and which interact with a wide variety of complex molecules. What does this have to do with cancer? Medicines made from human antibodies help us battle cancer — but since they blend into our immune system so well, it’s difficult to track their side effects. Shark antibodies, by contrast, stand out like a sore thumb. Because of this, they could become a valuable tool for neglected diseases and clinical drug trials — and potentially create a new breed of cancer medicines. In the end, Koenning reminds us that we can find useful molecules in many other species, each of them having very special traits. So our search for “zebras” shouldn’t stop at the shark tank.

We can fight antibiotic-resistant superbugs with a new class of vaccines. We urgently need to revamp our approach to developing solutions for bacterial diseases, says pharmacist Vikas Jaitely. Deadly superbugs like MRSA and Clostridium difficile are quickly evolving to resist antibiotics by continuously mutating their genes and even borrowing stronger DNA from other bacteria. Although medical science is trying to keep up, these strains are progressing at a much faster rate than our antibiotics; by 2050, superbugs could claim up to 10 million lives a year globally. Jaitely proposes a new source of help: learning directly from the bacteria and developing what he calls an “ecosystem of evolving vaccines” that can be rapidly modified to target ever-changing bacteria strains. Jaitely says that by modeling superbug behavior and tracking the most probable adaptations (similar to how we approach the flu virus), we can engineer vaccines that evolve alongside the superbugs, functioning as protective shields in our bodies. By “bridging immunology and biology,” he concludes, “we can remove these bugs’ superpowers through the power of our own immune systems, fully trained by these new vaccines.”

What your breath could reveal about your health. There’s no better way to stop a disease than catching and treating it early, before symptoms show. That’s the whole point of medical screening techniques like radiography, MRIs and blood and tissue tests. But there’s a medium with overlooked potential for medical analysis: your breath. Technologist Julian Burschka shares the latest in the art of breath analysis — the screening of the volatile organic compounds we exhale — and how it can be used to better understand the biochemical processes happening inside a patient’s body. Burschka explains how research on breath analysis has skyrocketed recently, and that there’s substantial data suggesting that diseases like Alzheimer’s, diabetes and even colon cancer can be detected in our breath. As the technology matures, the decision of whether or not to treat a disease based on early detection will still be debated, Burschka says. But it’s opening up exciting new possibilities like the creation of longitudinal data that could track the same patient over her lifetime, enabling doctors to detect abnormalities based on a patient’s own medical history, not the average population. “Breath analysis should provide us with a powerful tool not only to proactively detect specific diseases, but also to predict and ultimately prevent them,” Burschka says.

The possibilities of dynamic lighting. Light is all around us, yet many of us don’t realize how much of an effect it has on our behavior and productivity. Lighting researcher Sarah Klein believes we can use lighting to improve our daily lives. Lighting is often chosen with installation costs in mind — not designed to help us feel our best. Klein thinks we should change that approach and make it work with our biological needs. She suggests a “dynamic light system” — a network of adjustable, condition-specific LED lights that NASA uses to help their astronauts get the right amount of sleep. This kind of solution isn’t just for astronauts — it can be useful back on Earth, too, Klein says. For example, a dynamic light system could help travelers cope with jetlag on airplanes and enable people to heal faster in hospitals. Now that we know the impact that light has on us, she says, “We can create a healthier environment for our colleagues, our friends, our families — and ultimately ourselves.”

The impact of a TED Talk, one year later. In a personal, eye-opening talk at last year’s TED@Merck, patient advocate Scott Williams highlighted the invaluable role of informal caregivers — those friends and relatives who go the extra mile for their loved ones in need. More than a million views later, Williams is back on the TED stage, discussing the impact of his talk both within Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, and on the general public. Since the talk, the company has launched a program called Embracing Carers that supports informal caregivers, and people from around the world have reached out to Williams to share their stories and perspectives. Now, Williams and Embracing Carers are partnering with like-minded organizations, such as Eurocarers and the American Cancer Society (and actor Rob Lowe!), to share tools and resources. “This journey generated interest and brought people together,” Williams says. “It sparked a dynamic conversation about the situation of carers.”

A grassroots healthcare revolution in Africa. The last several decades have brought revolutionary advances in medical technology — and yet, according to the World Health Organization, half of the world’s population still can’t get basic health care. How can we fix this glaring gap? Inclusive health care advocate Boris A. Hesser believes that the answer lies in community pharmacies, and developing them into bonafide centers of care. Throughout Africa, for example, small pharmacies can be logical local service points for basic medical care and long-term patient outcomes — if they can access the tools they need. Hesser’s team has already built five basic, sustainable facilities around Nairobi that provide preventative care, affordable medication and even refrigeration for medicines. It’s one step in bringing affordable health care to everyone, everywhere.

The wonderful, surprisingly scientific world of bubbles. Ink formulation scientist Li Wei Tan wants to burst your bubble. It’s actually her job to do just that; when you hold a smartphone, it’s her work that helps give the screen such a crisp, clear quality, by removing the micro- and nano-sized bubbles that want to live in the ink beneath the screen. Tan knows all about the secret world of bubbles — how to remove tiny ones and create the giant bubbles that may have fascinated you as a child — and shares the magic of these soapy spheres. Bubbles are mathematical marvels because they’re constantly seeking geometric perfection, which gives them their shape, Tan says. (Did you know six connected bubbles form a cube in the center?) And these spectacular orbs have influenced industries from manufacturing and shipping (where boats are trying to mimic the bubble-producing tendencies of swimming penguins) to medicine — even down to the tiny bubbles in champagne. “As a scientist who is passionate about bubbles,” she says, “I love to see them, I love to play with them, I love study them, and also I love to drink them.”

Why multitasking works — if we slow it down. “To do two things at once is to do neither,” so the saying goes. But economist and journalist Tim Harford thinks that doing two things at once — or three or even four — is exactly what we should be going for, so long as we slow down to do them right. Harford calls this concept “slow-motion multitasking,” and it’s a pattern of behavior common in highly creative people of all stripes — from Einstein and Darwin to Michael Crichton and Twyla Tharp. Slow-motion multitasking is “when we have several projects in progress at the same time, and we move from one to the other and back again as the mood takes us or the situation demands,” he says. The benefits of this approach are manifold. For instance, creativity often comes from moving an idea out of its original situation and into a new context. As Harford puts it: “It’s easier to think outside the box if you spend some time clambering from one box to another.” What’s more, learning to do one thing may help you do something else. Harford gives the example of medical trainees who became significantly better at analyzing and diagnosing images of eye diseases after spending time studying art. And by balancing several fulfilling projects at once, Harford explains, you’re less likely to get stuck: a setback on one project presents itself as an opportunity to work on another. So how do you keep all these creative pursuits straight in your head? Harford suggests storing related information in separate boxes — whether these are actual physical boxes or digital folders — that can be easily accessed when inspiration strikes. “We can make multitasking work for us, unleashing our natural creativity,” Harford says. “We just need to slow it down.”

Breaking down cultural barriers — with cake. Materials scientist Kathy Vinokurov says that when faced with cultural boundaries in unfamiliar environments, we should be bold and take the first step to bridge those gaps. Born in Russia, Vinokurov moved to Israel as a teenager, where she says she built an imaginary wall between her and her classmates. Fast forward to a new job in Germany later in life and Vinokurov realized she had done the same thing at her workplace. While we can’t control the perceptions others have of us, Vinokurov says, we can control how we communicate and share with those around us. She suggests that when we’re in new settings, we can ease cultural barriers by showing up as our full, authentic selves — and, perhaps, bringing sweet treats from home, like cake. “This opens up the possibility to talk about all the bricks that, if not addressed, may build that wall,” Vinokurov says. While not everyone will immediately open up, she encourages us to spark conversation and “cultural barriers will start to melt away.” Though the tensions of a new workplace can be daunting, sometimes it really is as easy as pie.

Technological tools for mining medical data. Complexity specialist Gunjan Bhardwaj begins his talk with a grim statement: “All of us in this room have a friend or a loved one who has suffered from a life-threatening disease.” When faced with this reality, we find ourselves trying to sort through a mountain of medical data to figure out what therapies are available, pinpoint where we can get them and identify the best experts to help. And this mountain is constantly growing; according to a study by Peter Densen: at the present rate, medical knowledge will double itself every 73 days in the year 2020. Doctors and researchers — let alone patients and their families — will find it impossible to attain a cohesive view of this “deep, dense and diverse” data. Bharwaj identifies two potential technological solutions to this problem: artificial intelligence and blockchain. An AI trained in the specialized language of medical science could crawl data and enable users to answer their most pressing questions. And using blockchain to encrypt siloed, proprietary and otherwise unavailable data could allow researchers to share their unpublished findings more securely, sparking innovation. By combining AI and blockchain, we could enter an era where we render all data — published and unpublished — searchable and shareable. “That era is now,” Bharwaj says.

The self-assembling circuits of the future. We’ve all experienced the frustration of an old computer or smartphone grinding to a halt. It’s the circuits to blame. In time, if we don’t develop better hardware for evolving tech like facial recognition and augmented reality, we could hit a point where the mind-blowing potential of software may be limited, warns developer Karl Skjonnemand. Right now, much of our technology runs thanks to transistors — big, hulking machines that after 50 years of continuous reinvention are now smaller than a red blood cell. But Skjonnemand says that we’re reaching their physical limits, while still needing to go smaller. It’s time for a totally different, robust and cost-effective approach inspired by nature and brought to life by science: designing self-assembling materials after membranes and cell structures in order to continue with the spectacular expansion of computing and the digital revolution. “This could even be the dawn of a new era of molecular manufacturing,” says Skjonnemand. “How cool is that?”

What should electric cars sound like? Renzo Vitale designs an automotive system that few of us consider — the sonic environments cars produce. Electric cars, with their low audio footprints, offer some welcome silence in our cities — as well as new dangers, since they can easily sneak up on unsuspecting pedestrians. So what kind of sounds should they make to keep people safe? Instead of an engine sound, Vitale explores “sonic textures that are able to transmit emotion … connecting feelings and frequencies” that “speak to the character and identity of the car” — or “sound genetics.” In practice, this could mean a car that sounds like a harmonious synthesizer reaching crescendo as it accelerates. Vitale is also an artist and a performer, using his automotive environments as blueprints for mind-boggling installations and musical scores. To close of his talk, he plays selections from his piano albums, Storm and Zerospace.

How a shipping container sparks students’ curiosity. “How can students get excited about science if they don’t have access to the resources that actually make science fun?” asks science education promoter Daniel Sherling. With his team at MilliporeSigma, Sherling transformed a yellow shipping container into a “Curiosity Cube” — a mobile science lab meant to create an engaging, dynamic learning environment. Inside the Curiosity Cube, students can find technology like programmable robots, 3D printers, interactive microscopes, virtual reality and more. The Cube is strapped to a trailer and travels throughout North America, visiting schools that lack the resources for real hands-on science experiments. This way, he says, interactive science can be brought to the students who need it most. And on weekends, families and students can find the Cube in large city centers or public spaces. It’s open to anyone interested in learning more about science — no matter their age. “If we can expose students to the wonders of science, if we can get them just that much more excited for science class the next day, we truly believe we can have a domino effect,” says Sherling. “Because what students need is the opportunity to see and experience how awesome science is. To feel safe to learn, to build their confidence, and most importantly to have their curiosity sparked.”

“Part II. The Journey Through Time.” After closing remarks from Belén Garijo, CEO Healthcare, at Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, Deutsche Philharmonie Merck wraps up the evening performing a piece composed by its conductor Ben Palmer in 2018 to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the company. This is followed by a second piece by Mikhail Glinka, “Ruslan and Lyudmila,” an overture based on a poem by Pushkin, providing a contemplative melody with toiling bravado, soaring strings and notes of inspiration — which one could imagine as the sounds of a working mind struck by brilliance.

New writing from Casey Gerald, Stephen Hawking’s final book and more TED news

The TED community is brimming with new books and projects. Below, a selection of highlights.

A powerful story of an American odyssey. Writer and business leader Casey Gerald has published a new memoir on his journey through American life. Titled There Will Be No Miracles Here, the book tells Gerald’s story from a childhood of scraping by, to Yale University, to his role as the leader of a nonprofit placing MBA graduates in communities where they can share their knowledge and make a difference. In an interview with NYMag, Gerald says, “I feel very certain that this book, writing it and giving it away, was the highest and best use of the luxury of being alive. Only time will tell whether that’s true.” The memoir, which The New York Times calls “magnificent,” can be found in bookstores and online. (Watch Gerald’s TED Talk.)

New insights on the benefits of playing instruments. In collaboration with neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, guitar manufacturer Fender has published a new report on the emotional, physical and mental benefits of playing instruments with a focus on the guitar. The study has some fascinating findings: women make up half of all new and aspiring guitar players, 72% of participants began playing guitar as a way of bettering themselves and 42% of participants considered guitar-playing a part of their identity. On the study, Levitin said, “Playing an instrument has a meditative aspect that can release positive hormones in the brain … When we play an instrument, it allows us to see ourselves differently — taking on something that is seen as being a masterful skill in society.” (Watch Levitin’s TED Talk.)

A free resource on integrating ethics and tech. In a closing keynote at the 2018 Borah Symposium, game designer and technologist Jane McGonigal spoke about the tangible benefits of video games. As quoted in The Argonaut, McGonigal said, “Microsoft Research estimated that the United States’ global life expectancy had increased by 2.825 million years just because of the amount of increase in physical activity [from the release of Pokémon Go]. That’s a real outcome.” McGonigal also discussed Ethical OS, her latest project, a free online ethics toolkit for technology makers and futurists. McGonigal crafted it in collaboration with the Omidyar Network and her team at the Institute for the Future, where she is the Director for Game Research and Development. (Watch McGonigal’s TED Talk.)

Marvel’s SHURI series is here. The Black Panther universe has a new addition: a comic series focusing on Shuri, the princess of Wakanda. Written by Afrofuturist writer Nnedi Okorafor and illustrated by Leonardo Romero, the first issue was released last week. This series signals a departure from the Black Panther lore so far. According to Marvel, SHURI leads the eponymous main character on exciting adventures and challenges as she strives to lead Wakanda — the fictional African country of the Black Panther universe — in the absence of her brother, King T’Challa. The first issue has three gorgeous covers by artist Sam Spratt and the second issue is out next month. (Watch Okorafor’s TED Talk. and read our new interview with her)

Brief Answers to Big Questions. The final book of the late theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking was published in October, seven months after Hawking passed away at age 76. Published by Bantam Books, Brief Answers to Big Questions explores some of life’s greatest mysteries, including the existence of God and the possibility of time travel (spoiler alert: Hawking says no and maybe, respectively). The book was finished and polished by Hawking’s family members, who drew from his research, notes and papers following his death. In addition, Hawking, widely considered one of the most influential scientists of his generation, will be honored at the 2019 Breakthrough Prize ceremony. Hawking was awarded a Special Fundamental Physics Prize by the organization in 2013 for his discovery that black holes emit radiation. (Watch Hawking’s TED Talk.)

Preview our new podcast: The TED Interview

TED is launching a new way for curious audiences to immerse themselves more deeply in some of the most compelling ideas on our platform: The TED Interview, a long-form TED original podcast series. Beginning October 16, weekly episodes of The TED Interview will feature head of TED Chris Anderson deep in conversation with TED speakers about the ideas they shared in their TED Talks. Guests will include Elizabeth Gilbert and Sir Ken Robinson, as well as Sam Harris, Mellody Hobson, Daniel Kahneman, Ray Kurzweil and more. Listen to the trailer here.

NEW: Listen to the first episode, our conversation with Elizabeth Gilbert.

“If you look at the cast of characters who have given TED Talks over the past few years, it’s a truly remarkable group of people, and includes many of the world’s most remarkable minds,” Chris said. “We got a glimpse of their thinking in their TED Talk, but there is so much more there. That’s what this podcast series seeks to uncover. We get to dive deeper, much deeper than was possible in their original talk, allowing them to further explain, amplify, illuminate and, in some cases, defend their thinking. For anyone turned on by ideas, these conversations are a special treat.”

The launch comes at an exciting time when TED is testing multiple new formats and channels to reach even wider global audiences. In the past year TED has experimented with original podcasts, including WorkLife with Adam Grant, Facebook Watch series like Constantly Curious, primetime international television in India with TED Talks India Nayi Soch and more.

“We’ve been very ambitious in our goal of developing and testing new formats and channels that can support TED’s mission of Ideas Worth Spreading,” said Colin Helms, head of media at TED. “A decade after TED began posting talks online, there are so many more differing media habits to contend with—and, lucky for us, so many more formats to more to play with. The TED Interview is an exciting new way for us to offer curious audiences a front-row seat to some of the day’s most fascinating and challenging conversations.”

The first episode of the TED Interview debuts Tuesday, October 16, on Apple Podcasts, the TED Android app or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. Season 1 features eleven episodes, roughly 40 minutes each. New episodes will be made available every Tuesday. Subscribe and check out the trailer here.

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.