Free to Dream: TED Talks in partnership with American Family Insurance

We all deserve the right to dream and to pursue better, richer and fuller lives. In fact, this ideal is often referred to as the American Dream. And yet, the country’s criminal justice system denies many people the freedom to truly dream — even after they have been technically “freed” from incarceration. In an evening of talks, four speakers and a performer challenged the definition of the word “freedom” and laid out new ideas for how to engage in systems change, close equity gaps and reimagine what it means to be free to dream.

The event: TED Salon: Free to Dream, curated and hosted by Whitney Pennington Rodgers, in partnership with American Family Insurance

Opening remarks: Bill Westrate, president and CEO-elect of American Family Insurance, welcomes the audience to the salon.

Music: A soaring musical interlude from The Resistance Revival Chorus, a collective of women artists and activists who use their voices to amplify freedom, justice reform and the power of dreaming.

Reuben Jonathan Miller, sociologist, writer

Big idea: For the nearly 20 million Americans with a felony record, punishment doesn’t end with a prison sentence. We need to embrace the politics of radical hospitality, where we make a place in society for all people, even those who’ve done harm.

How? When a previously incarcerated person comes home, they return to a hostile world — what Reuben Jonathan Miller calls an alternate legal reality. In the United States, more than 44,000 laws and policies dictate where a person with a felony record can live, what jobs they can hold, how they can spend their time and whether or not they can vote or see their kids. As a sociologist, Miller has spent more than two decades “following the people we’ve learned to be afraid of.” For people like a man Miller calls Jimmy, who was released from prison into Detroit, punishment never ends. Miller explains how the terms of Jimmy’s release required that he find housing, report to his parole officer for weekly drug screenings, complete a workforce development program and get a job — without providing him with any resources or support. His mother wanted him to come home, but he couldn’t even sleep on her couch because landlords can evict families for housing relatives with criminal records. What’s the solution? How do we end perpetual punishment? We need to change the laws, Miller says, but we also need to change our commitments. He points to Ronald Simpson Bey as someone who models the politics of radical hospitality. Bey spent 27 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, and since he’s come home has become one of the nation’s leading advocates for justice. When a 14-year-old boy murdered his son, Bey even advocated on behalf of the boy to ensure that he would be tried as a minor, giving the boy a second chance in life. As Miller says, people like Bey help us imagine alternatives for the formerly incarcerated; they invite us “to help remake the world, so we all belong, simply because we’re fully human participants in a human community.”

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Nyra Jordan, social impact investor

Big idea: Corporations can engage in justice reform by making it easier to hire someone with a criminal record.

How? Corporate commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) often leave out people impacted by the criminal justice system, even though employment is one of the best ways to prevent someone from returning to prison. As social impact investment director for American Family Insurance, Nyra Jordan has pioneered fair chance hiring for people with a criminal record. Under her leadership, the company eliminated any “check here if you have a criminal record” boxes from their job applications and started including programs that train incarcerated individuals in their talent pipeline. Now, she shares four steps to implement fair chance hiring at your company.  First, she says, hire based on skills. If a person has the skills they need for the job, then a gap in their resume for time spent in prison shouldn’t matter. Second, make sure there’s a clear path for promotion for justice-impacted individuals. Third, help justice-impacted employees adjust to your corporate culture. And last, include criminal justice education and anti-bias training as part of your company’s DEI strategy to ensure a positive work environment for all fair chance hires. Someone who’s been involved in the criminal justice system can very much be a qualified candidate. “For many reasons, they might end up being your most motivated, most dedicated, most hard-working employees because their stakes are so much higher,” Jordan says.

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Brittany K. Barnett, attorney, entrepreneur, author

Big idea: The freedom journey doesn’t end when someone is released from prison. In many ways, it begins. True liberation must include a vision for restoring, investing in and nurturing the creative ingenuity of justice-impacted people.

How? Brittany K. Barnett realizes that we cannot rely on the glacially slow legislative process, or on lawmakers indifferent to those suffering behind bars. Instead, she champions “sustainable liberation” — a concept by which economic freedom, equity and access to resources and capital opens doors for incarcerated creatives to impact their communities both inside and outside of prison walls. In addition to numerous initiatives investing in the businesses of the formerly incarcerated, Barnett and her clients cofounded the Buried Alive project — a joint effort fighting to free those snared by outdated drug laws. Through these programs, Barnett helps restore the dreams of those whose lives have been shattered by prison. “When we lose sight of the humanity of those we unjustly sentence, we lose sight of all of the brilliance they might bring into the world,” she says.

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Nick Turner, president and director of Vera Institute of Justice, interviewed by TED current affairs curator Whitney Pennington Rodgers

Big idea: With the Vera Institute, Nick Turner seeks to transform the “criminal legal system” — referred to as such because the so-called “criminal justice system” does not dispense justice. Instead, this system feeds America’s oppressive legacy of racial injustice, established through centuries of slavery and “Black Codes.” Disguised by euphemisms such as “War on Crime,” rather than fixing social problems, our current legal system preserves racial divides and economic inequities. 

How? Democracy can do better than this, Turner says. We must shrink the system, make it less brutal and ensure that there is “some modicum of justice that is provided.” Among other initiatives, the Vera Institute helped overturn the congressionally imposed ban on Pell grants for incarcerated students, which extended to 20,000 students the opportunity to earn a degree. There’s a lot of work to do to build a just justice system, Turner says, but it’s crucial that we recognize the humanity of those caught in it, rather than bow to our fear of violent crime (which police and prisons do relatively little to minimize).

Reducing: Notes from Session 4 of Countdown Summit

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How will we get the 55 gigatons of global greenhouse emissions produced each year down to zero? By rapidly scaling up proven green technologies, finding innovative and brilliant ways to trap carbon and ending destructive practices.

In Session 4 of Countdown Summit, 10 speakers shared the actions we need to take to attack climate change at its source — and end the 400-year-old legacy of extraction that began with colonialism and stretches to today.

The event: Countdown Summit: Session 4, hosted by Future Stewards cofounder Lindsay Levin and David Lammy, Member of Parliament for Tottenham, England, at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre in Edinburgh, Scotland on Thursday, October 14, 2021

Speakers: John Doerr, Ryan Panchadsaram, Ilissa Ocko, Ermias Kebreab, Rainn Wilson, Nat Keohane, Gabrielle Walker, Ben van Beurden, Chris James and Lauren MacDonald

The talks in brief:

John Doerr, engineer and investor, and Ryan Panchadsaram, systems innovator

Big idea: The action plan to solve the world’s climate crisis is here.

How? John Doerr and Ryan Panchadsaram have teamed up to map out what concerted global action on climate could look like using Doerr’s proven system for setting up and tracking goals and success known as OKRs: objectives and key results. Together, they’ve broken down the road to climate action into six big parts: electrifying transportation; decarbonizing the grid with alternatives like wind, solar and nuclear; fixing the food industry; protecting nature; cleaning up business; and removing carbon. As Panchadsaram underscores, all six must be enacted at once — and quickly — alongside winning at politics and policy, so that climate commitments have follow-through. This can be achieved by turning movements into real action, innovating to drive down the cost of clean tech and investing in research, deployment and philanthropy. While these needs are both practical and ambitious, leaders and business executives are underestimating the economic opportunity — and the human cost — if we don’t act fast. Doerr and Panchadsaram call for investment now, scaling up what we already know works as well as finding new solutions. Their plan requires the United States and Europe to lead the way by showing that decarbonizing can be done and that a clean green economy is possible in order to lower the costs for everyone — especially those who have suffered the most but contributed the least to the climate problem. “How much more damage do we have to endure before we realize it’s cheaper to save this planet than to ruin it?” Doerr asks.

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Ilissa Ocko, atmospheric scientist

Big idea: Cutting methane emissions is the single most effective way to slow the rate of climate change.

How? Methane gas emissions could cause a greater short-term increase in global warming than CO2 emissions, says atmospheric scientist Ilissa Ocko. Fortunately, we can use available technologies to halve methane emissions from human activities like fossil fuel production, waste management and agriculture. Methane gas is a significant byproduct of oil, coal and gas extraction, but with sensor technology, we can detect and quantify emissions with unprecedented precision, eliminating the majority of accidental emissions at no net cost. Waste management also produces methane when bacteria decompose garbage and sludge in wastewater. Ocko proposes we vacuum up the methane emitted from landfills and use this gas for electricity. (Although burning methane does emit CO2, CO2 traps a lot less heat than methane). Finally, Ocko says we need to tackle the number one methane polluter: raising livestock. Some solutions include using higher quality feed for cows and covering manure lagoons. If we implement rapid, full-scale efforts in each sector, Ocko is confident we will reap the climate benefits in our lifetimes. “We could slow down the rate of warming by as much as 30 percent before mid-century,” she says.

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Ermias Kebreab, animal scientist

Big idea: Feeding cattle seaweed could drastically reduce global methane emissions, cutting into one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gasses.

How? Scientists have long known that cows are a huge source of greenhouse gasses, contributing up to four percent of emissions globally each year. And since humanity doesn’t seem to be willing to adopt a plant-based diet on anything near the global scale required to ameliorate these emissions, we need to find ways to make cattle less — ahem — gassy. Animal scientist Ermias Kebreab is developing a green solution, sourced from just below the surface of our oceans: seaweed. Inspired by research showing that feeding cattle seaweed could drastically reduce the methane produced by burping, he’s devised ways to feed it to dairy animals in a scalable way. Eventually, Kebreab and his colleagues discovered they could cut methane emissions from cattle up to a staggering 98 percent with the proper combination of feed and seaweed.

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Rainn Wilson, actor and activist

Big idea: Surely there must be something funny about climate change.

Right? Not really, says actor and activist Rainn Wilson, in a comedic interlude between talks. Backed up by an ensemble of famous friends like Maria Bamford, Larry Wilmore, Weird Al Yankovic and many more, Wilson searches for the comedic light in humanity’s greatest challenge and comes up with — well, basically nothing. (Although in a dark, twisted way, not finding any humor at all can be kind of funny in itself.) “Maybe there’s nothing funny about climate change,” says Al Madrigal. “Let’s fix it.”

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Nat Keohane, climate policy advocate

Big idea: We can’t solve climate change without tropical forests.

Why? Deforestation means carbon pollution, as eliminating tropical forests means losing one of the world’s most important carbon sinks, responsible for absorbing over one-fifth of emissions made from burning fossil fuels. And right now, instead of protecting rainforests, we’re cutting them down at alarming rates, pushing us closer to a tipping point. The heart of the problem is economic, says climate policy advocate Nat Keohane. That so long as it’s profitable to chop down forests for timber or clear them for agriculture, we’ll continue to lose them unless incentives are worth more to keep these important places alive. He proposes a way forward, successfully happening in Brazil’s Mato Grosso within the Amazon, where the state is now a model of economic development and forest protection — down 85 percent in deforestation since making the leap toward sustainable growth for beef and soy. How did they do it? Using the three key building blocks for any credible green market, which is also upheld by his coalition, LEAF: precision carbon measurements, standardizing buyer quality and creating a transaction platform for companies looking to make good on their climate commitments. “If we can expand LEAF globally, we can stop tropical deforestation, protect some of the largest carbon sinks on the planet and enable forest nations and local populations to thrive and grow, Keohane says. “All because we harness the power of the market to reflect the full value of standing forest.”

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Gabrielle Walker, writer, carbon removal thinker

Big idea: We can harness the power of nature, human ingenuity and technology to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stop climate change from getting worse.

How? What do wooly pigs have to do with the future of our planet? According to writer Gabrielle Walker, this relative of the Scottish wild boar is one example of a new approach to addressing climate change through carbon removal. Walker says reducing carbon emissions isn’t enough to slow global warming; we also need to take billions of tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere in the next few decades. On the Isle of Mule in Scotland, wooly pigs root out the undergrowth leftover from sheep grazing, allowing native trees to grow back and, eventually, suck carbon from the air. Other carbon removal solutions are equally ingenious and surprising. For instance, basalt rock formed from volcanic lava naturally traps carbon, but we can accelerate the carbon capture process by grinding the rock and spreading it across agricultural fields. Walker also says we can use technology to speed up carbon removal. She points to a giant fan in Texas that strips CO2 from the air and buries it underground as well as construction projects that use wood (natural carbon stores) to build skyscrapers instead of high-emitting materials like concrete.

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Chris James, cofounder of the activist fund Engine No. 1; Lauren MacDonald, climate justice activist; and Ben van Beurden, CEO of Royal Dutch Shell

Big idea: The path to decarbonizing fossil fuels.

How? Session 4 closed with a conversation between Chris James, cofounder of Engine No. 1, the activist fund that successfully installed three new directors on the board of the US’s largest oil firm, ExxonMobil; Lauren MacDonald, Scottish climate activist and a member of the Stop Cambo campaign, fighting against a proposed offshore oil field west of the Shetlands; and Ben van Beurden, CEO of Royal Dutch Shell, the largest Europe-based oil and gas company. The discussion was moderated by Christiana Figueres, the Costa Rican diplomat who steered the global effort that culminated in the 2015 Paris Agreement. The difficult and at moments emotional onstage panel covered fossil fuels and accelerating the trajectory of decarbonization. Read more about it here.

Mark your calendar: Tune in to the Countdown Global Livestream on October 30, 2021. This virtual event will lay out a credible and realistic pathway to a zero-carbon future. Save the date.

In Case You Missed It: Highlights from day 2 of TED2019

Here’s what happened on Tuesday of TED2019. A few news-making highlights first:

Jack Dorsey proposed a new way Twitter could work — by following topics and not individual people and brands. Hmm. Also, fun fact: If he had it to do over again, he would not have built the Like button. Watch for Jack Dorsey’s Q&A with Chris Anderson and Whitney Pennington Rodgers on TED.com today.

Digital Domain’s Doug Roble showed, for the first time outside his studio, a jaw-dropping digital animation tool mapped to a live human actor. This avatar-creating wonder tool could revolutionize filmmaking … and also your next video chat.

The Audacious Project unveiled eight ambitious projects to change the world — from a data-backed approach to fighting racist activity, to a sweeping global drive to breed plants that are better for the planet. Between them — and thanks to a good old-fashioned fund drive last night — they raised a collective $283 million, and each project now has enough seed funding to launch. But they’re only halfway to a collective goal of — wait for it — $567m.

And some larger themes emerged …

Changing, fast and slow: In Chris’s indelible image, Twitter is a ship, Jack Dorsey is the captain, and a few of the passengers have come up from steerage to ask if Dorsey might consider, perhaps, turning away from the path of the iceberg. As Chris says: “You’re showing this extraordinary calm, but we’re all standing outside saying, Jack, turn the f*cking wheel.” Jack’s response: “Quickness will not get this job done.” He’s looking for deeper, systemic change (including a few suggested moves that some Twitter users did not love). Rafael Casal had the same question — “How fast should change happen?” — after he touched off a Twitter firestorm around an issue of racial unfairness. He made one brief point on the platform; it gained traction over a weekend; and it got ugly real fast. Now, he asks: Is social media just too quick on the trigger to allow for nuanced discussion of social change? Working at another timescale altogether, Safeena Husain spoke about a deep investment in the far future — by educating young girls today, starting with the 1.4 million girls in India who never go to school. Investing now, today, in the potential of these girls could have a material effect on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, aimed at creating a better world by 2030. Why not start now?

Playing with personas: As Doug Roble demos his jaw-dropping tool to create detailed, real-time digital renderings of a person — in this case, Doug himself, plus an alternate personality named Elbor — a thought arises: Will this next-gen avatar lead to more deepfakes, more fraudulent online personalities? (The likely answer: Yes, but honestly, what won’t?) Meanwhile, from the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Roger Hanlon told us about shape-shifting cephalopods who change their skin color and texture in a blink, to hide, to mate, to blow human minds. Hanlon suggests their smart skin, and their ability to deploy it in sophisticated ways and in a flash, is an alternative form of intelligence, driven by their strange and wonderful and very, very large brains.

Service and meaning: Matt Cutts worked at Google for almost 17 years, and he took what he thought would be a six-month break to join the US government’s digital service. Three-plus years later, he’s still in government, finding deep meaning and satisfaction in solving problems that affect real people’s lives. At TED Unplugged, he makes the case to his fellow technologists that if you want to really make an impact, you should leave Silicon Valley, wave goodbye to those crazy perks and free meals, and enter a world where office furniture isn’t a given — but the impact is. Julius Maada Bio, the president of Sierra Leone, offered his own take on the meaning of service. He first took power in a military coup, but his goal, he says, was always to return the country to democratic rule. His other major goal: “Sierra Leone must be a secure, peaceful and just society where every person can thrive and contribute.” Over the past decades, he’s moved steadily toward that objective. Plant biologist Joanne Chory is committed to an equally large and far-seeing goal: developing plants that capture carbon better and for longer than common crops do now which will help mitigate our planet’s creeping carbon levels. Her vision, her sense of mission and her nothing-can-stop-me persistence are genuinely inspiring.

Curiosity makes us human: Educator Brittany Packnett meditates on confidence, the hidden skill that powers many of our other skills. Confidence is what helps you put plans into action, and what helps you keep moving even after you fail. What builds confidence? One key factor, she says, is curiosity, the desire to push beyond who you are and what you know. Mentalist Derren Brown taps into the curiosity of the audience by guessing our innermost questions (and even one guy’s password). How did he do it? He’ll never tell. Appearing via robot, David Deutsch meditates on another force that moves us: the drive for new “explanatory knowledge.” As humans, we desire to understand things and explain them and change them and make them new. As he says: “From the human perspective, the only alternative to that living hell of static societies is continual creation of new ideas, behaviors, new kinds of objects.”

Watch the first TED Talk released from TED2019: Carole Cadwalladr.

Intelligence: Notes from Session 3 of TED2019

Session 3 featured a dazzling celebration of intelligence — from the knowledge coded in our DNA (and a new way we could rewrite it) to one of the most astonishing tech demos ever seen at TED. Let’s jump right in.

The event: Talks and performances from TED2019, Session 3: Intelligence, hosted by TED’s Chris Anderson.

When and where: Tuesday, April 16, 2019, 11:15am, at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, BC.

Speakers: David Deutsch, David R. Liu, Brittany Packnett, Roger Hanlon, Derren Brown and Doug Roble

The talks in brief:

Physicist, author, Oxford professor and father of quantum computing David Deutsch, who delivered his talk via a remote-controlled robot

• Big idea: Within a few short centuries, humans have permanently transformed the Earth. Yet for billions of years, the rest of the cosmos has remained largely unchanged. Why is that? The answer lies in the one thing that fundamentally sets us apart: our ability to attain knowledge.
• How? As humans, we can wrap our minds around just about any problem imaginable. (It’s why Einstein could predict the existence of black holes without ever seeing one, for instance.) Deutsch calls this unique skill of ours “explanatory knowledge,” and it’s driven the immense progress of the past few hundred years — inventions, new behaviors, novel ideas — along with the physical, large-scale changes we’ve left to the Earth. In other words: humans are small beings that can have a massive impact on big things. On the cosmic scale, however, it’s a different story: massive, powerful things strongly affect lesser things, and not vice versa. (A comet that hits the sun is vaporized, while the sun carries on as before.) The last 13 billion years have been dictated by this principle, leading to very few grand cosmological changes — i.e., little novelty — in the universe. Yet we have the power to buck that trend, Deutsch says: with our explanatory knowledge, we can push back against the “great monotony” of the universe, reshape the future of the galaxy — and start looking beyond.
• Quote of the talk: “Humans are not playthings of cosmic forces. We are users of cosmic forces.”

David R. Liu, chemist, biologist, pioneer of genome editing

• Big idea: We hear a lot about CRISPR, the chemical scissors with which we can cut genetic code. But what if we could use CRISPR to find flawed DNA sequences — and instead of snipping them out, simply correct them? Base editing could be that red editing pencil, and once fully developed, it could cure many genetically transmitted diseases.
• How? Liu and his colleagues created chemically engineered proteins that correct sequence-scrambling mutations in DNA. Having made its corrections, this base editor then “tricks” the cell into building stable DNA out of the new sequence. For now, only a few editors exist, and have only been used in plants and animals. But once more are discovered — and scientists solve some formidable practical challenges — they could revolutionize genetic medicine.
• Quote of the talk: “Thanks to a relentlessly dedicated group of students who were creative enough to engineer what we could design ourselves, and brave enough to evolve what we couldn’t, base editing has begun to transform that science fiction-like aspiration into an exciting new reality.”

Brittany Packnett, educator and activist

• Big idea: Confidence is key to pursuing our goals. How can we develop and maintain it — especially in the students who most need it as they grow? Prioritize three things — permission, community and curiosity.
• How? As a teacher of low-income students of color, Packnett noticed that her students weren’t developing the confidence they needed to navigate the world. She realized that to build the muscles of confidence, you need three things: the permission to grow, a community to lean on and support you, and the curiosity to explore and grow in confidence. When we create environments that fulfill these three needs, Packnett says, we can boost our confidence — and accomplish our dreams.
• Quote of the talk: “Confidence is the difference between being inspired and actually getting started, between trying and doing until it’s done. Confidence helps us keep going, even when we’ve failed.”

Roger Hanlon, marine biologist and expert on camouflaged deep-sea creatures

• Big idea: Cephalopods, like squid, octopus and cuttlefish, evolved without vertebrae in the murky mystery of the deep. Their remarkable neurological systems may be evidence of an entirely new type of evolutionary intelligence.
• How? These creatures have astonishing intellect and cognitive skills: decision-making, dynamic camouflaging, memorization — they even experience REM sleep (and potentially dream) — much of which is made possible by their advanced RNA. Cephalopods, they’re sort of like us! Hanlon and his team see huge potential in studying their big brains and marvelous, morphing skin (an octopus’s brain, for example, contains 35 lobes and 80 million neurons, while its skin is home to 300 million neurons). These evolutionary tricks might just lead to breakthroughs in AI, fabrics, cosmetics and beyond.
• Fun fact: While on the hunt for prey, cephalopods can make more than 200 complex camouflaging decisions in the scope of two hours. And they do this multiple times a day.

Derren Brown, illusionist and mentalist

• Big idea: Magic is a great analogy for how we dream up reality in our own heads, forming a story and then mistaking that story for the truth.
• How? Brown’s talk includes a performance that … well, you’ll have to see it to believe it. He describes the practice of mentalism as “the dubious art of getting inside your head.” Humans are, he says, story-forming creatures: we live by the stories we tell ourselves, or the ones we inherit — that we need to be successful to be loved, perhaps, or that we have a terrible secret we must keep. They are, to us, utterly convincing. Brown’s job is also to tell us a story that we’ll believe, but performing reminds him to avoid reducing people to neat characters in the actual world and “to be more alive and alert to the complexity and subtlety of what’s real.”
• Quote of the talk: “We’d worry a lot less about what other people think about us if we realized how seldom they do.”

Doug Roble, senior director of software R&D at Digital Domain, the Academy Award–winning visual effects studio in Los Angeles, California

• Big idea: The future of motion capture is here and it looks … just like us.
• How? The usual suspects: machine learning, deep neural networks and gargantuan amounts of data. Over a year of intense video recording, Roble offered all the facial expressions he could muster to create an exact digital rendering of himself. In an astonishing demo, he debuts the software in real time — for the first time ever outside his team’s LA studio — with a complete 3D character of his likeness, accurate down to his pores and wrinkles. The implications of this technology are, he admits, as far-reaching as they are fearsome. By transposing 3D fantastical film characters onto the big screen, the future of film could grow even brighter — but there’s also the threat of designing deepfakes indistinguishable from their real-life counterparts.
• Fun fact: Roble’s team had to collect an immense of data — like, really, an immense amount. Learn more about part of that data-gathering process (the sphere of bright lights) as it was presented in Paul Debevec’s 2009 TED Talk, “Animating a photo-real digital face.”
• Quote of the talk: “Why did we do this? First of all, it is just crazy cool.”