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À partir d’avant-hierTED Blog

Moving on up: Talks from day 3 of TEDWomen 2023

Activist, filmmaker and entrepreneur Maya Penn, TEDWomen editorial director Pat Mitchell and TED’s head of curation Helen Walters host Session 5 of TEDWomen 2023: Two Steps Forward on October 13, 2023, in Atlanta, GA. (Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED)

For the final day of TEDWomen 2023 in Atlanta, Georgia, a multidisciplinary group of experts took on the challenges and opportunities of navigating change — from reimagining migration for political power and addressing the real threats of AI to championing inclusivity, celebrating nature’s wildness and pondering life’s myriad complexities through art.

The event: Sessions 4 and 5 of TEDWomen 2023, hosted by TEDWomen editorial director Pat Mitchell, TED’s head of curation Helen Walters and activist, filmmaker and entrepreneur Maya Penn

When and where: Friday, October 13, 2023, at the Woodruff Arts Center in Atlanta, Georgia

Speakers: Charles M. Blow, Sasha Luccioni, Ruha Benjamin, Melonie D. Parker, Sherrell Dorsey, Mary Ann Sieghart, Dyhia Belhabib, Rebecca McMackin, Lucy McBath, Valerie Montgomery Rice, Maira Kalman, Freada Kapor Klein, Sheila Ngozi Oparaocha, Chantale Zuzi Leader

Darkwave artist Abra performs at Session 5 of TEDWomen 2023: Two Steps Forward on October 13, 2023, in Atlanta, GA. (Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED)

Music: Darkwave artist Abra captivated the TEDWomen audience with her signature blend of gothic, R&B and electronic music.

Writer Charles M. Blow speaks at Session 4 of TEDWomen 2023: Two Steps Forward on October 13, 2023, in Atlanta, GA. (Photo: Erin Lubin / TED)

Societal progress often feels like two steps forward, one step back — how do we change that? New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow calls for a peaceful, reverse migration of Black Americans to southern US states, to write over legacies of oppression and wield political power to change history.

AI ethics researcher Sasha Luccioni speaks at Session 4 of TEDWomen 2023: Two Steps Forward on October 13, 2023, in Atlanta, GA. (Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED)

We’ve all heard it recently: “AI could kill us all.” Instead of catastrophizing, AI ethics researcher Sasha Luccioni wants to address AI’s more pressing risks — like carbon emissions, copyright infringement and biased data — by creating tools and legislation that promote transparency.

Innovation and equity researcher Ruha Benjamin speaks at Session 4 of TEDWomen 2023: Two Steps Forward on October 13, 2023, in Atlanta, GA. (Photo: Erin Lubin / TED)

In the era of superintelligent AI, are health care and housing for all really beyond reach? From the outcry against Atlanta’s “Cop City” to tech-driven democracy in Barcelona, researcher Ruha Benjamin imagines a future where tech and people-power work in tandem, not in opposition.

Google’s chief diversity officer Melonie D. Parker and TED Tech podcast Sherrell Dorsey speak at Session 4 of TEDWomen 2023: Two Steps Forward on October 13, 2023, in Atlanta, GA. (Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED)

How can we create safe and inclusive work cultures for all? Google’s chief diversity officer Melonie D. Parker joins journalist and host of the TED Tech podcast Sherrell Dorsey in a nuanced conversation about creating a sustainably inclusive company where every employee can thrive.

Author, journalist and broadcaster Mary Ann Sieghart speaks at Session 4 of TEDWomen 2023: Two Steps Forward on October 13, 2023, in Atlanta, GA. (Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED)

We still take women less seriously than men, says author, journalist and broadcaster Mary Ann Sieghart. She explains how we can tackle what she calls the “authority gap” by questioning our biases against women’s intelligence (like judging a woman by the pitch of her voice) and actively promoting female experts.

Maritime crime fighter Dyhia Belhabib speaks at Session 4 of TEDWomen 2023: Two Steps Forward on October 13, 2023, in Atlanta, GA. (Photo: Erin Lubin / TED)

Criminal groups use sophisticated technology to perpetrate crimes on the ocean: drug smugglers pilot autonomous submarines; pirates use satellites to detect ships they plan to capture and ransom. Maritime crime fighter Dyhia Belhabib introduces Heva, a tool that uses AI to aggregate international criminal records with the goal of detecting and stopping maritime crime.

Ecologically obsessed horticulturist Rebecca McMackin speaks at Session 4 of TEDWomen 2023: Two Steps Forward on October 13, 2023, in Atlanta, GA. (Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED)

Ecological horticulturist Rebecca McMackin explores the beauty of letting your garden run wild, surveying the success she’s had increasing biodiversity on the piers of Brooklyn Bridge Park and offering tips for creating wildlife-friendly habitats at home.

US Congresswoman Lucy McBath speaks at Session 5 of TEDWomen 2023: Two Steps Forward on October 13, 2023, in Atlanta, GA. (Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED)

Following the death of her only son, US Congresswoman Lucy McBath was elected to office with one major goal: pass comprehensive gun safety legislation. She shares the power of a personal story to bridge divides and make real, impactful change.

President and CEO of Morehouse School of Medicine Valerie Montgomery Rice speaks at Session 5 of TEDWomen 2023: Two Steps Forward on October 13, 2023, in Atlanta, GA. (Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED)

“There are challenges and fears that catapult us to become the greatest versions of ourselves, to become great leaders,” says health equity advocate and president and CEO of Morehouse School of Medicine Valerie Montgomery Rice. She shares three lessons in leadership and shows how they can guide anyone hoping to break through fear, stand up for what’s right and build opportunity for all.

Multidisciplinary artist Maira Kalman speaks at Session 5 of TEDWomen 2023: Two Steps Forward on October 13, 2023, in Atlanta, GA. (Photo: Erin Lubin / TED)

Multidisciplinary artist Maira Kalman delivers a delightfully wry, sneakily profound reflection on time, death, work, art, family, dreams and more. Backed by her wise, witty illustrations, her talk seems to embody the entirety of life itself, in all its absurd glory.

Impact investor Freada Kapor Klein speaks at Session 5 of TEDWomen 2023: Two Steps Forward on October 13, 2023, in Atlanta, GA. (Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED)

Impact investor Freada Kapor Klein is building fairness into the core of tech companies. Her VC fund, Kapor Capital, only invests in businesses that commit to hiring diverse teams, fostering inclusive workplaces and creating products and services that close opportunity gaps.

Energy equity expert Sheila Ngozi Oparaocha speaks at Session 5 of TEDWomen 2023: Two Steps Forward on October 13, 2023, in Atlanta, GA. (Photo: Erin Lubin / TED)

The dominant narrative of energy transition has a problem, says energy equity expert Sheila Oparaocha: it ignores the billions of people without energy access. For just and inclusive climate solutions, Oparaocha says we must empower women and prioritize universal access to sustainable energy.

Refugee advocate Chantale Zuzi Leader speaks at Session 5 of TEDWomen 2023: Two Steps Forward on October 13, 2023, in Atlanta, GA. (Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED)

After surviving devastating violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Chantale Zuzi Leader found safety in the US. She urges everyone to consider the problem of displacement with curiosity and compassion — and offers refugees like her a powerful message of hope: “It is possible to break through.”

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Off with a bang: Notes on Session 1 of TED2023

Hosts Whitney Pennington Rodgers, Chris Anderson, and Helen Walters open Session 1 of TED2023: Possibility on April 17, 2023 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Jasmina Tomic / TED)

It’s time for TED! In an eclectic and interdisciplinary opening session, artists, scientists, activists, entrepreneurs and more explored the breadth of transformative possibilities that lie ahead of us, from understanding animal communication to breakthroughs in artificial intelligence to the theory of the “adjacent possible.”

The event: Talks from Session 1 of TED2023: Possibility, hosted by TED’s Chris Anderson, Helen Walters and Whitney Pennington Rodgers

When and where: Monday, April 17, 2023, at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, BC, Canada

Speakers: Angus Hervey, Stuart Kauffman, Jennifer Doudna, Golshifteh Farahani, Tom Graham, Karen Bakker, Wangechi Mutu, Benjamin Zander

AI opera Song of the Ambassadors perform at Session 1 of TED2023: Possibility on April 17, 2023 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED)

Opening performance: AI opera Song of the Ambassadors, created by Refik Anadol and K Allado-McDowell, kick off the session and beckon us into a new era of opera, co-created by humans and artificial intelligence, presenting a hymn to nature and existence.

The talks in brief:

Journalist Angus Hervey speaks at Session 1 of TED2023: Possibility on April 17, 2023 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED)

Why are we so good at reporting bad news and so bad at reporting good news? That’s a question journalist Angus Hervey spends a lot of time thinking about as the editor of Future Crunch, a newsletter that cuts through the usual doom and destruction we see on news channels and reports on stories of progress. Delivering a mock newscast from the TED stage, Hervey takes us on a whirlwind tour of the “good news” stories you might have missed from the past year — from the acceleration of the world’s clean energy transition to advancements in public health, human rights, astronomy and more — and clarifies why, if we want to change the story of humanity this century, we have to start changing the stories we tell ourselves.

“Adjacent possible” originator Stuart Kauffman speaks at Session 1 of TED2023: Possibility on April 17, 2023 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Jasmina Tomic / TED)

Theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman thinks we can explain the historical pattern of long periods of nothing happening followed by explosive growth (from the Cambrian explosion to hockey-stick growth of global GDP to the present computing revolution) through math — what he calls the theory of the “adjacent possible.” Tracing the arc of human history through the tools and technologies we’ve invented, Kauffman explains that humanity has so far used its creativity to bring about the Anthropocene and the destruction of the biosphere, and provides examples in soil regeneration for how we can reverse the damage and feed the world in the process.

Nobel Laureate, biochemist and 2023 Audacious Project grantee Jennifer Doudna speaks at Session 1 of TED2023: Possibility on April 17, 2023 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Jasmina Tomic / TED)

A brave new world is upon us, and in its dawn emerges a collaboration between two breakthrough technologies — metagenomics and the Nobel Prize-winning technology CRISPR — to birth a new field of science: precision microbiome editing. Jennifer Doudna, co-inventor of CRISPR and a 2023 Audacious Project grantee with the Innovative Genomics Institute, details the deep potential of this new science and its focus on not just one organism but entire populations of organisms called microbiomes that exist in every living thing, influencing things like the development of asthma, obesity, diabetes and Alzheimer’s in the human body and methane production in cows. The opportunities to improve the future health of humanity and the planet are here now, and precision microbiome editing is the way forward, Doudna says.

Live from Rome, actor, musician and activist Golshifteh Farahani speaks at Session 1 of TED2023: Possibility on April 17, 2023 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Jasmina Tomic / TED)

“I am the raised fist of young girls with their hair flowing in the wind,” says actor, musician and activist Golshifteh Farahani. In a moving tribute to individuals who have lost their lives during protests in response to the death of Mahsa Amini in her home country of Iran, Farahani draws connections between those fighting for freedom in Iran and the other places in the world where ignorance and fear separates instead of unites humanity.

Head of TED Chris Anderson and AI developer Tom Graham — face-swapped live with Chris — speak at Session 1 of TED2023: Possibility on April 17, 2023 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED)Tom Graham, AI developer

In conversation with head of TED Chris Anderson, AI developer Tom Graham explores how AI-generated content that looks and sounds exactly like the real world (known as “deepfakes”) will come to permeate our lives over the next decade. He offers a proof of concept directly from the stage: a startlingly realistic deepfake of Tom Cruise outside TED2023 in Vancouver, and then a real-time demo of Anderson’s face overlaid first on Graham’s head and then on TED community member Sunny Bates, seated in the first row of the TED Theater. Together they discuss the creative and educational potential of this technology — along with its risk for exploitation — and explain the new legal rights we’ll need to ensure we maintain control over our photorealistic AI avatars.

Conservation technology researcher Karen Bakker speaks at Session 1 of TED2023: Possibility on April 17, 2023 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED)

Conservation technology researcher Karen Bakker uncovers how the animal kingdom communicates in ways as complex as our own human speech – from microscopic coral larvae listening for the sounds of their home reef to the varying dialects in the dictionary of elephants’ trumpeting. Much of nature’s acoustics are ultra- or infra-sonic, lying outside our natural ability to hear (consider a bat’s shrill speech or a hydrothermal vent’s deep hum), but technological breakthroughs are changing that, allowing us to tune into a world previously unheard. Scientists are even able to translate some variations of animal speech, while generative AI is able to imitate some of these sounds, allowing us to communicate with nature like never before – and bringing along some difficult challenges, too. “In nature, sound is everywhere and silence is an illusion,” Bakker says.

Visual artist Wangechi Mutu speaks at Session 1 of TED2023: Possibility on April 17, 2023 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Jasmina Tomic / TED)

“We’ve left messages for each other using art. Messages that travel across vast expanses of time and culture, reminding us of where we came from,” says visual artist Wangechi Mutu. From ancient carvings deep in the Sahara to her own chimeric art, Mutu traces evolving representations of divine femininity and the presence of women in African art. She shares her otherworldy sculptures that merge nature, history and lore, pointing to how art gives voice to those rendered invisible — and reminds us of the freedom found in creation.

Conductor Benjamin Zander speaks at Session 1 of TED2023: Possibility on April 17, 2023 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED)

In a rousing talk and piano performance to close out the opening session, legendary conductor Benjamin Zander (watch his 2008 TED Talk) explains his view on the difference between “positive thinking” and “possibility,” saying, “Positive thinking is a fraud, and possibility is a language of creation.” And he waxes lyrical about Beethoven, asking us to listen a little deeper to the very familiar “Moonlight Sonata” and inviting the audience to a sing-along (in German) of the original words to “Ode to Joy.”

The entrance to the TED Theater at TED2023: Possibility in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

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Awe: Notes from Session 11 of TED2022

TED’s current affairs curator Whitney Pennington Rodgers, head of TED Chris Anderson and TED’s head of curation Helen Walters speak at Session 11 of TED2022: A New Era on April 14, 2022 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED)

What a week! Eleven mainstage sessions of TED Talks, two sessions of TED Fellows talks, an incredible array of on-site activations, countless Discovery Sessions, parties, dinners and more made TED2022 a triumphant return to Vancouver. The closing session of the conference capped off the week with world-changing ideas from the mountains of Nepal to the Amazon rainforest to Mars and beyond.

The event: Talks from Session 11 of TED2022, hosted by TED’s Chris Anderson, Helen Walters and Whitney Pennington Rodgers

When and where: Wednesday, April 14, 2022, at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, BC, Canada

Speakers: Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, Leo Lanna and Lvcas Fiat, Bryce Dallas Howard, Bedouine, Elon Musk, Shreya Joshi, Michael Schur, Sara Lomelin, Sarah Kay

Music: With striking vocals and guitar, singer-songwriter Bedouine performed “Nice and Quiet” and “One Of These Days,” fusing her beautiful lyrics and sumptuous melodies.

Conference wrap-up: Poet Sarah Kay and piano virtuoso Samora Pinderhugh sent the conference off with a stirring tribute to the week through the ideas of paying attention, being astonished and telling about it — inspired by Mary Oliver’s iconic poem “Sometimes.”

Bedouine performs at Session 11 of TED2022: A New Era on April 14, 2022 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

The talks in brief:

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche speaks at Session 11 of TED2022: A New Era on April 14, 2022 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, spiritual leader

Big idea: Meditation is an act of awareness, wisdom and self-compassion that, if done with patience and acceptance, can bring us the peace and joy that we seek.

How? A blissed-out state of nothingness is often the image we associate with meditation, but Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche knows there’s so much more to it. After dealing with panic attacks for many years, spending time at Tibetan retreats and consulting with his father, a meditation master, he realized that there are a few misunderstandings we have about the practice. We assume, for example, that if we try to force problems out of our minds they’ll go away; we sit lotus in a dead silent room trying to arrive at peace and calm, only to find that the more we go looking for them, the more difficult they are to find. Inviting us to adopt a more fulfilling approach to meditating, Rinpoche shares three core principles that could help us tap into our inner zen:
with awareness, the “essence” of meditation, we could engage with the world through sensory stimuli — like sound — to be present in any moment; with wisdom, we could realize that no matter how strongly negative emotions affect us, there’s always a state of calm to return to; and finally, with self-compassion, we could give ourselves the grace to let negativity come and go, and become better equipped to handle the challenges of day-to-day life. Conjuring up an image of mother nature, he calls on us to remember our inner strength.


Leo Lanna and Lvcas Fiat speak at Session 11 of TED2022: A New Era on April 14, 2022 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Leo Lanna, artistic entomologist, and Lvcas Fiat, designer and explorer

Big idea: We lack efficient tools to survey parts of Amazonia, where the core of the world’s biodiversity (like more than 2,500 species of mantises) can be found or is yet to be discovered. By employing creative uses of technology as part of contemporary science practices, scientists like the environmental conservation group Projeto Mantis, can explore the Amazon’s biodiversity and help preserve it for future generations.

How? Two winners of the TED Idea Search: Latin America 2021, Leo Lanna and Lvcas Fiat work at the intersection of science, conservation and design to learn about the Amazon. Through Projeto Mantis, an independent agency devoted to research, conservation and wildlife photography, Lanna and Fiat are devoted to studying praying mantises and their environment. Their approach may be unconventional in philosophy — Lanna and Fiat live closely with the insects and look after every mantis collected for research until its natural death — but it’s also innovative in technique, as Projeto Mantis attempts to explore the Amazon using modern technology, like drones, UV light and nighttime explorations to learn about the world that emerges when the sun goes down. Thankfully, Lanna and Fiat do not fear the dark. Instead, they are alarmed by the rapid destruction of the rainforest. By marrying technology, art and science, the two believe “the age of exploration on planet Earth is far from over. And in the nights of the rainforests, it is just beginning.”


Bryce Dallas Howard speaks at Session 11 of TED2022: A New Era on April 14, 2022 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Bryce Dallas Howard, multi-hyphenate creator

Big idea: As anyone who has experienced fame knows, private life is precious. In the social media age, we should all protect and cultivate our private lives with the same enthusiasm that we post and promote in public.

How? All of us live in public now, says actor and filmmaker Bryce Dallas Howard — but some more willingly than others. Howard’s father was a star in The Andy Griffith Show, so she grew up with the same feeling of exposure that so many of us now experience because of social media. From assigning rustic chores like sheep-shearing to covering the mirrors in the house, Howard’s mother took extreme measures to protect her children from the perils of their father’s fame. Along the way, she taught Howard the secret to living a fulfilling life in the public eye. From her, Howard learned it is our private lives that make our public lives worth living. Inspired by this philosophy, Howard now protects her private life with two simple rules: 1) whatever you are experiencing, soak it in for 48 hours before posting or sharing, and 2) keep yourself honest by asking “why” before you decide to share.


Shreya Joshi speaks at Session 11 of TED2022: A New Era on April 14, 2022 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Shreya Joshi, future leader

Big idea: The solution to political polarization? Listen to opposing perspectives and talk to people with whom you disagree.

How? Most of us have a tendency to gravitate toward people who look, think and act like us. This affinity can offer comfort — but it can also be harmful, says 17-year-old youth leader Shreya Joshi. The negative impact is clear across society: hate groups, screaming cable news pundits and politicians who strike down bills just because they come from across the aisle. But the root of this polarization isn’t just a difference of opinion, Joshi says: it’s the product of seeing the “other side” as malevolent, hateful and holding a hidden agenda. That’s why Joshi launched Project TEAL, a teen-led initiative dedicated to helping young people engage with the political process and bring people with opposing perspectives into the same room. While the conversations can get uncomfortable, she admits, the benefits are enormous: we better understand other people’s beliefs and learn to better advocate for our own. So look for a group — whether it’s with coworkers, a book club at your library or a PTA group at your school — and have a tough conversation. You might be surprised by what happens when you enter a conversation with the intent to listen and learn, not to win or agree.


Michael Schur speaks at Session 11 of TED2022: A New Era on April 14, 2022 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED)

Michael Schur, television writer, producer

Big idea: Understanding ethical theories helps us make better, kinder decisions.

How? In 2005, TV writer and producer Michael Schur and his wife got into a fender bender. No one was hurt, and both cars looked fine, but a few days after the accident, the man whose car they bumped sent them a bill for 836 dollars to replace his entire fender. The incident incensed Schur, who didn’t want to pay for a mark he could barely see, but it also sent him down a rabbit hole into the realm of ethical decision-making. He consulted heavy-hitting philosophers like Kant, T.M. Scanlon and John Stuart Mill and explored their schools of thought. After much research, Schur realized he was in the wrong; he apologized and paid the man. But his story illustrates what we can all learn from ethical theories about right and wrong — and what we owe one another as people who share the planet.


Elon Musk speaks Session 11 of TED2022: A New Era on April 14, 2022 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Elon Musk, serial entrepreneur

In conversation with head of TED Chris Anderson, Elon Musk digs into the recent news around his bid to purchase Twitter and gets honest about the biggest regret of his career, how his brain works, the future he envisions for the world and a lot more. Watch the unedited interview here »


Sara Lomelin speaks at Session 11 of TED2022: A New Era on April 14, 2022 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Sara Lomelin, philanthropy disruptor

Big idea: Often, philanthropy is imbalanced, with a select few deciding which people or what projects should (or shouldn’t) get funding. By democratizing philanthropy through “collective giving” — a people-powered, inclusive model that invites everyday donors to participate– we can make giving back an intentional, collaborative, joyful and accessible process.

How? Sara Lomelin is the founding CEO of Philanthropy Together, a global initiative that works to disrupt philanthropy through collective giving. Lomelin is a proponent of giving circles — a gathering of people with shared values (like friends, family or colleagues) who come together to make change. There are all kinds of circles — artist circles, circles focused on climate change, circles with Latinx LGBTQ+ folks, Black men’s giving circles. The philosophy is that anyone can be a donor, no matter their identity, background or wealth status. The key in hosting a circle lies in taking the time to build deep relationships by cultivating a sense of belonging, a culture of discourse and a sense of trust and abundance. Whether members are giving five dollars or 50,000, collective circles are successful, meeting year over year, because people realize that together we have a much bigger impact. “Giving by, for, and with the communities we represent is the future of philanthropy — and each and every one of us belong in this movement,” Lomelin says.


Sarah Kay speaks at SESSION 11 at TED2022: A New Era. April 10-14, 2022, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED

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What Now … for ingenuity and invention? Notes from Session 5 of TEDWomen 2021

Multi-instrumentalist and healer Geminelle performs at TEDWomen 2021: What Now? on December 2, 2021 in Palm Springs, California. (Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED)

In Session 5, we turn to collective moments of joy. Seven speakers and a performer dove headfirst into creativity, helping us see the silver lining, embrace artistry and boldly chart out the world we want to live in.

The event: TEDWomen 2021: Session 5, hosted by TEDWomen curators Helen Walters and Whitney Pennington Rodgers, in Palm Springs, California on December 2, 2021

Speakers: Emily Pilloton-Lam, Cecilia Aragon, Temie Giwa-Tubosun, Fariel Salahuddin, Emma Hart, Gala Marija Vrbanic, Christina Tosi

Music: Singer, multi-instrumentalist, producer and healer Geminelle performs a hypnotic set, featuring “Everything I Need,” “Find Your Tribe” and “I Am Free”

The talks in brief:

In a first-of-its-kind TED demo, youth educator Emily Pilloton-Lam uses power tools to build a wooden toolbox onstage … while giving her talk. She speaks at TEDWomen 2021: What Now? on December 2, 2021 in Palm Springs, California. (Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED)

Emily Pilloton-Lam, builder, youth educator

Big idea: Our image of construction workers is overwhelmingly male — and for good reason, as only four percent of workers on construction sites are women. Through her nonprofit Girls Garage, Emily Pilloton-Lam is teaching girls and non-binary kids (with a focus on people of color) the skills needed to take up this well-paid and satisfying vocation. What will it take to actualize a future built (literally) by women as well as men?

How? According to Pilloton-Lam, there are more than 300,000 unfilled jobs in construction, and the industry is struggling to fill them. But unlike other fields, the gender wage gap in construction is a mere 99 cents to the dollar. Considering these statistics, it’s a no-brainer that women represent a huge, untapped pool of labor resources. On top of the stereotype that women aren’t strong enough for the job (which, considering most of the work is done by power tools, is absurd), women and non-binary people face numerous other artificial barriers, including a work culture that is unwelcoming at best and hostile at worst. To fight this, Girls Garage provides mentorship and education to train and inspire girls and gender-expansive youth to take their places in this industry. And, in a first-of-its-kind TED demo, Pilloton-Lam uses power tools to build a wood toolbox onstage … while giving her talk.


Cecilia Aragon, professor, pilot, author

Big idea: Fanfiction deserves a closer look for its creativity, criticism and community. 

Why? When she was 10 years old, Cecilia Aragon fell in with the Lord of the Rings trilogy but was disappointed with the lack of female characters. So she rewrote the story to her liking with reimagined protagonists and new scenes that reflected what she wanted to see. Today, what Aragon wrote is known as fanfiction (or transformative fiction): a story based on characters or settings from another’s work. As an adult, she decided to do a deep data dive into the vast world of online fanfiction to study the impact creating these stories has on the writer and their craft. And what she and her research partner found surpassed her wildest imagination — over 60 billion words in more than 44 languages, written primarily by millions of young people over the past 20 years. An outpouring of creativity culminating in a kind, supportive community that’s generous with its feedback and constructive criticism in a way that encourages and emboldens. Aragon sees this organic network of writerly love as a blueprint for more formal learning tools to help develop students in schools and as an opportunity to foster connections across the country.


Entrepreneur Temie Giwa-Tubosun shares the hero’s journey she went on to start her company. She speaks at TEDWomen 2021: What Now? on December 2, 2021 in Palm Springs, California. (Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED)

Temie Giwa-Tubosun, entrepreneur

Big idea: Black women entrepreneurs are founding game-changing start-ups in Africa and across the globe. It’s time for investors to give them the funding and support they need to grow and scale.

How? Temie Giwa-Tubosun is the founder of LifeBank, a start-up that connects remote cities, towns and villages with life-saving medical supplies. Since 2016, they’ve saved more than 40,000 lives — yet it proved nearly impossible for Giwa-Tubosun to raise funds when she first set out to start her company. And she’s not alone: in 2020, less than six percent of venture capital funding for African startups went to companies with women cofounders, despite their proven track records. Giwa-Tubosun issues a challenge to investors to think harder when it comes to deciding which founders to back — and to close the funding gap for Black women-led startups and innovations.


Fariel Salahuddin, TED Fellow, alternative currency enthusiast

Question: Who gets to decide what is and isn’t money?

Answer: Fariel Salahuddin’s favorite way to be introduced at social gatherings is as “the foremost goatherd in Pakistan,” a vocation she happened upon through a combination of fate and curiosity. She works with smallholder farmers in developing countries, enabling them to use their livestock as currency. After visiting a small town in Pakistan where people live without access to basic necessities like water, she took a chance and asked a village elder if they’d be willing to pay for a solar water pump (which are very expensive in Pakistan) with goats (which are abundant there). This idea blossomed into a now-booming trade, tokenizing goats as a form of currency and helping get desperately needed water to remote areas — and leading Salahuddin to question how money really works. Tracing the history of money from Sumerians trading in barley to paper money backed by central banks to the blockchain, she shows how value and the way it’s exchanged has changed over time — and that there’s great opportunity in leveraging the economic assets of varied communities.


In a mind-blowing talk, computer scientist Emma Hart explains how robots could evolve like biological organisms, autonomously optimizing themselves over time. She speaks at TEDWomen 2021: What Now? on December 2, 2021 in Palm Springs, California. (Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED)

Emma Hart, computer scientist

Big idea: What if we could create robots that evolve like biological organisms, autonomously optimizing themselves over time?

How? Think of it as a robot building itself, says Emma Hart. She and her collaborators are working on a radical new technology that would enable robots to be created, “reproduce” and evolve in real-time, successively “breeding” more and more optimized versions of themselves. This would allow robots to design themselves on the fly when sent to far-off, unknown or dangerous places (think: an asteroid, the bottom of the ocean or a nuclear reactor meltdown), potentially saving years of wasted effort and creating machines uniquely adapted to the environment and task at hand. So how exactly does a robot self-evolve? Hart and her team are turning to nature for help, replicating the three essential ingredients of biological evolution: a population in which individuals exhibit physical variations; a method of reproduction in which offspring inherit traits from their parents (and sometimes acquire new ones via mutation); and natural selection. Using a mixture of software and hardware, they’re able to guide the evolution of robots. For instance, they develop digital versions of DNA that combine and mutate; use 3-D printers to create skeletons; and oversee a virtual version of the “survival of the fittest” whereby robot designs are scored and prioritized based on their ability to conduct tasks. By repeating this cycle over and over, scientists could produce successive generations of new robots that — just like in nature — get better than the last. Call it “digital evolution” — a groundbreaking new process that could unlock new designs freed from the constraints of our current understanding of engineering, science and design.


Gala Marija Vrbanic, digital fashion maven

Big idea: With the advent of virtual and augmented reality, avatars are becoming more complex, demanding out-of-this-world couture that’s unchained from physical reality. Gala Marija Vrbanic is at the forefront of this brave new world.

How? Gamers have been dressing up their video game characters for years. The next logical step, Marija Vrbanic tells us, is the advent of virtual clothing for social media and VR spaces — and in fact, this latest step has already become a reality, with virtual Gucci bags now selling for more than their physical counterparts. As founder and CEO of the virtual fashion house Tribute Brand and YCY, Marija Vrbanic has put Croatia on the fashion map with her weird and wonderful AR and VR garments.


Christina Tosi shares the sugary jolt of her first food memory — and the vision behind Milk Bar. She speaks at TEDWomen 2021: What Now? on December 2, 2021 in Palm Springs, California. (Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED)

Christina Tosi, baker

Big idea: Break the rules to create some delicious magic. 

How? Most people think of magic as a trick, says Christina Tosi — a seemingly impossible act put on for the sake of entertainment. But Tosi wants to challenge that belief: real magic, she says, is not an illusion but the feeling of experiencing life shift from ordinary to extraordinary. It can be found in the spark of a moment, the simple act of believing, belonging, understanding or being understood. And she has found that magic is often created by breaking some sort of rule: pushing boundaries, challenging norms, asking why or why not. Seeing people experience magic by eating baked goods, Tosi was inspired to recreate that feeling with her quirky, unexpected confectionery combinations. Simple, approachable, accessible and nostalgia-tinged flavors — rooted in known, safe and loved delights — form the basis of her desserts, almost as if “fancy was the enemy of delicious.” With rebelling against convention baked into both her business and creative ethos, Tosi has developed a brand recognized for its ingenuity, invention and generosity of spirit. “That’s what you do when you benefit from what came before you and plan on passing it along long after you — when you know you’re here to give and not take, and leave this place better than you found it,” she says. And it all starts with a decision to act: to see the magic, capture it before it can disappear and share it … perhaps one bite at a time.

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A pathway opens: Notes from Session 1 of Countdown Summit

Hosts Lindsay Levin, Chris Anderson and Bruno Giussani speak at Session 1 of the TED Countdown Summit on October 12, 2021 in Edinburgh, Scotland. (Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED)

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Countdown is the most ambitious initiative TED has endeavored upon. A meeting point and invitation to all, from any walk of life, to participate in the story of solving the climate crisis in urgent and crucial ways. A call-in to businesses, governments, society, investors and everyday people to drive action with passion, energy and a deep desire for change.

Bringing together individuals who have spent decades pushing toward a zero-emission future and highlighting the new generation of dedicated changemakers, Session 1 took the first step on the marathon path to curtailing the world’s biggest existential threat with ambition, realism — and an invigorating dose of optimism.

The event: Countdown Summit: Session 1, hosted by Future Stewards cofounder Lindsay Levin and TED’s Chris Anderson and Bruno Giussani, at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre in Edinburgh, Scotland on Tuesday, October 12, 2021

Speakers: Zac Goldsmith, Amina J. Mohammed, Selina Neirok Leem, Johan Rockström, Gabriel Kra, Nigel Topping, Jim Hagemann Snabe, Monica Araya and Melati Wijsen

Performances: Let It Happen, a dance trio comprised of Dutch twin sisters Norah and Yarah along with younger sister Rosa, who vibrantly lit up the TED stage to remixes of classic American songs “Get On the Good Foot” by James Brown and “Hit the Road Jack” by Ray Charles.

Let It Happen performs at Session 1 of the TED Countdown Summit on October 12, 2021 in Edinburgh, Scotland. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)


The talks in brief:

Zac Goldsmith speaks at Session 1 of the TED Countdown Summit on October 12, 2021 in Edinburgh, Scotland. (Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED)

Zac Goldsmith, UK Minister for the Pacific, environmental advocate

Big Idea: Restoring and preserving natural systems is humanity’s single greatest mission in the fight against climate change — but in order to achieve this, governments need to prioritize protecting nature.

How? Despite knowing that Earth’s ecological systems make life possible, forests continue to be cut down and oceans filled with trash as climate change reaps its effects. Clean technology has made big leaps towards curbing the destruction by pushing for green energy and renewables, explains UK Minister for the Pacific Zac Goldsmith, but tech can’t compare to the solutions nature has to offer if restored. Take mangroves, for example, which absorb carbon from the air and protect coastal communities from storms but are not as prioritized as cement defenses that function at only a fraction of the efficiency mangroves naturally provide. The issue lies in what solutions the economy values most. “Markets barely register the cost of destroying those natural systems, and until governments change that … we are always going to be playing catch up,” says Goldsmith. He urges governments to pass laws that protect at least thirty percent of land and sea by 2030, to support the world’s Indigenous peoples and to remove deforestation and degradation from supply chains. By redirecting incentives (and budgets), nature can recover from the damage of all the systems in place set against it — and thrive.


Amina J. Mohammed speaks at Session 1 of the TED Countdown Summit on October 12, 2021 in Edinburgh, Scotland. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Amina J. Mohammed, UN Deputy Secretary-General

Big idea: As we work to decarbonize the global economy, we should prioritize projects like the Great Green Wall that use climate action as a vehicle to deliver dignity, economic opportunity and equality for all.

How? When UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed was a young girl, Lake Chad looked like an ocean — it touched the border of four countries and sustained over 30 million people. Today, more than 90 percent of this freshwater basin has dried up, along with the economic opportunities it once provided for millions of farmers, fisherfolk and marketplace sellers. The devastation grows with extreme weather events like the dry, windy Harmattan, meaning “more jobs lost, hunger and families displaced — a perfect storm for instability and, sadly, more violence.” But Mohammed remains hopeful; she believes we can decarbonize our planet and meet the aims of the Paris Climate agreement through strategic climate action that invests in human potential. She provides the Great Green Wall — a project aiming to plant 100 million trees on the edge of the Sahara to stop desertification, restore degraded land and improve water harvesting — as an example. Beyond the climate benefits, Mohammed believes the project will create green economic opportunities for half a billion people. She acknowledges that transformative climate actions like this will require massive investments from rich countries and, perhaps more importantly, vocal solidarity from people worldwide. “Friends,” she says, “it’s time to make some serious noise.”


Selina Neirok Leem speaks at Session 1 of the TED Countdown Summit on October 12, 2021 in Edinburgh, Scotland. (Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED)

Selina Neirok Leem, youth climate activist

Big idea: Communities at the frontlines of climate change like the low-lying Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean are at risk of losing everything to something they didn’t contribute to creating. Climate adaptation is now their only choice.

Why? For 23-year-old climate warrior Selina Neirok Leem, climate change isn’t a distant threat to be negotiated over decades-long timelines — it’s the ever-present reality of her home in the Marshall Islands. The youngest delegate at the COP21 conference that adopted the Paris Agreement in 2015, Leem and her fellow Marshall Islanders now bear witness to floods from continually rising seas that routinely send them seeking shelter on hard-to-find high ground, threatening livelihoods, access to clean water and their way of life. In a stirring poem and talk, she explains that climate adaptation is the only choice for her people now. “We’ve been told to move. To become climate change refugees,” she says. “I’m not even sure who would even take us in. But to those who think that we should just accept our fate, I want to say: adaptation and indigenous knowledge are the solutions.”


Johan Rockström, climate impact scholar

Big idea: There are three key messages about the climate crisis that you need to know.

What are they? First, a message from the scientific community: the Sixth Assessment Report the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the latest in a series of landmark reports that assess the threat of climate change, is a code red for humanity, vividly explaining the alarming extent of the global crisis. As climate impact scholar Johan Rockström says, the alarm bell of climate change has been ringing for decades, but humanity kept hitting the snooze button. Now is the time to wake up and act. Message two: tipping points. We are now forced to consider the real risk of destabilizing the planet, as the big biophysical systems that regulate climate — from the Greenland ice sheet to the Amazon rainforest — approach their irreversible tipping points that could make Earth uninhabitable for humanity. As Rockström puts it: “We’re sleepwalking in a minefield.” Finally, message three: the window of opportunity is still open, but barely. He stresses the importance of all countries participating in the transformation to sustainability, going from billions to trillions in investment and putting end dates on coal and the combustion engine.


Gabriel Kra, climate tech investor

Big idea: We need to stop thinking about climate change as a problem and regard it more as an opportunity.

Why? We have better technologies, policies and, most importantly, a clearer sense of urgency bundled with some of the best minds of our time dedicated to solving the climate crisis. As an investor, Gabriel Kra knows this firsthand from his experience in Silicon Valley, where he has a bird’s-eye view of the entrepreneurs, inventors and fellow investors focused like never before on what he calls “the great business opportunity of our generation.” From his soaring optimism, he offers a few on-the-ground details from electric cars and alternative energies to sustainable architecture and optimized software that should be cause to share in his building excitement for these burgeoning technologies. And these examples are just the beginning, Kra explains. Each new or improved aspect paves a better and more realistic path toward a greener future. By constantly developing and revolutionizing innovations, we are on track to solve one of the biggest problems of our time — and that’s something to be wildly optimistic about.


Nigel Topping, UN High Level Climate Action Champion for COP26

Big idea: There are distinct pathways to transform the economy and ratchet up climate ambition.

How? As High Level Climate Action Champion for the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26), Nigel Topping works to help economies scale up their climate ambitions in support of local governments ahead of the landmark meeting. So, what’s changed since the Paris Agreement of 2015? Topping says there’s a much stronger sense of urgency, driven in part by our lived experiences — the disruptions of climate change feel closer to home than ever — and the reality that we can not just achieve sustainability but instead make it the key development story of this century. The focus now should shift to positively disrupting the patterns of the global economy that keep us from climate action and creating ambition loops between policy and the private sector to accelerate progress.


Jim Hagemann Snabe, Chairman, Mærsk and Siemens

Big idea: We need dramatic, exponential scale expansion in solar, wind, green hydrogen and green fuel plants to deliver on the growing demand for green shipping.

How? At Mærsk, the world’s largest maritime shipping company, Jim Hagemann Snabe is leading an effort to decarbonize logistics by 2050. After looking at carbon-reducing options like “slow steaming” — slowing down the speed of a vessel so it uses less fuel — and running ships on battery power and liquid natural gas, Mærsk, the A. P. Moller Foundation and the Center for Zero Carbon Shipping in Copenhagen think they’ve landed on a viable path towards carbon neutrality for the shipping giant: Power-to-X. Through a special process, Power-to-X turns green electricity into a green liquid fuel that can be used in combustion engines, meaning existing ships can be retrofitted to run on renewable energy. While still expensive, the benefits of Power-to-X greatly outweigh the costs — and Hagemann Snabe urges governments to show leadership by imposing a global price on CO2, which would eliminate the affordability argument completely. “We have the technologies needed to create a sustainable future. What we need is leadership to get us there faster,” he says.


Monica Araya, electrification advocate

Big Idea: A global movement towards emissions-free transport is one of the key steps towards a sustainable future in the face of climate change — and everyone has a role to play.

How? Leading the shift towards clean transport, 70 organizations have come together to establish the Drive Electric campaign, an initiative pushing for all new road vehicle sales to be electric by 2035. Spearheading this movement over the crucial next five years, electrification advocate Monica Araya is working to set the world on a path towards completely emissions-free transportation — which will potentially cut 160 billion tons of cumulative carbon dioxide emissions. To reach these goals, she explains, we have to work with all levers of change, from cities to politicians to corporations to citizens so this goal can be funded — and realized. The price tag for change? Araya says the switch to all-electric will cost $1 billion — and announces that the Audacious Project, TED’s initiative to inspire and fund global change, has recently secured a breakthrough $300 million in funding towards this effort. With hopes of inspiring other industries to follow suit, these big leaps towards climate stability show that scalable change is possible and every effort towards it counts.


Melati Wijsen speaks at Session 1 of the TED Countdown Summit on October 12, 2021 in Edinburgh, Scotland. (Photo: TED)

Melati Wijsen, climate activist, social entrepreneur

Big idea: When starting on the journey of activism, young people need tools and support to lead and make the change they want to see in the world.

How? Activism is a tough job, especially for young people yearning for immediate change — something climate activist Melati Wijsen has learned over ten years of pushing for environmental protection, starting at age 12 in her home on the island of Bali, Indonesia. How can young changemakers acquire the skills they need and keep from burning out? First, Wijsen says, activists must take care of themselves. When exhaustion sets in, it’s time to take a break and rely on colleagues to continue the work. Second, create support networks to share resources, information and inspiration — like Circle of Youth within YOUTHTOPIA, an educational platform where activist peers learn from each other. Third, look out for companies touting youth activism to advance their brands — a tactic Wijsen calls “youthwashing.” Young people seeking change need seats at the bargaining table, not lip service for their causes.

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.

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Conversations on rebuilding a healthy economy: Week 1 of TED2020

To kick off TED2020, leaders in business, finance and public health joined the TED community for lean-forward conversations to answer the question: “What now?” Below, a recap of the fascinating insights they shared.

“If you don’t like the pandemic, you are not going to like the climate crisis,” says Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund. She speaks with head of TED Chris Anderson at TED2020: Uncharted on May 18, 2020. (Photo courtesy of TED)

Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)

Big idea: The coronavirus pandemic shattered the global economy. To put the pieces back together, we need to make sure money is going to countries that need it the most — and that we rebuild financial systems that are resilient to shocks.

How? Kristalina Georgieva is encouraging an attitude of determined optimism to lead the world toward recovery and renewal amid the economic fallout of COVID-19. The IMF has one trillion dollars to lend — it’s now deploying these funds to areas hardest hit by the pandemic, particularly in developing countries, and it’s also put a debt moratorium into effect for the poorest countries. Georgieva admits recovery is not going to be quick, but she thinks that countries can emerge from this “great transformation” stronger than before if they build resilient, disciplined financial systems. Within the next ten years, she hopes to see positive shifts towards digital transformation, more equitable social safety nets and green recovery. And as the environment recovers while the world grinds to a halt, she urges leaders to maintain low carbon footprints — particularly since the pandemic foreshadows the devastation of global warming. “If you don’t like the pandemic, you are not going to like the climate crisis,” Georgieva says. Watch the interview on TED.com »


“I’m a big believer in capitalism. I think it’s in many ways the best economic system that I know of, but like everything, it needs an upgrade. It needs tuning,” says Dan Schulman, president and CEO of PayPal. He speaks with TED business curators Corey Hajim at TED2020: Uncharted on May 19, 2020. (Photo courtesy of TED)

Dan Schulman, President and CEO of PayPal

Big idea: Employee satisfaction and consumer trust are key to building the economy back better.

How? A company’s biggest competitive advantage is its workforce, says Dan Schulman, explaining how PayPal instituted a massive reorientation of compensation to meet the needs of its employees during the pandemic. The ripple of benefits of this shift have included increased productivity, financial health and more trust. Building further on the concept of trust, Schulman traces how the pandemic has transformed the managing and moving of money — and how it will require consumers to renew their focus on privacy and security. And he shares thoughts on the new roles of corporations and CEOs, the cashless economy and the future of capitalism. “I’m a big believer in capitalism. I think it’s in many ways the best economic system that I know of, but like everything, it needs an upgrade. It needs tuning,” Schulman says. “For vulnerable populations, just because you pay at the market [rate] doesn’t mean that they have financial health or financial wellness. And I think everyone should know whether or not their employees have the wherewithal to be able to save, to withstand financial shocks and then really understand what you can do about it.”


Biologist Uri Alon shares a thought-provoking idea on how we could get back to work: a two-week cycle of four days at work followed by 10 days of lockdown, which would cut the virus’s reproductive rate. He speaks with head of TED Chris Anderson at TED2020: Uncharted on May 20, 2020. (Photo courtesy of TED)

Uri Alon, Biologist

Big idea: We might be able to get back to work by exploiting one of the coronavirus’s key weaknesses. 

How? By adopting a two-week cycle of four days at work followed by 10 days of lockdown, bringing the virus’s reproductive rate (R₀ or R naught) below one. The approach is built around the virus’s latent period: the three-day delay (on average) between when a person gets infected and when they start spreading the virus to others. So even if a person got sick at work, they’d reach their peak infectious period while in lockdown, limiting the virus’s spread — and helping us avoid another surge. What would this approach mean for productivity? Alon says that by staggering shifts, with groups alternating their four-day work weeks, some industries could maintain (or even exceed) their current output. And having a predictable schedule would give people the ability to maximize the effectiveness of their in-office work days, using the days in lockdown for more focused, individual work. The approach can be adopted at the company, city or regional level, and it’s already catching on, notably in schools in Austria.


“The secret sauce here is good, solid public health practice … this one was a bad one, but it’s not the last one,” says Georges C. Benjamin, Executive Director of the American Public Health Association. He speaks with TED science curator David Biello at TED2020: Uncharted on May 20, 2020. (Photo courtesy of TED)

Georges C. Benjamin, Executive Director of the American Public Health Association

Big Idea: We need to invest in a robust public health care system to lead us out of the coronavirus pandemic and prevent the next outbreak.

How: The coronavirus pandemic has tested the public health systems of every country around the world — and, for many, exposed shortcomings. Georges C. Benjamin details how citizens, businesses and leaders can put public health first and build a better health structure to prevent the next crisis. He envisions a well-staffed and equipped governmental public health entity that runs on up-to-date technology to track and relay information in real time, helping to identify, contain, mitigate and eliminate new diseases. Looking to countries that have successfully lowered infection rates, such as South Korea, he emphasizes the importance of early and rapid testing, contact tracing, self-isolation and quarantining. Our priority, he says, should be testing essential workers and preparing now for a spike of cases during the summer hurricane and fall flu seasons.The secret sauce here is good, solid public health practice,” Benjamin says. “We should not be looking for any mysticism or anyone to come save us with a special pill … because this one was a bad one, but it’s not the last one.”

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Wayfinders: Notes from Session 6 of TEDWomen 2019

Singer, songwriter and beatboxer Butterscotch lights up the stage at TEDWomen 2019: Bold + Brilliant, on December 6, 2019, in Palm Springs, (California. Photo: Jasmina Tomic / TED)

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

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

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

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

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

The talks in brief:

Valorie Kondos Field, gymnastics coach

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

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

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


How do you find your passion? Noeline Kirabo provides some answers at TEDWomen 2019: Bold + Brilliant, on December , 2019, in Palm Springs, California. (Photo: Jasmina Tomic / TED)

Noeline Kirabo, social entrepreneur

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

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

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


Martha Minow, law professor

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

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

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


Agnes Binagwaho, pediatrician, former Minister of Health of Rwanda

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

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

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


Mary Ellen Hannibal, science writer

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

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

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


Jasmine Crowe, social entrepreneur, hunger hero

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

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

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


Cara E. Yar Khan, humanitarian, disability activist

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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Business Unusual: Notes from Session 4 of TEDSummit 2019

ELEW and Marcus Miller blend jazz improvisation with rock in a musical cocktail of “rock-jazz.” They perform at TEDSummit: A Community Beyond Borders, July 24, 2019, in Edinburgh, Scotland. (Photo: Dian Lofton / TED)

To keep pace with our ever-changing world, we need out-of-the-box ideas that are bigger and more imaginative than ever. The speakers and performers from this session explore these possibilities, challenging us to think harder about the notions we’ve come to accept.

The event: TEDSummit 2019, Session 4: Business Unusual, hosted by Whitney Pennington Rodgers and Cloe Shasha

When and where: Wednesday, July 24, 2019, 9am BST, at the Edinburgh Convention Centre in Edinburgh, Scotland

Speakers: Margaret Heffernan, Bob Langert, Rose Mutiso, Mariana Mazzucato, Diego Prilusky

Music: A virtuosic violin performance by Min Kym, and a closing performance by ELEW featuring Marcus Miller, blending jazz improvisation with rock in a musical cocktail of “rock-jazz.”

The talks in brief:

“The more we let machines think for us, the less we can think for ourselves,” says Margaret Heffernan. She speaks at TEDSummit: A Community Beyond Borders, July 24, 2019, in Edinburgh, Scotland. (Photo: Dian Lofton / TED)

Margaret Heffernan, entrepreneur, former CEO and writer 

Big idea: The more we rely on technology to make us efficient, the fewer skills we have to confront the unexpected. That’s why we must start practicing “just-in-case” management — anticipating the events (climate catastrophes, epidemics, financial crises) that will almost certainly happen but are ambiguous in timing, scale and specifics. 

Why? In our complex, unpredictable world, changes can occur out of the blue and have outsize impacts. When governments, businesses and individuals prioritize efficiency above all else, it keeps them from responding quickly, effectively and creatively. That’s why we all need to focus on cultivating what Heffernan calls our “unpredictable, messy human skills.” These include exercising our social abilities to build strong relationships and coalitions; humility to admit we don’t have all the answers; imagination to dream up never-before-seen solutions; and bravery to keep experimenting.

Quote of the talk: “The harder, deeper truth is that the future is uncharted, that we can’t map it until we get there. But that’s OK because we have so much capacity for imagination — if we use it. We have deep talents for inventiveness and exploration — if we apply them. We are brave enough to invent things we’ve never seen before. Lose these skills and we are adrift. But hone and develop them, and we can make any future we choose.”


Bob Langert, sustainability expert and VP of sustainability at McDonald’s

Big idea: Adversaries can be your best allies.

How? Three simple steps: reach out, listen and learn. As a “corporate suit” (his words), Bob Langert collaborates with his company’s strongest critics to find business-friendly solutions for society. Instead of denying and pushing back, he tries to embrace their perspectives and suggestions. He encourages others in positions of power to do the same, driven by this mindset: assume the best intentions of your critics; focus on the truth, the science and facts; and be open and transparent in order to turn critics into allies. The worst-case scenario? You’ll become better, your organization will become better — and you might make some friends along the way.

Fun fact: After working with NGOs in the 1990s, McDonald’s reduced 300 million pounds of waste over 10 years.


“When we talk about providing energy for growth, it is not just about innovating the technology: it’s the slow and hard work of improving governance, institutions and a broader macro-environment,” says Rose Mutiso. She speaks at TEDSummit: A Community Beyond Borders, July 24, 2019, in Edinburgh, Scotland. (Photo: Dian Lofton / TED)

Rose Mutiso, energy scientist

Big Idea: In order to grow out of poverty, African countries need a steady supply of abundant and affordable electricity.

Why? Energy poverty, or the lack of access to electricity and other basic energy services, affects nearly two-thirds of Sub-Saharan Africa. As the region’s population continues to grow, we have the opportunity to build a new energy system — from scratch — to grow with it, says Rose Mutiso. It starts with naming the systemic holes that current solutions (solar, LED and battery technology) overlook: we don’t have a clear consensus on what energy poverty is; there’s too much reliance on quick fixes; and we’re misdirecting our climate change concerns. What we need, Mutiso says, is nuanced, large-scale solutions with a diverse range of energy sources. For instance, the region has significant hydroelectric potential, yet less than 10 percent of this potential is currently being utilized. If we work hard to find new solutions to our energy deficits now, everybody benefits.

Quote of talk:Countries cannot grow out of poverty without access to a steady supply of abundant, affordable and reliable energy to power these productive sectors — what I call energy for growth.”


Mariana Mazzucato, economist and policy influencer

Big idea: We’ve forgotten how to tell the difference between the value extractors in the C-suites and finance sectors and the value producers, the workers and taxpayers who actually fuel innovation and productivity. And recently we’ve neglected the importance of even questioning the difference between the two.

How? Economists must redefine and recognize true value creators, envisioning a system that rewards them just as much as CEOs, investors and bankers. We need to rethink how we value education, childcare and other “free” services — which don’t have a price but clearly contribute to sustaining our economies. We need to make sure that our entire society not only shares risks but also rewards.

Quote of the talk: “[During the bank bailouts] we didn’t hear the taxpayers bragging that they were value creators. But, obviously, having bailed out the biggest ‘value-creating’ productive companies, perhaps they should have.”


Diego Prilusky demos his immersive storytelling technology, bringing Grease to the TED stage. He speaks at TEDSummit: A Community Beyond Borders, July 24, 2019, in Edinburgh, Scotland. (Photo: Bret Hartman / TED)

Diego Prilusky, video pioneer

Big idea: Get ready for the next revolution in visual storytelling: volumetric video, which aims to do nothing less than recreate reality as a cinematic experience.

How? Movies have been around for more than 100 years, but we’re still making (and watching) them in basically the same way. Can movies exist beyond the flat screen? Yes, says Diego Prilusky, but we’ll first need to completely rethink how they’re made. With his team at Intel Studios, Prilusky is pioneering volumetric video, a data-intensive medium powered by hundreds of sensors that capture light and motion from every possible direction. The result is like being inside a movie, which you could explore from different perspectives (or even through a character’s own eyes). In a live tech demo, Prilusky takes us inside a reshoot of an iconic dance number from the 1978 hit Grease. As actors twirl and sing “You’re the One That I Want,” he positions and repositions his perspective on the scene — moving, around, in front of and in between the performers. Film buffs can rest easy, though: the aim isn’t to replace traditional movies, he says, but to empower creators to tell stories in new ways, across multiple vantage points.

Quote of the talk: “We’re opening the gates for new possibilities of immersive storytelling.”

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Weaving Community: Notes from Session 1 of TEDSummit 2019

Hosts Bruno Giussani and Helen Walters open Session 1: Weaving Community on July 21, 2019, Edinburgh, Scotland. (Photo: Bret Hartman / TED)

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

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

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

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

Opening: A warm Scottish welcome from raconteur Mackenzie Dalrymple

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

The talks in brief:

“Seeming happiness can stand in the way of true joy even more than misery does,” says writer Pico Iyer. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Pico Iyer, novelist and nonfiction author

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

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

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


Jochen Wegner, journalist and editor of Zeit Online

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

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

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


“The systems we have nowadays for political decision-making are not from the people for the people — they have been established by the few, for the few,” says activist Hajer Sharief. She speaks at TEDSummit: A Community Beyond Borders, July 21, 2019, in Edinburgh, Scotland. (Photo: Bret Hartman / TED)

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

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

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

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


Mariana Lin, AI character designer and principal writer for Siri

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

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

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


In 2018, Carole Cadwalladr exposed Cambridge Analytica’s attempt to influence the UK Brexit vote and the 2016 US presidential election via personal data on Facebook. She’s still working to sound the alarm. She speaks at TEDSummit: A Community Beyond Borders, July 21, 2019, in Edinburgh, Scotland. (Photo: Bret Hartman / TED)

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

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

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

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


Susan Cain meditates on how the feeling of longing can guide us to a deeper understanding of ourselves, accompanied by Min Kym on violin, at TEDSummit: A Community Beyond Borders. July 21, 2019, Edinburgh, Scotland. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Susan Cain, quiet revolutionary, with violinist Min Kym

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

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

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

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A first glimpse at the TEDSummit 2019 speaker lineup

Par : TED Staff

At TEDSummit 2019, more than 1,000 members of the TED community will gather for five days of performances, workshops, brainstorming, outdoor activities, future-focused discussions and, of course, an eclectic program of TED Talks — curated by TED Global curator Bruno Giussani, pictured above. (Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED)

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

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

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

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

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

Anna Piperal, digital country expert

Bob Langert, corporate changemaker

Carl Honoré, author

Carole Cadwalladr, investigative journalist

Diego Prilusky, immersive media technologist

Eli Pariser, organizer and author

Fay Bound Alberti, historian

George Monbiot, thinker and author

Hajer Sharief, youth inclusion activist

Howard Taylor, children safety advocate

Jochen Wegner, editor and dialogue creator

Kelly Wanser, geoengineering expert

Ma Yansong, architect

Marco Tempest, technology magician

Margaret Heffernan, business thinker

María Neira, global public health official

Mariana Lin, AI personalities writer

Mariana Mazzucato, economist

Marwa Al-Sabouni, architect

Nick Hanauer, capitalism redesigner

Nicola Jones, science writer

Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister of Scotland

Omid Djalili, comedian

Patrick Chappatte, editorial cartoonist

Pico Iyer, global author

Poet Ali, Philosopher, poet

Rachel Kleinfeld, violence scholar

Raghuram Rajan, former central banker

Rose Mutiso, energy for Africa activist

Sandeep Jauhar, cardiologist

Sara-Jane Dunn, computational biologist

Sheperd Doeleman, black hole scientist

Sonia Livingstone, social psychologist

Susan Cain, quiet revolutionary

Tim Flannery, carbon-negative tech scholar

Tshering Tobgay, former Prime Minister of Bhutan

 

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

Djazia Satour, singer

ELEW, pianist and DJ

KT Tunstall, singer and songwriter

Min Kym, virtuoso violinist

Radio Science Orchestra, space-music orchestra

Yilian Cañizares, singer and songwriter

 

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

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Meyer Sound at TED, from the stage to the stars

Small but mighty speakers from Meyer Sound helped bring sound into the front rows at TED2019

Small but mighty speakers from Meyer Sound helped bring rich sound to the sonically challenging front-row seats of TED2019: Bigger Than Us, April 15–19, 2019, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Photo: Bret Hartman / TED

Given John Meyer’s roots in the Bay Area’s 1960s radio and music scenes, and his innovations for just about every acoustic application — electronically dampening ambient noise in loud rooms, building 3D Cirque du Soleil soundscapes, and helping develop the Grateful Dead’s revolutionary “Wall of Sound” — it’s not surprising to spot his team behind the scenes at TED. With his state-of-the-art audio production platforms and speaker systems, Meyer and his colleagues at Meyer Sound have significantly improved TED’s music and voice reproduction game, and opened the door to a world of new sonic possibilities at TED’s events — including an on-site audio refuge at TED2019 to provide conference-goers with a serene space to digest heavy ideas.

Meyer is a living legend, and accordingly, I caught up with him as he’s revisiting one of his most legendary projects: the sound design of Apocalypse Now, which first toured the US in 1979 using Meyer’s subsonic speaker system. Director Francis Ford Coppola wanted audiences to literally feel every explosion in the film, and he tapped Meyer to provide special subwoofers that would reach to 30 cycles per second (or Hz) — well below the range of human hearing — to provide that impact. For the film’s 40th-anniversary screening at the Beacon Theatre in New York City, Meyer’s speakers sunk even lower to a gut-rumbling 13 Hz.

“Sound can change your emotion more than any other tool that’s ever existed,” Meyer says. “The movie people know this, because they change the sound to change the mood of a scene. They’ve known this for 50 years; neuroscience is just studying this now. And we know that low frequencies — which we’re doing for Apocalypse Now — create emotion.”

This exploratory and thoughtful approach to sound and all its possibilities forms the cornerstone of Meyer Sound (which Meyer and his wife, Helen, founded in Berkeley in 1979), and it’s enshrined in their motto: “Thinking sound.” “‘Thinking sound’ embodies our philosophy of making sound something that matters for everyone in all situations,” Meyer explains. “Sound is a crucial contributor to quality of life, because it is all around us all of the time.” By developing new technologies, Meyer Sound constantly seeks to “create audio solutions that heighten the quality and enjoyment of each of these kinds of sonic experiences.”

Mina Sabet, TED's director of production/video operations

Meet Mina Sabet, TED’s director of production/video operations. It’s her job to make TED’s custom-built theater look and sound better year after year. TED2019: Bigger Than Us. April 15–19, 2019, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Photo: Dian Lofton / TED

If this kind of thinking sounds familiar, it’s because it dovetails perfectly with the values of TED’s production team, for whom sound and video are equal ingredients in an ideal conference experience. Mina Sabet, TED’s Director of Production and Video Operations, sought to up the ante of TED’s audio production — and Meyer Sound was a “clear choice” to reboot the sound system for the 2019 Vancouver conference.

Building a PA system that blends into the background, doesn’t block anyone’s view of the stage, and yet still provides adequate sound coverage is a daunting task. According to Sabet, “One specific red flag we noticed when sitting in the theater was that our front rows” — specifically couches arranged at the front of the theater — “did not have a full audio experience.” The existing speakers were high overhead, creating a sonic void at the front of the hall. Loudspeakers must compete with lighting rigs and video projectors for ceiling real estate, and they had lost that battle. Speakers in the aisles are both hazardous and, well, ugly.

The solution was both innovative and comically obvious — hide speakers under the furniture. Sabet says that Meyer Sound’s “UP4-Slim speaker could fit nicely under the couch, face the people in the couches, and never be visible to the audience or our cameras. It was a perfect fit.” From there, the team optimized the rest of the room — as Meyer’s business manager John Monitto says, “making sure that we had equal coverage between all the seats, and just really making it a dynamic space… completely blanketing the seats with sound.”

This tranquil simulcast room became a chillout lounge between sessions, with sound environment from Meyer Sound.

This quiet simulcast room became a chillout lounge between sessions of talks, thanks to a tranquil sound environment from Meyer Sound. TED2019: Bigger Than Us. April 15–19, 2019, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Photo: Dian Lofton / TED

Once Meyer Sound had conquered the challenges in the main theater, they rewired the simulcast rooms to provide relaxed, uncrowded viewing spaces away from the main theater. As they explored the theme of relaxation, the teams began to wonder — how could they design a space that is not only a great place to listen to the conference, but also a meditative environment where attendees could really lose themselves and quietly observe the torrent of ideas they’d just experienced? More important, how could the production team exploit Meyer Sound’s powerful sound design suites — which can enable small halls to sound like cathedrals or caverns, or muffle echoes to make large spaces sound tiny — to their fullest potential?

As Monitto tells it, “TED had brought us the idea of a room that has two purposes: one, it’s a simulcast space [where] you can watch a talk happening live. [Two], between those sessions, when there’s not somebody on a stage or they’re not presenting material, there’s a place to go to be able to just chill out. And that’s what this room was all about. They brought us a theme of ‘Under the stars,’ and they wanted us to run with it.” And so the “Under the stars” room was born, centered around an interactive ceiling installation that would display the constellations of different cultures with the wave of a baton.

Monitto continues: “We did something really creative — creating an outdoor theme, with an audio soundscape that allowed you to just kind of chill out and relax.” By manipulating high-quality recordings of wind, water, insects and birds flying overhead with Spacemap — an audio matrix that maps up to 288 input sources to output locations — the Meyer Sound team created the illusion of an outdoor cinema under the stars, with sounds not only drifting between speakers, but also soaring overhead and far away. “It just was a real nice place to hang out,” Monitto says.

Leveraging sound to redefine spaces and moods within the conference venue is just the beginning — TED and Meyer Sound have a wide spectrum of challenges and possibilities ahead of them. Using their boundless curiosity, ingenuity, and creativity, both teams seek to redefine the aesthetic boundaries of their events — and seeking to master data-driven tools to achieve this is perhaps the most daunting task of all. As John Meyer puts it, “We [can analyze sound], but it’s like analyzing food — it’s hard. Analyzing whiskey or anything like that with chemistry is hard to figure out. Does it taste good?” As they enter their multi-year partnership, TED and Meyer hope to deliver complex, rich, and five-star flavors to audiences in their theater and in rooms at TED’s flagship conference in Vancouver for years to come.

A meditative soundscape and a ceiling full of stars turned this simulcast space into a calm, relaxing environment, thanks to sound design from Meyer Sound.

A meditative soundscape and a ceiling full of stars turned this simulcast space into a calm, relaxing environment, thanks to sound design from Meyer Sound. TED2019: Bigger Than Us. April 15–19, 2019, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Photo: Dian Lofton / TED

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Mina Sabet, TED's director of production/video operations

This tranquil simulcast room became a chillout lounge between sessions, with sound environment from Meyer Sound.

A meditative soundscape and a ceiling full of stars turned this simulcast space into a calm, relaxing environment, thanks to sound design from Meyer Sound.

Audacity: 8 big, bold ideas for global change unveiled in Session 4 of TED2019

Executive Director of the Audacious Project Anna Verghese and Head of TED Chris Anderson help unveil eight big, bold projects that are receiving the support of The Audacious Project in 2019. They speak at TED2019: Bigger Than Us, on April 16, 2019 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

In the program guide for Session 4 of TED2019, “Audacity,” a group of eight mysterious figures stands silhouetted in black. That’s because the speakers in this session were a total surprise — to those in TED audience and to those tuning in via Twitter Live from around the world. These eight speakers all have big, bold ideas for global change — and they’re representing eight projects that are receiving the support of The Audacious Project in 2019. Over the next three to six years, these ideas have the potential to change broken systems and impact millions of lives in a positive way. And each needs your support. After each idea, find out how you can get involved.

The event: Session 4 of TED2019, hosted by Chris Anderson, Head of TED, and Anna Verghese, Executive Director of the Audacious Project

When and where: Tuesday, April 16, 2019, 5pm, at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, BC

Speakers: Phillip Atiba Goff, Joanne Chory, Claudia Miner, David Baker, Safeena Husain and Julie Cordua, with special videos on ideas from Ellen Agler and Mark Tercek

Music: Emeli Sandé singing three beautiful songs: “You Are Not Alone,” “Extraordinary Being” and “Read All About It Part III”

The talks in brief:

“When we change the definition of racism from attitudes to behaviors, we transform that problem from impossible to solvable,” says Phillip Atiba Goff, president of the Center for Policing Equity. He speaks at TED2019: Bigger Than Us, on April 16, 2019 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Phillip Atiba Goff, behavioral scientist and president of the Center for Policing Equity

  • Big idea: In the US, Black people are two to four times more likely than white people to be targets of police force. The problem, says Phillip Atiba Goff, is that we think of racism as contaminated hearts and minds — when racism is really about behaviors. “When we change the definition of racism from attitudes to behaviors, we transform that problem from impossible to solvable,” says Goff. “Because you can measure behaviors.” Like any other organization, police departments can set goals for more equitable behavior — and hold themselves accountable to reaching them.
  • The Audacious project: Goff and his team at the Center for Policing Equity work with police departments and communities, city by city, to collect data on police behavior and set goals to make it more fair. They’re building a CompStat for Justice — a data system that shows police departments where they’re going, who they’re arresting and much more. The data that CPE collects can help police chiefs develop strategies for changing their department’s behaviors, and to date, they’ve seen staggering results. So far, CPE has delivered products to 25 cities, leading to an average of 33 percent fewer force incidents. Over the next five years, the Center for Policing Equity hope to bring their tools to police departments that collectively serve 100 million people across the US, effectively reaching one in three Americans.
  • Quote of the talk: “I’ve experienced the fear of seeing an officer unclip their gun, and the panic of realizing someone might mistake my 13-year-old godson as old enough to be a threat. So when a chief — or a pastor or an imam or a mother — calls me after an officer shoots another unarmed Black child, I understand the pain in their voice.” See what you can do for this idea »

Joanne Chory, plant biologist and director of the Plant Biology Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies

  • Big idea: To most of us, CO2 is a villain, the greenhouse gas responsible for rising global temperatures. But to Joanne Chory, one of the world’s most prominent plant biologists, CO2 is simply the thing that plants take in during photosynthesis, and convert into oxygen and sugars. For millions of years, plants have kept Earth’s CO2 levels in check — and Chory believes they can do it now, even as human beings release more CO2 into the atmosphere than ever before. Plants could help us fight climate change.
  • The Audacious project: Chory’s team at the Salk Institute wants to train plants to sequester carbon better, and for longer. They’re developing the science to create plants with more of a natural polymer called suberin in their roots, as this cork-like substance works as a stable carbon-storage device. They’re also looking to grow plants with deeper, more robust root systems, to really amplify their sequestering ability. Salk will start by creating these traits in model plants, and then will be able to transfer them to major crop plants like corn, soybean and cotton. If these superstar plants could occupy fields around the world, they could hold massive amounts of carbon in the ground, to achieve a 20 to 46 percent reduction of excess CO2 every year.
  • Quote of the talk: “I’ve come to appreciate plants as the amazing machines they are — they literally suck CO2 out of the air. They’ve been doing it for 500 million years, and they’re really good it!” See what you can do for this idea »

In this jar, there are 200 roundworms — because that’s the number that might be found in the belly of one child with an intestinal worm infection. Ellen Agler, the CEO of the END Fund, has a big plan to end disease from worms. (Photo: Bret Hartman / TED)

Ellen Agler, public health leader, CEO of the END Fund and author of Under the Big Tree

  • Big idea: Parasitic worms have been around for thousands of years, causing disease and limiting human potential. Today, more than 1.5 billion people in the world are at risk for worms, 600 million of them in Africa. And yet worms are very easy to treat — it takes just one to three pills, given once or twice a year. Ellen Agler and her team at the END Fund know that governments across Africa want to gain traction on this problem. By amplifying work already in progress, the END Fund thinks we can be the generation that ends disease from worm infections for good.
  • The Audacious Project: Over the next six years, the END Fund will deliver deworming treatment to 100 million people. But that’s really just the start. The END Fund looks at the problem of delivering deworming treatments through a systems lens, bringing together the right partners, lowering the cost of treatment, focusing on prevention, helping with monitoring and evaluation, and treating overlooked people, like young children and women of reproductive age. Every step of the way, the END Fund will support governments and nurture local leadership, creating a roadmap toward local ownership of deworming programs.
  • Quote of the video: “If the World Health Organization’s 2020 goals for worm control are met, African economies would see a $35 billion boost in productivity within ten years.” See what you can do for this idea »

Claudia Miner, historian, education entrepreneur and executive director of Waterford’s UPSTART project

  • Big idea: Fifty years ago, the United States achieved a watershed moment when it started bringing early education to low-income children through Head Start. Today, however, there are still 2.2 million children in the US — half of all 4-year-olds — who don’t have access to an early education program, because they live too far from one, speak another language or face a financial or logistical hardship. On day one of kindergarten, these children may already be years behind their peers. And they may not ever catch up.
  • The Audacious project: At Waterford.org, Claudia Miner and her team have created a kindergarten readiness project called UPSTART that bridges these access gaps. In just 15–20 minutes a day, children without access to in-person early education engage with personalized software that lets them learn at their own pace, from home. This isn’t mindless screen time — UPSTART lessons are educational and engaging, and the program coaches parents to take on the role of their children’s first teacher. UPSTART has a 90 percent completion rate, and a longitudinal study has shown that the gains students make last well into third and fourth grade. UPSTART has been piloted in 15 states so far, and several have opted to fund it because it’s been so effective. Over the next five years, Waterford will pilot UPSTART in all 50 states, serving a quarter of a million children, and make deep inroads toward state funding.
  • Quote of the talk: “Our Audacious idea is to make UPSTART available across the country — not to replace anything. We want to serve children who otherwise would not have access to early education.” See what you can do for this idea »

At the Institute for Protein Design, biochemist David Baker and his team are working on five grand challenges: including developing a universal flu vaccine that you would only need to take once. (Photo: Bret Hartman / TED)

David Baker, professor of biochemistry and director of the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington School of Medicine

  • Big idea: “Proteins carry out all of the essential functions in our bodies,” says David Baker. These miniature machines digest our food, contract our muscles, fire our neurons and so, so much more. But proteins are also tricky. They’re built of long strings of amino acids that “fold up” into specific shapes that allow them to do their job. And because scientists haven’t been able to crack the code of how proteins fold, we’ve only been able to make small modifications to proteins that already exist. Being able to create new proteins would open up incredible possibility.
  • The Audacious project: Baker’s research team at the Institute for Protein Design has developed the ability to design new proteins. And they want to launch the protein design revolution. Their goal is to become the Bell Laboratories of this new field, doubling their faculty and attracting top talent to train the next generation of scientists. Specifically, IPD will work toward five grand challenges: (1) universal vaccines for flu, HIV and cancer, (2) advanced medications for chronic pain, (3) protein nano-containers that bring medicines to specific cells, (4) smart protein therapeutics that recognize unhealthy cells, and (5) next-generation nanoengineering for solar energy capture. They stand to change the world of medicine and so much more.
  • Quote of the talk: “Humans have only been able to harness the power of proteins by making very small changes to the amino acid sequences of the proteins we’ve found in nature. This is similar to the process that our Stone Age ancestors used to make tools and other implements from the sticks and stones they found around them.” See what you can do for this idea »

Mark Tercek, global environmental leader and CEO of The Nature Conservancy

  • Big idea: Island and coastal nations need to protect their waters in order for our oceans, globally, to stay healthy. But these countries hold high debt loads and often aren’t able to prioritize ocean protection over other needs. Mark Tercek and his team at The Nature Conservancy see a way to solve both problems at once. Their idea is to buy a nation’s debt at a discount and restructure it to give them lower debt payments, in exchange for the government’s commitment to protect 30 percent of its coastal areas.
  • How: The Nature Conservancy has been a pioneer in debt-for-nature conservation, working since 2001 to negotiate deals like this for the protection of tropical forests. In 2016, they tried this approach in the Seychelles, restructuring $22 million in debt in exchange for the protection of 400,000 square kilometers of ocean — an area the size of Germany. It’s been incredibly successful, but the deal took years to complete. Now The Nature Conservancy plans to build a team that can close these deals much more quickly. Over the next five years, they will negotiate deals in 20 island and coastal nations, and together create more than 4 million square kilometers of marine-protected areas.
  • Quote of the video: “If you refinance your house to take advantage of a better interest rate, maybe you use the savings to insulate your attic. That’s what Blue Bonds for Conservation do, for entire coastal countries.” See what you can do for this idea »

Safeena Husain, executive director of Educate Girls, plans to enroll a staggering 1.6 million girls in school in the next five years. She speaks at TED2019: Bigger Than Us, on April 16, 2019 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Bret Hartman / TED)

Safeena Husain, social entrepreneur and executive director of Educate Girls

  • Big idea: Working in India, Safeena Husain has met girls named Aa chuki (“not wanted”), Antim Bala (“the last girl”) because that’s what her family hoped she’d be, and Naraz nath (“angry”) because her community was so angry she was born a girl. It’s not just poverty and cultural norms that bar girls from receiving an education: it’s collective mindsets. Even though girls’ education has been shown to have a long list of positive effects — it impacts nine of the UN’s 17 sustainable development goals –many girls in the world are still barred from receiving an education. India is home to one of the largest populations of out-of-school girls, with more than 4.1 million girls outside the classroom.
  • The Audacious project: Husain and her team at Educate Girls work in remote regions in India, going door-to-door to find all out-of-school girls. They do individual counseling with parents, and hold neighborhood and village meetings to change those mindsets. Their Team Balika (“team for the girl”) volunteers use an app to collect data — and their predictive model reveals that just five percent of India’s villages are home to 40 percent of the out-of-school girls. Their plan is to work specifically in these 35,000 villages for amplified impact. By doing this, they will enroll a staggering 1.6 million girls in school in the next five years. And they will work to keep them there.
  • Quote of the talk: “I believe that girls’ education is the closest thing we have to a silver bullet to help solve some of the world’s most difficult problems.” See what you can do for this idea »

“This Audacious project is a declaration of war against one of humanity’s darkest evils,” says Julie Cordua, social entrepreneur and CEO of Thorn. She speaks at TED2019: Bigger Than Us, on April 16, 2019 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Julia Cordua, social entrepreneur and CEO of Thorn

  • Big idea: Thorn works on a problem that isn’t easy to talk about: the sexual abuse of children in images and videos on the internet. This is clearly a human problem. But it’s also, says Julie Cordua, a technology problem. In the late 1980s, child pornography was nearly eliminated — because of tighter laws, it was too risky for abusers to trade it through the mail. But with the advent of the internet, both supply and demand skyrocketed. In 2018, there were 45 million reports of child sexual abuse content in the US alone — twice the number of reports of the year before. “Law enforcement focuses on just their jurisdiction. Companies look at just their platform,” says Cordua. “Whatever they learn along the way is rarely shared.” A unified response is necessary.
  • The Audacious project: Thorn is building technology to connect the dots between the law enforcement agencies, NGOs and tech companies who are the responders in this invisible crisis. Their tools collect the hashes of known sexual abuse content — essentially, the digital fingerprint of each file — and catalog it. As they collect more and more hashes of known content, it will allow law enforcement to spot new material quickly, and swing into action to try to find the child being abused. And the system will only get smarter — when a company sees a known hash posted, for example, they can scrub that user’s account and potentially discover hashes for other unknown material. Thorn’s goal is to be able to identify new material in seconds — which will open the door to eliminating this content from the internet altogether.
  • Quote of the talk: “The abusers win when we look at one piece of the puzzle at a time. … This Audacious project is a declaration of war against one of humanity’s darkest evils.” See what you can do for this idea »

And with these eight projects revealed, it’s time for the audience to get involved. Each project has a significant gap between what’s been committed to it so far and what’s needed to complete it. Anderson and Verghese called on the audience at the TED Conference and watching online to donate to the projects that most moved them, and pledges started rolling in, scrolling on the screens on stage.

Together, these eight projects will require $567 million in funding. And between presentations to donor groups earlier in the year and pledges made tonight, they have now raised $283,561,215. Each project is at least halfway funded, and will able to launch. Now … to watch them in action.

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‘Crazy Rich Asians’ shows that diversity onscreen is a win for everyone

Actress Michelle Yeoh in a scene from "Crazy Rich Asians." (Photo by Sanja Bucko) © 2017 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. and SK Global Entertainment

Michelle Yeoh, center, in a scene from “Crazy Rich Asians.” Photo by Sanja Bucko © 2017 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. and SK Global Entertainment

Crazy Rich Asians, a new Hollywood film that is an adaptation of the best-selling book by Kevin Kwan, topped the box office over the weekend, proving the “power of diversity (again).”

The romantic comedy is a major motion picture with big studio backing and a reported budget of $30 million. For Hollywood it also presents something unique: an all-Asian cast. As The New York Times reported last week, “The last time a major Hollywood film set in the present day showcased a majority Asian cast was a whopping 25 years ago, with The Joy Luck Club in 1993.”

NYT writer Robert Ito called Crazy Rich Asians something of a “cinematic Halley’s comet because — before Joy Luck Club, there was The Flower Drum Song in 1961, and then what?”

The film was not only an incredible opportunity for Asian actors, but also for Asian- and Asian-American moviegoers. The filmmaker and Kwan turned down a lucrative deal with Netflix in order to get to the silver screen. “Ultimately, we decided Netflix is probably the future. But right now, it’s not,” director Jon M. Chu told Vanity Fair. “We’re really focused on the financial victory of people showing up so that other voices can be heard and other stories can be told.”

Hollywood has made depressingly little progress

Despite the big opening for Chu’s film, a recent report from Stacy Smith’s research team at the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, “Inequality in 1,100 Popular Films,” revealed some disappointing data for women and particularly women of color in Hollywood. Of the top 100 films in 2017, two thirds didn’t include a single Asian or Asian-American character. Two-thirds. Among the female leads, only 4 actors out of the 33 films that had female leads weren’t white.

None were Asian.

Courtesy of Annenberg Inclusion Initiative

The smaller screen is no better. A recent study by Asian-American Pacific Islander academics found that 64% of television shows do not include one Asian or Asian-American character.

With all the talk in Hollywood of inclusion and diversity, we’d all hoped to see some movement in these numbers over the past few years. But the study reveals just how little top-grossing movies have changed when it comes to the on-screen prevalence and portrayal of females, underrepresented racial/ethnic groups, the LGBT community and individuals with disabilities.

In order to combat ongoing inequality in film, report authors offer several solutions.

Put more women in charge.

The answer to addressing “on-screen diversity deficits may lie behind the scenes,” Dr. Stacy Smith and her co-authors of the Annenberg report write: “The presence of a female in the directing or writing role is associated with more female characters on screen. The same is true for Black directors and Black characters — particularly Black female characters.”

One woman with power agrees. In the September issue of Vogue, Beyoncé told journalist Clover Hope why she insisted on working with “this brilliant 23-year-old photographer Tyler Mitchell.” At 23, Mitchell is among the youngest photographers to have shot the cover of Vogue. He is also the first African-American photographer to have done it in the magazine’s 125-year history.

“We will all lose” without diversity, Beyoncé says. “If people in powerful positions continue to hire and cast only people who look like them, sound like them, come from the same neighborhoods they grew up in, they will never have a greater understanding of experiences different from their own. They will hire the same models, curate the same art, cast the same actors over and over again, and we will all lose.”

But first we need to get more women and people of color into those powerful positions. The Annenberg report notes that “few women or people of color have worked as directors on the most popular films across more than a decade. Of 2017’s top-grossing film directors, only 7.3% were female, 5.5% were Black, and 3.7% were Asian. Only one woman of color worked on the top movies released last year.”


New projects should make use of inclusion riders.

Dr. Stacy Smith is the founder and director of the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the University of Southern California. She and her team have been conducting extensive research on gender equality in entertainment for over a decade. Other organizations, such as the Sundance Institute, the Representation ProjectWomen in Film, and the Women’s Media Center, also lead initiatives intended to document the diversity gap and to implement programs to close that gap.

In 2014, Stacy wrote an op-ed in The Hollywood Reporter introducing the concept of equity, or inclusion, riders and talked about it in her 2016 TEDWomen talk (watch below). A template of the rider is available at the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative website.

Set targets for inclusion goals.

One way to move toward measurable change is for companies to set target inclusion goals. These objectives, which should be transparent and public, should specify not only a company’s expectations for inclusion but also the steps it will take to achieve the goals.

One model for how studios and production companies can activate equilibrium change for inclusion comes from powerhouse producer and director Ava Duvernay. She set a goal that she met: 100% women directors for her TV series, Queen Sugar.

 

Just add five.

Most of the background speaking roles in film are awarded to men. In order to increase the percentage of women on screen and set a new overall norm for female characters, “directors could add five female speaking characters to every one of the 100 top movies next year.”

Geena Davis, founder of Institute on Gender in Media, lays out the process in two easy steps. Besides speaking roles, she encourages parity in crowd scenes and other scenes involving extras. Although you can’t “snap your fingers and suddenly half the Congress is female,” onscreen it’s much easier, she explains. “In the time it takes to make a movie or create a television show, we can change what the future looks like.”

Tax incentives that promote diversity.

Lastly, entertainment companies benefit from state tax incentives that subsidize production costs. Earlier this year, Asian-American lawmakers in California pushed through legislation that extended its film and TV tax incentive program and introduced new measures for productions receiving the credit to report on diversity. The Hollywood Reporter notes that even though productions don’t have to meet any quotas to be considered for the credit, the “objective is to motivate change by starting with self-awareness.”

“‘By including reporting on diversity above the line, this bill creates accountability,’ said Dr. Stacy L. Smith. ‘Rather than waiting for reports like mine, content creators have to tabulate their own scores on inclusion, and creating this awareness opens up a space for people to make intentional choices in who is hired, and it forces filmmakers to recognize when they have not made choices toward inclusion.’”

Other states with successful tax incentive programs, such as my home state of Georgia where more films were made last year than in Hollywood and New York, should follow California’s lead and institute inclusion reporting of their own.

Yes, we have a long way to go in getting to gender and racial equality onscreen…to getting closer to the “REEL” world looking like the “real” world, and we can’t wait for the film and TV industry to move in this direction without new strategies and incentives. But another very effective lever for this change is what you and I buy tickets to watch and listen to and what we decide to stream and read. Supporting projects that promote diversity is one very important step in that direction.

Will Crazy Rich Asians be another Halley’s Comet or a new constellation that lights up Hollywood?

As actress Constance Wu tweeted, “I know [Crazy Rich Asians] won’t represent every Asian American. So for those who don’t feel seen, I hope there is a story you find soon that does represent you. I am rooting for you. We’re not all the same, but we all have a story.”

It’s a good time to start telling the untold ones.

– Pat


TEDWomen 2018 Update

TEDWomen, the conference that I am honored and privileged to curate in partnership with the TED team, continues to do our part to equalize with an unparalleled digital platform for women’s ideas and stories.

Join us this year at TEDWomen 2018! The theme is “Showing Up” and you can be sure that we’ll be talking about ideas and strategies for equity in media, business, academia, government and health care. This year the conference will be held in Palm Springs, Calif. from November 28-30.

Registration is filling up fast, so I encourage you to register to join us today!

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