Mind Expanders: Notes on Session 2 of TED2024

AI is reshaping how we interact with the world around us and within us, expanding creative possibilities and bringing us closer together by dissolving barriers of all kinds. But anyone who’s paying attention can spot its obvious flaws and potential pitfalls.

From trailblazing platforms making software accessible to micro-robotics revolutionizing health care (including a mind-blowing demo you won’t want to miss), Session 2 of TED2024 explored the frontiers of tech with visionary entrepreneurs, scientists and creators. They offered glimpses of what good AI could do for the world when governed with empathy and curiosity.

The event: Talks from Session 2 of TED2024: The Brave and the Brilliant, hosted by head of TED Chris Anderson and creative technologist and host of The TED AI Show Bilawal Sidhu

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

Speakers: Vinod Khosla, Fei-Fei Li, Thomas Dohmke, Niceaunties, Alex Luebke, Vivek Kumbhari, Helen Toner

A special challenge: President and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund Andrew Steer announces the AI for Climate and Nature Grand Challenge, a groundbreaking initiative set to distribute up to $100 million in grants to harness AI in the fight against climate change and nature loss.

The talks in brief:

Vinod Khosla is a self-proclaimed techno-optimist who believes in the power of “foolish ideas.” He shares his predictions for how technology will continue improving human lives, discussing expanded medical care through AI doctors, a massive robotic workforce, planes that can travel 4,000 miles per hour and more.

AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li proposes that the progress of AI’s understanding of spatial intelligence – the ability to derive predictions and insight from objects’ relationships to one another – is catalyzing robotic learning, bringing us closer to a world where AI not only sees and creates but also interacts with the world around us.

Software development has long been the purview of specialized workers. By removing the barrier between programming languages and human ones, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke shows how AI is poised to change that forever. He demos never-before-seen software his team has been developing that promises to empower people to create code using just their spoken words — in any language.

From sushi-bedecked cars with legs to elderly women wearing cat-shaped masks made of cereal, artist Niceaunties’ surreal “Auntieverse” — a mind-bending homage to “auntie culture” prevalent in Asian communities — charmingly showcases the creative potential of human-AI partnerships.

Meet PillBot: a wireless micro-robot that can go inside the human body and take a look around. In a (literally) stomach-turning demo, engineer and entrepreneur Alex Luebke swallows a PillBot and physician-scientist Vivek Kumbhari navigates it around his stomach with a game controller, showing how the device allows direct visualization of internal organs and could move us past the age of invasive, expensive endoscopies.

No one understands AI — not even experts, says policy expert Helen Toner. But that doesn’t mean we can’t govern it. She makes the case that people and policymakers need to push for more research into AI interpretability (measuring what these systems can do) as well as regulations that require AI companies to share what they’re building and why.

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

The dots finally connect: Notes on Session 12 of TED2023

After a jam-packed week of ideas, connection and wonder, the remarkable closing session of TED2023 connected the dots, with deep thinking on purpose and the power of self-belief as well as some much-needed challenges to conventional wisdom.

The event: Talks from Session 12 of TED2023: Possibility, hosted by TED’s Chris Anderson, Helen Walters and Whitney Pennington Rodgers

When and where: Friday, April 21, 2023, at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, BC, Canada

Speakers: Sheryl Lee Ralph, Krista Tippett, David McWilliams, Emmanuel Acho

Performance: Jacob Collier‘s music makes spirits soar. No stranger to the big stage, Collier brings his signature “audience choir” to TED, inviting the whole audience to test out their pipes and create haunting harmonies that prove anyone can make beautiful music.

Conference wrap-up: Sending up the conference with her signature wit, actor and comedian Julia Sweeney observes the TED tradition of closing out a sometimes serious week with a hilarious set of jokes that celebrate the speakers who took the stage.

“The greatest relationship you will ever have is with yourself,” says actor Sheryl Lee Ralph. As soon as she steps on stage, Ralph sings a powerful rendition of Dianne Reeves’s “Endangered Species,” as she did when she won her Emmy for supporting actress in a comedy for her role as Barbara Howard in the series Abbott Elementary. Sharing her own journey (and challenges) with self-belief, Ralph gifts us with three life-altering pearls of wisdom that can help us muster the confidence to take up the space we deserve: 1) See yourself for who and what you truly are. 2) In order to believe in yourself, reframe your experiences in ways that empower you. 3) Act like you believe in yourself. Ralph urges us all to start a meaningful practice of looking in the mirror. “Believe in what you see,” she says. “If you can’t love it, then respect it. If you can’t respect it, then encourage it. If you can’t encourage it, empower it. If you can’t empower it, please be kind to it.”

Journalist and host of the On Being podcast Krista Tippett dives into the spirit of a post-pandemic world and offers three tips for cultivating a happier, more meaningful life. First, she suggests, see the “generative story of our time.” Human brains are naturally inclined to notice threats, but if you retune yourself to notice the goodness around you, that can influence your worldview, too. Second, in the tradition of Rainer Maria Rilke, learn to “live the questions.” Ask high-quality questions that can deepen and guide you in the present moment; don’t fixate only on the answers. Finally, reconsider the matter of your “calling” and the possibility of wholeness. You are more than your job. Participate in your relationships and your community to discover and embrace your role in the wider story of society.

Economists get paid to think about the future — so why are they so often wrong? David McWilliams believes the answer lies in how our society discourages unconventional thinking. Take the consensus among economists after World War I, for example. Most predicted a return to the gold standard and a “war to end all wars.” It took a poet, William Butler Yeats, to anticipate the great tipping point ahead: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,” Yeats wrote in “The Second Coming.” McWilliams says the system that produced so many overconfident economists in the 1920s remains fundamentally unchanged. Our schools reward a narrow range of intelligence and, after formal education, we unwittingly create echo chambers that constrain our understanding of the world. To fight confirmation bias, we must embrace unconventional thinkers: “If you want to understand the world more clearly, listen less to the economists and more to the poets,” McWilliams says.

Content about the power of goal-setting is inescapable. Almost anyone will tell you: if you want to achieve something, set a goal. But Emmanuel Acho, former NFL linebacker and Emmy-winning host and producer, has a different story to tell. Goal-setting, Acho says, is a symptom of our insatiable desire for feedback. We crave affirmation and the feeling that we’ve achieved an end, but whether or not you achieve your goals, Acho believes they carry a hidden cost. Goals damage your self-worth and prevent you from exploring unexpected possibilities. The most fulfilled people pursue growth with no endpoint. Take Kirk Hammett, lead guitarist of Metallica, for example. Hammett never set out to sell 125 million records: he “just wanted to play his guitar a little better every day.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Open: The talks of TED@DestinationCanada

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

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

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

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

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

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

The talks in brief:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TEDWomen Presents: Women leading joy, with Angélique Kidjo and Femi Oke

Joy is one of the most under-prioritized essentials to social progress. How do we reconnect to it during life’s hardest moments?

The fifth and final day of TEDWomen Presents — an online festival featuring interviews with leading women, interactive workshops, specially curated film screenings and more — focused on the value of joy, with a conversation between Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter Angélique Kidjo and international broadcaster Femi Oke.

Big idea: Women and girls across Africa need unfettered access to education — and safe, collaborative and inspiring spaces for their ambitions to thrive.

How? “When I am on stage, I am just trying to convey the happiness, the joy and the strength that we have as human beings to prevail in every circumstance,” says Angélique Kidjo. In a deep and expansive conversation with Femi Oke, Kidjo shares the different kinds of joys that weave together her experience as a musician and gender equality advocate. Growing up in Benin, she witnessed silencing limitations placed on girls from a young age, whether it was marriage at a young age or unwanted pregnancy. She founded Batonga — a foundation that provides education and resources to women and girls in the most hard-to-reach parts of Africa — to help give them a voice. By investing in the dreams, skills and ambitions of those who are often overlooked and marginalized, Kidjo found that education can create the space necessary to break harmful societal barriers. Whether she’s making an impact through her infectious, Grammy-award-winning music or creating safe, entrepreneurial spaces for girls to thrive, Kidjo wants us all to recognize our worth and know “you can fall beneath the Earth, but you always can rise.”

Q&A: After the interview, Kidjo joined TEDWomen Editorial Director Pat Mitchell live from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she’s just wrapped up the final show of her North American tour. Kidjo detailed practices that help her connect to joy even when life gets challenging, reminding us that “joy is endless.”

“When you are joyful, you are free,” Kidjo says. She’s eager to continue collaborating with organizations whose mission is to help cultivate the music and solidarity that empower women and girls to become leaders of their own lives. Kidjo talked about the ways in which her organization Batonga has positively impacted generations of women by supporting mothers, who in turn support their daughters. She highlighted the importance of honesty, accountability and hope when it comes to connecting with younger generations, equipping them for the challenges (and infinite possibilities) ahead.

TED also invites you to join the BIG JOY Project — a one-week, seven-minute-a-day journey to discover what micro-acts of joy help you tap into your own happiness. At the end of this citizen science project, your very own joy superpower will be revealed to you.

And lastly, a bit of news! TEDWomen will have a new home in 2023: the exuberant and historically-rich city of Atlanta, Georgia. We hope you can join next year (whether it’s virtually or in person) and take part.

Join the TEDWomen Community newsletter list to be the first to hear updates from the community and announcements about TEDWomen 2023 in Atlanta, Georgia — October 11-13, 2023.

Brighter future(s): The talks from TED@BCG 2022

Predicting the future can sometimes feel impossible, but there are clear paths we can follow to take action on the issues of the day. In a day of talks and performances, 16 leading minds gathered to present promising and hopeful solutions to problems related to health care, the economy, modern leadership and more.

The event: TED@BCG: brighter future(s) is the thirteenth event TED and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) have co-hosted to uplift forward-thinking speakers from around the globe. Hosted by TED current affairs Curator Whitney Pennington Rogers and BCG managing director and partner Julia Dhar (a past TED speaker herself!).

When and where: Thursday, September 15, 2022 at the TED World Theater in New York City

Speakers: Aparna Bharadwaj, Gareth Thomas, Tolu Oyekan, Dave Sivaprasad, Phnam Bagley, Tessa Clarke, Alex Koster, Gitte Frederiksen, June Sarpong, Zineb Sqalli, Will Guidara, Cristina Junqueira, Elena Crescia, Keenan Scott II, Veronica Chau, Nithya Vaduganathan, Paul Catchlove

Music: Musician KERA performed their serene and soulful songs “Bright Future Ahead” and “Vitamin T” for the audience.

The talks in brief:

Aparna Bharadwaj, global consumer strategist

Big idea: People can benefit from finding the hidden connections and secret similarities.

Why? Businesses tend to focus on what separates consumers in one country from another. Aparna Bharadwaj shows that it’s much more interesting for businesses to instead look for unexpected similarities across borders. Her research has revealed insights like: Chinese and Indonesians like to share snacks in groups, rather than eating alone; car-buying habits in China look similar to those in Nigeria, motivated by status more than utility; and Americans and Russians share similar motivations when shopping for clothes, looking for on-trend apparel instead of performance wear. “These are patterns where you least expect them,” Bharadwaj says, as businesses wouldn’t normally think to group consumers in these countries together. These commonalities go beyond commercial opportunities — they provide a message of hope for the world. “If only people knew that we are similar in the most profound ways, in our everyday activities … maybe we would understand and empathize with each other,” she says.

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Gareth Thomas, former pro rugby player, stigma challenger

Big idea: Together, we can tackle stigma.

How? The tattoo on Gareth Thomas’s knee is dark, ghoulish and threatening — a skeleton that represents the imminent death he felt when he first was diagnosed with HIV. The wings beneath it symbolize the freedom he felt once he finally found his voice: “Like a dead man coming back to life,” he says. The crown atop the skull embodies leadership against discrimination and misinformation. Each adornment represents his journey living, celebrating and reclaiming his truth in the face of stigma and shame. Now he’s on a mission to fight for the same for others. Thomas demystifies and redefines what it means to live with HIV, urging us to normalize conversation around all vilified conditions. The more people who know the facts — and stand up against stigma — the more the truth can spread, reducing shame and giving the world more of a fighting chance to make right what has been wrong for so long.

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Tolu Oyekan, inclusive finance promoter

Big idea: To meet developmental goals on the African continent (and beyond), historically non-profit objectives must be treated with the same urgency that for-profit initiatives enjoy. 

How? In the for-profit sector, a business’s top priority is ensuring that the benefits of their efforts outweigh the investments. Tolu Oyekan believes that non-profits should borrow a page from their playbook. He sets up a crucial example of this approach: access to financial services across his native Nigeria is extremely scarce. Oyekan shows us how data-driven and scalable solutions can transform banking for rural and urban communities alike. Treating this critical lack of access with a lean approach that empowers citizens, Oyekan explains how agent banking — an individual acting on behalf of a bank and providing financial services from established local businesses — could be an affordable fix, as opposed to expensive solutions like adding physical ATMs and bank branches. This way, people can access banking resources at their local grocery store, barber shop or anywhere an agent sets up shop. “When we include the profit motive in the development work that we do, we can go fast and far, together, to address development challenges and change the world for the better,” Oyekan says.

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Dave Sivaprasad, coastline resilience advocate

Big idea: When it comes to mitigating the impact of climate change on coastal areas, it’s not about finding a singular solution — it’s about finding the right mix of solutions.

Why? Around forty percent of humanity lives near a coast, and their livelihoods are dependent on the conditions of the environment. From flooding and ocean acidification to stronger storms and changes in wind patterns, Dave Sivaprasad lays out the ever-increasing risks climate change poses to these areas. To deal with these more intense conditions, he shares a multitude of approaches coastal populations can implement to brace themselves for the (metaphorical and literal) storm. Sea walls, stone barriers, mangrove restoration, land reclamation are all viable options, but the challenge is choosing the right mix to meet each community’s needs. “No two coasts are alike” says Sivaprasad — and neither are their respective paths to climate resilience.

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Phnam Bagley, designer and creative director

Big idea: With creative thinking and innovative design, people traveling beyond Earth could eat nourishing, flavorful food reminiscent of home.

How? When astronauts are hurtling through space, they typically eat what Phnam Bagley kindly calls “goop-in-a-bag.” The lack of gravity, limited storage and distance from Earth make it difficult for an explorer to enjoy a fresh, delectable meal. Meal time becomes even more complicated when you plan to send astronauts to Mars, a roundtrip journey of 2.5 to 3 years. To take on the challenge of making better astronaut grub, Bagley and her team designed the Space Culinary Lab with flavor, nutrition and practically in mind. The system can mix coffee granules, hot water, ghee and collagen powder to make a coffee with both satisfying flavor and healthy omega-3 fatty acids. A hydroponic garden grows lettuce and microgreens for salad, while lasers cook rehydrated freeze-dried chicken with the same enticing pattern of grilled meats. For snacks, they grow carbon-negative microalgae like spirulina onsite, then mix it with oats, nuts, powdered berries and spices. Bagley’s designs have the potential to make space feel more human. They could improve life here on Earth as well, replacing non-regenerative agricultural methods with low-resource creative cooking.

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Tessa Clarke, sharing economy entrepreneur

Big idea: There’s a super simple solution to the climate crisis – sharing.

Really? Household consumption is directly responsible for 65 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. Tessa Clarke thinks the most effective solution is something humans have been doing for thousands of years: sharing more and wasting less. Globally, one-third of all the food we produce each year is thrown away, a trillion-dollar squandering that ends up in landfills, producing carbon dioxide’s deadlier cousin, methane. And half of that waste comes from households. According to leading scientists, solving the food waste problem is even more important than transitioning to electric cars, solar panels or plant-based diets. To take on the problem, Clarke cofounded Olio, a free app that connects local communities around giving food away before it’s thrown away. They’ve empowered people to share 66 million portions of food, and this is just a tiny fraction of what’s possible. Users can also share home items, books, appliances, toys and more. “Sharing instead of shopping needs to become the default,” she says.

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Alex Koster, mobility and software visionary

Big idea: The automobile industry is busy building the “Software Dream Car.”

How? The future of the automotive industry goes beyond clean fuels — software is poised to be a transformational force as well. If we take driverless cars as an eventual given, it’s time to dream up what their interior spaces will look like, says Alex Koster. As computer vision technology continues to advance, we’re moving towards what he calls the “Software Dream Car” — an augmented reality vehicle that fuses science fiction and luxury into a real-world environment overlaid with information and entertainment. What we see out our window will be limited only by our imaginations, says Koster, as our cars pilot us through rich virtual worlds in addition to taking us from point A to point B.

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Gitte Frederiksen, leadership champion

Big question: Modern organizations are complex, multidirectional organisms, so why are we so invested in hierarchical leadership structures?

Some thoughts: When it comes down to it, leaders are only human. And when there’s only a small group of leaders moving at their own speed, bottlenecks are inevitable, organizational decisions flounder and leaders lose sight of the great ideas that often lie unnoticed in the margins. Gitte Frederiksen offers an innovative solution: leadership networks without labels, replacing the power of the few with the influence of many by emphasizing sharing and kindness. These complex human networks not only increase feelings of ownership, reduce stress and create better products, but they’re also “more beautiful, more multidimensional, more dynamic, more like nature,” says Frederiksen.

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June Sarpong, diversity leader

Big idea: The next big disruption in business is in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

How? “Rock star” leaders are those that disrupt business as usual — and June Sarpong thinks the same strategy can be used to move us forward on DEI. It all starts with uncomfortable connections, breaking with the status quo and developing a vision for a better future. When it comes to the workplace, people in power need to make the big leaps first. Consider FX Networks, which disrupted its previously lily-white programming roster and invested significantly in diverse directors and writers. In the process, it created critically and commercially successful content – which Sarpong says is truly “rock star behavior.”

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Zineb Sqalli, gender and climate researcher

Big idea? The next few decades will see trillions invested in infrastructure improvement in the name of fighting climate change, but women will only benefit from these policies and programs as much as men if we are intentional about their inclusion.

How? Climate action has historically been designed with a “gender neutral” lens, but continuing in this manner could set gender equality back by fifteen years, says Zineb Sqalli. We need to consider women’s specific needs upfront, involve women in the design process and measure results so that we can correct course if needed. Cities like Vienna, Austria have already done this. With a diverse urban planning board, Vienna restructured its parks so teenage girls would feel more welcome; created a public campaign to educate the city on the new approach; and integrated a gender assessment into social housing and infrastructure contracts. These changes benefit everyone. By abandoning the gender neutral mindset and intentionally designing for women, Sqalli says, we could build both an environmentally sustainable and gender equitable world.

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Will Guidara, restaurateur, author

Big idea: Unreasonable hospitality turns ordinary transactions into extraordinary experiences.

How? What does it take to earn the title “best restaurant in the world?” Ask Will Guidara, and he might tell you that the secret is a two-dollar, off-menu hot dog. Guidara is the former owner of Eleven Madison Park, a restaurant that claimed this distinction in 2017 under his leadership by pursuing a strategy of “unreasonable hospitality.” It all started when Guidara overheard a table of out-of-town guests regretting that their trip to New York City hadn’t included a taste of one of the city’s finest (and cheapest) culinary classics: a New York City hot dog. Eleven Madison Park is an exceptionally fancy establishment, but Guidara decided that if his guests wanted a hot dog, he’d make it happen. He ran out to the street, bought a hot dog from a sidewalk vendor and persuaded his chef to serve it. This simple gesture gobsmacked his guests — and it forever changed Guidara’s approach to service. He recounts other incredible experiences the Eleven Madison Park orchestrated for their patrons and offers strategies for anyone to make their hospitality a little more “unreasonable” — whether it be serving a guest or buying a gift (and creating a memory) for a loved one.

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Cristina Junqueira, entrepreneur, in conversation with Elena Crescia, social entrepreneur

Big idea: To disrupt an industry’s status quo, take customers’ pain seriously. 

How? “It felt a little bit like going to prison,” says Cristina Junqueira, describing the heightened security and long wait times that were typical at Brazilian banks when she cofounded her online bank, Nubank. She was drawn to banking by this pain, which she identified as an opportunity to disrupt a stagnant industry in need of improvement. Fast forward nine years and Nubank has redefined how Brazilians access their money and participate in commerce. In conversation with social entrepreneur Elena Crescia, Junqueira discusses the transformative impact her decision to center customers’ experience has had in Brazil. According to Junqueira, Nubank serves more than five million people who had never previously engaged with the country’s financial system. The company’s efficient digital platform is imitable, she says, but what’s harder to emulate is Nubank’s customer-first mindset. As she puts it: “That’s where the real competitive advantage lies.”

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Keenan Scott II, playwright, poet, TED Fellow

Big idea: As a kid, Keenan Scott Il loved words, stories and superheroes — a passion that fueled his journey to becoming a celebrated playwright, producer, director and actor.

How? In every superhero narrative, says Keenan Scott II, there’s always an event that pushes the superhero to realize their power. For Scott, it was a poetry assignment in his eighth-grade English class. He struggled with dyslexia as a kid, but he soared when it came time to write a poem. He discovered that he already understood advanced literary devices like simile, assonance and slant rhyme because he’d encountered these techniques in the music he loved by artists like Tupac Shakur and Lemon Andersen. Scott continued to develop his craft outside the classroom by paying attention to words and the world around him. He listened to speech patterns in different parts of the city and heard the stories of his neighbors; he explored the work of other artists, poets and jazz artists whose creativity inspired his own. On the TED stage, Scott performs three stunning spoken word pieces that testify to the superheroic talent he cultivated despite the obstacles (read: kryptonite).

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Veronica Chau, sustainable investment professional

Big idea: To improve financing for sustainable and equitable housing, we need policies that stimulate demand and create a favorable investing environment.

Why? Faced with the climate crisis, financial institutions have pledged trillions to transform the economy — but right now, says sustainable investing expert Veronica Chau, that money is not flowing at the speed it needs to. Taking the housing sector as a case study, Chau explains that the US is facing two challenges at once: housing is scarce and the buildings we live in are a major contributor to climate change. To reconcile and overcome these two challenges, we need to radically increase financing for sustainable housing. Banks want to reach net-zero, she says; the problem is that government housing policy is not doing enough to create a low-risk environment for investment. By creating robust investment incentives; strengthening requirements for energy efficiency; investing in programs that help low-income communities retrofit their homes; and offering permits for affordable, energy-efficient housing, local governments can create a favorable financing environment and ensure financing flows to areas where it’s needed most.

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Nithya Vaduganathan, talent strategy expert

Big idea: To find hidden talent, take a fresh look around.

How? Something interesting is happening in the labor market: there are lots of job openings, yet many employers are struggling to find the right people to fill them. Why is that? Nithya Vaduganathan thinks it’s in large part because employers are using outdated practices to retract and retain talent – for instance, by focusing on features like college degree or time in role, which are not necessarily predictive of success. Vaduganathan offers five tips that will actually help employers fill open positions — while also helping job seekers advance their careers. First: leaders and managers must figure out what actually needs to get done, as opposed to listing Frankenstein job posts searching for impossibly qualified candidates. Second: “screen in” candidates, as opposed to screening out based on certain criteria like college degrees. (Great candidates don’t need to check every box, she says.) Third: start with coffee – or, in other words, start small. Try out micro-internships: small-scale, paid projects that create a low-risk path to hiring, particularly of college and grad students from overlooked schools. Fourth: look beyond your floor – there may be talent hiding inside your organization, just a floor above you. And, lastly: let your people go so they can grow. Companies that allow their people to move around internally report more diverse, innovative and effective teams. 

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Paul Catchlove, reflective leader

Big idea: Self-reflection can add value to your work life, increasing performance and helping you make better decisions and build better relationships.

How? Reflection is about learning, says Paul Catchlove: looking at our lives without judgment, but with a critical lens. So how do we do it? Catchlove recommends making reflection a habit, whether it takes the form of purposeful thinking, journal entries, audio notes or discussions with a mentor or friend. In the workplace, this would look like consistently setting aside time to distill learnings on what worked, what didn’t and why – and then making a personal commitment to do things differently next time. So next time a meeting leaves you feeling agitated, take some time to sit down, take a breath and reflect (whether it’s after work or the next morning). Over time, cultivating a habit of reflection will glean deeper insights as you begin to recognize patterns of behavior – whether it’s a problematic relationship with a boss or client or an aspect of your job that you begin to realize leaves you feeling happy and fulfilled.

Thrive: TED Talks from Indigenous leaders, in partnership with Nia Tero

The first-ever TED Salon co-created in partnership with Nia Tero featured five extraordinary Indigenous leaders, collectively representing thousands of communities worldwide. Speaking on issues connected to Indigenous environmental guardianship, the speakers laid out a compelling vision for how to better steward the Earth.

The event: TED Talks from five Indigenous leaders, hosted by Nia Tero’s managing director of programs Michael Painter and TED curator Sally Kohn

When and where: Thursday, September 22, 2022, at TED World Theater in New York City

Opening remarks: From Katsitsionni Fox, who opened the space by giving thanks to everything from the strawberries and bugs to the winds and the Moon; and from Nia Tero’s CEO Peter Seligmann, who spoke on the importance of centering Indigenous voices in climate action and finding new ways to love Earth.

Music: From singer-songwriter Mia Kami, who performed two songs — “Mana” and “Salt Water” — and filled the room with the sounds of the Pacific.

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The talks in brief:

Jupta Itoewaki, environmental activist

Big idea: Although Indigenous people comprise five to six percent of the world’s population, 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity is within Indigenous territory. So why do non-Indigenous people and institutions so often question Indigenous environmental wisdom and stewardship?

Some context: Jupta Itoewaki’s native Suriname, with 93 percent of its surface area covered by pristine forests, is one of the world’s greenest countries — in no small part due to the efforts of its Indigenous people, who are dedicated protectors of the natural world. These stewards of the world’s biodiversity should lead the world’s efforts to preserve the habitats in which unique biomes thrive, says Itoewaki. She shares five “Rs” to help understand Indigenous guardianship. First, responsibility — we are all responsible for decolonizing Indigenous lands, and for listening to Indigenous voices. Second, respect Indigenous voices, knowledge and autonomy. Third, cultivate relationships with Indigenous communities rather than exerting power. Fourth, reciprocity — share power and resources. Finally, redistribute ancestral lands to their rightful stewards and owners. 

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Jennifer “Jing” Corpuz, lawyer

Big idea: Although colonialism has softened its face over the years from violent oppression to development, the outcomes have remained the same: Indigenous people are exploited for the developer’s gain, without the consent of their communities. Jennifer “Jing” Corpuz shares the long struggle of her people (the Kankana-ey Igorot People of Mountain Province in the Philippines) against the changing tactics of their would-be exploiters — and shows why this struggle is important for the whole planet.

How? Exploitation has followed the same sad script for most of history — moving into a place and stripping it of resources, so that the wealthy few can grow wealthier, while the people whose lands they have appropriated fall into servitude. Some of them, like Jennifer Corpuz, fight to advance the Indigenous values of the common good, community health and stewardship of lands — and, in the process, hope these values prevail and save our planet.

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Emmanuel “Manu” Peni, human rights defender

Big idea: Modern ideas aren’t always better ideas. We must understand how Indigenous wisdom can work in harmony with new science and technology if we want to save the planet.

Why? Consider the ingenuity of the thatch roof, a shelter made from locally harvested leaves and vines. In Papua New Guinea, people have relied on thatch roofs for centuries to weather strong tropical winds and keep their homes cool and breezy. Emmanuel “Manu” Peni instead decided to build his home there using modern techniques with steel beams and an iron roof. He ignored the merits of traditional building practices and suffered the consequences — the winds tipped his brand new house sideways and ripped off part of his roof. Now Peni wants to prevent the world from making the same mistake of underestimating the value of Indigenous knowledge, especially when it comes to solving the climate crisis. Indigenous people are experts at healing and protecting the planet, Peni says, because they have lived in harmony with their environments for thousands of years. He provides powerful examples of how traditional practices in his community already enact sustainable land management and closes with a plea to anyone listening: “Pay attention, learn, try to understand, respect and heed Indigenous guardianship,” he says. “Or else, like me, the next great wind will blow us all over.”

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Valérie Courtois, forester

Big idea: If we all join Indigenous peoples in the fight to protect Earth’s biodiversity, we can heal our planet together.

Why? Valérie Courtois has witnessed firsthand the devastating impact of climate change in her homelands of Nitassinan, in what is now known as Canada. Two decades ago, she watched hundreds of thousands of caribou cross the Trans-Labrador highway. Today, that same caribou herd has dwindled to 8,000. But Courtois still has hope for Nitassinan and the world. Her inspiration: the Indigenous guardians who steward the region’s boreal forests, monitoring water quality, conducting climate research and working to restore species like caribou, salmon and moose. In return, she says, the forests are caring for their guardians too: helping people like Jarett Quock — a former heavy equipment operator who battled addiction and racism — heal from centuries of intergenerational trauma. Guardians already care for some of the largest protected areas on the planet, including a section of the Northwest Territories the size of Costa Rica. If we all join Indigenous peoples in the fight to protect Earth’s biodiversity — if we honor Indigenous knowledge and commit to sustained political action — we can heal our planet together. As Cortois puts it: “If we take care of the land, the land takes care of us.”

Future-facing ideas from emerging leaders: TED Talks from the Bezos Scholars

The first-ever TED Salon co-created in partnership with the Bezos Family Foundation featured incredible ideas from the Bezos Scholars — extraordinary young people thinking about the future of education, human rights, financial systems and more — as well as some special TED Fellows guests. The result of a years-long collaboration between the Bezos Scholars and TED Fellows, this energetic, future-facing TED session showcased the organizations’ shared belief in and commitment to socially engaged innovation and human ingenuity.

The event: TED Talks from the Bezos Scholars, hosted by TED Fellows co-director Lily James Olds and senior program manager Leonie Hoerster

When and where: Friday, September 9, 2022, at TED World Theater in New York City

Comedy: From TED Fellow and comedian Negin Farsad, who opened the salon with a stand-up set that hilariously tracked what’s happened over the last couple of pandemic-fueled years.

Music: From TED Senior Fellow, cellist and classical rockstar Joshua Roman and Bezos Scholar and violist Matthew Garcia, who closed out the session with a stirring rendition to the first movement of Beethoven’s Eyeglasses Duo.

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The talks in brief:

Joel Baraka, refugee education innovator

Big idea: Gamifying school curricula can help get students in refugee camps get excited about learning.

How? Going to school in a refugee camp is complicated: students encounter crowded classrooms, a rigid curriculum and limited access to teachers. Joel Baraka grew up in the Kyangwali refugee camp in western Uganda and remembers that what he liked best about his school years were the hours he spent outside the classroom playing soccer with his friends or the card game Spades. That’s why as an entrepreneur, Baraka wanted to find a way to “gamify” the learning experience for other refugee students. He presents the educational board game he created, 5 STAZ, that schools in Kyangwali now use as a daily part of schoolwork to help students master their curriculum – and have fun while doing it.

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Meghan Hussey, disability inclusion advocate

Big idea: Despite the global conversation around inclusive societies and workplaces for all races and genders, people with disabilities are still routinely excluded from education and employment. Making up an estimated 15 percent of the world’s population, their potential contributions remain unknown and unexplored. It’s time to build an inclusive future for people with all different kinds of abilities.

How? Meghan Hussey, a disability inclusion advocate and Global Development and Government Relations Director for the Special Olympics, believes that everyone benefits when people with disabilities are allowed to thrive — and the only thing holding them back from that is our own attitudes towards “those people.” According to Hussey, an inclusive future is four steps away. First, we must re-examine our assumptions and stereotypes around disability. These arise from the lack of disabled people in our everyday lives, and that lack is largely due to a lack of accommodations. Second, we must actively remove barriers and invite people with disabilities into our lives and organizations. Third, we should recognize how other exclusion issues — gender-based violence, health care accessibility — intersect with each other. And finally, we must listen to the voices of people with disabilities, because they will tell us what’s needed to remove the barriers keeping them from mainstream society.

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Matthew Garcia, education equalizer

Big idea: To break down racial, class and geographic barriers, nonprofits should think virtual.

Why? A Latinx son of immigrants from a small Texas border town, Matthew Garcia grew up loving to play the viola but living far away from classical music meccas like New York and Chicago. Through years of intense practice and community support, Garcia overcame the odds, traveling with other elite young musicians to tour four continents and play Carnegie Hall – but then he hit a wall. One of the best violists in the world told him he would never succeed as a professional musician: he hadn’t started early enough and hadn’t gotten the private lessons he’d needed, the violist explained. He had missed out on key resources that gave his peers an edge. Garcia never gave up the viola, but this devastating advice changed his life and spurred him to action. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, he founded a virtual nonprofit that provides free virtual private lessons to thousands of youth outside of major US cities. By broadening our ideas about what nonprofits can accomplish in the digital age, Garcia says, we can break down geographic, economic and racial barriers to historically exclusive fields like classical music, art and research.

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Miguel Goncalves, impact investor

Big idea: Millennials and Gen Z are set to become the richest generations in history — inheriting 30 trillion dollars’ worth of economic rewards in the coming years. But they’ll also inherit climate change impacts, global instability and a huge and growing wealth gap. Investor Miguel Goncalves believes that wealth can be leveraged to solve these problems through ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) investments, which weigh environmental and social costs and benefits in their return calculations. But how can investors overcome the inertia and bias that many old-guard investors hold towards ESG investments?

How? Recent data suggests that about half of institutional investors consider the benefits of ESG investing to be unproven at best, or unclear at worst. Goncalves thinks that institutional investors are guided by expectations as much as by data, and when it comes down to it, “expectations create reality” — in other words, ESG investing won’t work if people don’t believe in it. To change expectations, Goncalves believes analysts could alter financial metrics to focus on what really matters to each industry, rather than cherry-picking the data that makes companies look good. In addition, financial forecasts should weigh potential blowback from environmental irresponsibility, social scandal or wealth inequality. But what Goncalves believes we really need to make ESG investing work is trust: a belief that companies that do good will be around longer, perform better and, in the end, create sustainable wealth.

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Okong’o Kinyanjui, pan-African LGBTQIA+ advocate

Big idea: In many African countries, outdated colonialist laws make it dangerous for LGBTQIA+ people to share their sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression. In response, online communities are becoming vital safe spaces to combat hate and help people find the support and resources they need to thrive. 

How? Okong’o Kinyanjui co-created the Queer African Network, an online platform aiming to provide every queer African with access to verified opportunities, mentorship, fundraising and support. Through a three-week probation period on the network, community leaders are able to authenticate account holders, keeping bots and blackmailers out of private group chats and events. Once safety is established, the community can offer connections and mentorship, moving people closer to financial stability, without sacrificing their identity. There’s also space for queer Africans to share their stories, creating an archive of their lived experiences that can be used to allocate resources. Through constructive online spaces, communities can challenge oppressive systems and create new structures that prioritize collaboration over discrimination.

What’s next for climate action? The talks from the TED Countdown New York Session 2022

Countdown, TED’s climate action initiative founded in partnership with Future Stewards, launched three years ago with a focus on accelerating solutions to climate change. The goal: to highlight possible pathways forward and weave a story of how we can help build a safer, cleaner, fairer and net-zero future for all.

After creating more than 100 climate-focused TED Talks, supporting over 1,000 TEDxCountdown events and attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in climate investments, Countdown returned to New York City to explore some of the innovative solutions bringing us closer to achieving a zero-carbon world. Eight speakers (and two performers) shared exciting developments, the challenges that lay ahead and how everything from decarbonization and biochemicals to TikTok and hip-hop can be vehicles for climate action.

The event: Talks from TED Countdown New York Session 2022, hosted by TED’s Bruno Giussani and Logan McClure Davda

When and where: Tuesday, June 14, 2022, at the TED World Theater in New York City

Speakers: Zahra Biabani, James Irungu Mwangi, Olivia Lazard, Samir Ibrahim, MyVerse, Kristen Warren, Patricia Villarrubia-Gomez, Miguel A. Modestino, Yuval Noah Harari, Peggy Shepard

The talks in brief:

Zahra Biabani, climate activist

Big idea: Using the power of social media, we can promote climate optimism and avoid the hopelessness that leads to climate inaction.

How? When Zahra Biabani learned that 56 percent of Gen Zers believe humanity is doomed, she began posting “Weekly Earth Wins” videos that combine feel-good TikTok dances with positive climate news. Her goal? To combat “climate doom-ism,” an obstacle she says now rivals climate denialism in the fight to save Earth’s climate. Her comments section quickly filled up with grateful messages from young people who were losing hope. Today, Biabani is part of EcoTok, an online activist collective that uses social media to break the cycle of doom and gloom. Climate optimism, Biabani says, isn’t about ignoring the existential threat the climate crisis poses to life on Earth. It’s a way to cultivate hope so people continue fighting for change and don’t give in to “the very entities that have gotten us into this mess.”

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James Irungu Mwangi, strategist, social entrepreneur 

Big question: By themselves, cuts in emissions will not mitigate the looming disaster of climate change — and while we might be able to accelerate Mother Nature’s innate abilities to scrub greenhouse gasses, that alone won’t save us either. As the climate clock ticks, James Irungu Mwangi sees increased investments in carbon sequestering technologies like DAC (direct air capture), BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage) and BiCRS (biomass carbon removal and storage). But will these investments be enough to save us?

An answer: To date, carbon-sequestering tech has removed only 100,000 tons of CO2 from our atmosphere, a far cry from the billions of tons we must remove to reduce global warming. And scaling these technologies in places that already have a huge fossil fuel footprint will have no impact without a difficult transition to fully renewable energy. But there are places where we can sequester carbon and build a renewable power grid at the same time — places like Kenya, with plenty of forest and basalt rock, plenty of renewable energy potential and no current emissions that would need to be displaced. As humanity embarks on its biggest energy transition ever, Mwangi calls on the world to recognize and prioritize Africa’s climate action potential.

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Olivia Lazard, environmental peacemaking expert

Big idea: A fossil-fuel-free future is crucial to world peace and the resolution of future conflict, and renewables are the path to this future. But they require materials — minerals such as lithium, which must be mined. The countries controlling these resources and their processing (such as China) will find themselves at the center of the global stage.

How? The nations sitting on the natural resources crucial to renewable development are at the epicenter of a new geopolitical reality, as the recent invasion of mineral-rich Ukraine highlights. And while countries in Central Asia, Latin America and Africa could reap great economic benefits from their resources, these resources also put them at risk for exploitation. To avoid this, we must extract resources safely, fight corruption and invest in sustainable economic models. Our ticket to green growth is hidden deep within the environment, Lazard says — this time, let’s make sure we don’t make the same mistakes that got us here.

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Samir Ibrahim, climate entrepreneur, with artists MyVerse and Kristen Warren

Big idea: Hip-hop can make climate action mainstream.

How? The climate crisis is urgent, says Samir Ibrahim, but talking about climate change is generally boring — not to mention depressing. As a climate-positive CEO and a lifelong hip-hop lover, Ibrahim’s got an off-beat idea for inspiring climate action through hip-hop. In 1993, Snoop Dogg’s hit “Gin and Juice” led to a 20 percent increase in sales of Seagram’s Gin (the brand named in the song). Ibrahim believes that future hip-hop artists can do for the climate crisis what Snoop Dogg did for his song’s eponymous mixed drink. He points to the long history of hip-hop artists leveraging their cultural capital to influence society’s views and engagement with topics like mental health and suicide. He says hip-hop can also bring climate vernacular to the masses. As a proof of concept, he invites MyVerse and Kristen Warren onstage to perform their original climate-focused rap.

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Patricia Villarrubia-Gomez, plastic pollution researcher

Big idea: Swapping plastic grocery bags for canvas totes won’t solve our plastic problem. If we want to address the climate consequences of producing and consuming plastic, we need to consider plastic as more than a waste management issue.

How? Plastic now touches even the most remote areas of the planet — from the snowy caps of Mount Everest to the deepest sea trenches to unborn babies in the womb. According to Patricia Villarrubia Gomez, the total mass of plastics is now double the total mass of all living animals on the planet. And all of this plastic spells trouble for our planet’s future. Villarrubia Gomez breaks down the consequences of plastic production at every stage, from fossil fuel extraction to the disposal of single-use plastics in landfills, incinerators and our planet’s precious waterways. Even after it’s thrown away, plastic continues to wreak havoc, releasing greenhouse gasses and other toxins. To deal with this staggeringly complex problem, Villarrubia Gomez says, we need to address plastic’s entire lifecycle, including its production, design and disposal.

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Miguel A. Modestino, sustainable engineering researcher 

Big question: Modern industry is the foundation of not only the world’s economies but also of the human way of life. Yet without crucial reforms to chemical manufacturing, global industry could be central to society’s downfall. Its massive carbon footprint (and that of the fossil fuels that lie at its heart) has already contributed to the loss of natural wonders such as the tropical glaciers in Miguel A. Modestino’s native Venezuela. How might industry contribute to a sustainable future?

An answer: Modestino’s research team at New York University studies electrochemical engineering — chemical reactions that source their energy directly from electricity, as opposed to fossil fuels. They’re working to develop new reactions that aim to increase efficiency and decrease the emissions impact of chemical manufacturing, supply chains and transportation. These innovations, in tandem with retrofitting chemical plants to run on renewables and sequestering carbon before it hits the atmosphere, could transform not only the chemical industry but also the face of the planet.

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Yuval Noah Harari, historian, scholar 

Big idea: Nobody really knows how much it will cost to dodge the worst impacts of climate change. Yet Yuval Noah Harari’s research indicates that humanity might avert catastrophe by investing only two percent of global GDP into climate solutions. In other words, solving climate change will not require major disruption — we just need to change our priorities.

How? Researchers may quibble about the exact number, but the truth is simple — only a small amount of global GDP would be required to avoid the most apocalyptic climate change scenarios. And this money will not be sacrificed, but rather directed towards investments in new infrastructure and energy sources that will not only save the planet but also establish new (and sustainable) vectors of global posterity. A slight shift of political priorities spearheaded by citizens and politicians is all we need to redirect our resources. “As the climate crisis worsens, too many people are swinging from denial straight to despair,” Harari says. “But we should not lose hope. Humanity has enormous resources under its command, and by applying them wisely, we can still prevent ecological cataclysm.”

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Peggy Shepard, environmental justice leader

Big idea: To achieve environmental justice, we must address the disproportionate impact of pollution and environmental hazards on Black and brown communities.

Why? Everyone has the right to live in a clean environment, says Peggy Shepard. But in the United States, the complex legacy of racism, housing segregation and zoning laws have long determined where people of color can live. As a result, many Black and brown families often reside in what Shepard calls “sacrifice zones”: communities on the frontlines of pollution and environmental hazards like landfills, incinerators or petrochemical plants. By raising awareness about the health consequences of contamination and mobilizing those most affected, Shepard explains, the environmental justice movement aims to turn high-risk areas into some of the world’s first “green zones.”

The talks of TED@BCG 2022

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

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

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

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

The talks in brief:

Ashley M. Grice, purpose expert

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

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

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Shervin Khodabandeh, human and AI visionary

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

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

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

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

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

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Hyeonmi Kim, strategy consultant 

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

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

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Bernhard Kowatsch, social entrepreneur

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

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

Join us Saturday, October 30 @ 12pm ET for the Countdown Global Livestream

Take action on climate change. Tune in on Saturday, October 30, 2021 at 12pm ET for the TED Countdown Global Livestream: an empowering virtual event laying out a credible and realistic pathway to a net-zero future. Presented in collaboration with YouTube Originals and COP26.

Watch on TED’s YouTube channel on October 30 @ 12pm ET »

Hosted live from the TED World Theater in New York City by two-time TED speaker and Radiolab host Latif Nasser, this free virtual event combines new TED Talks, live performances, short films, expert conversations and more, vividly explaining the climate crisis, focusing on solutions and calling for leaders and citizens everywhere to step up.

Here’s the full lineup:

A Pathway Opens – presented by Mark Ruffalo, featuring:
Amina J. Mohammed, UN Deputy Secretary-General
Gabriel Kra, Climate tech investor
Clover Hogan, Climate activist and researcher on eco-anxiety
Johan Rockström, Climate impact scholar
John Doerr, Engineer, investor & Ryan Panchadsaram, Systems innovator 

Reducing – presented by Forest Whitaker, featuring:
Tzeporah Berman, Environmental campaigner
Ilissa Ocko, Atmospheric scientist
Ermias Kebreab, Animal scientist
Chibeze Ezekiel, Climate inclusion activist

Protecting – presented by Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, featuring:
Enric Sala, Marine ecologist
Susan Ruffo, Ocean expert
Shweta Narayan, Climate and health campaigner
Rosamund Kissi-Debrah, Clean air advocate
Ma Jun, Environmentalist, writer, scholar

Transforming – presented by Joaquin Phoenix & Rooney Mara, featuring:
Solomon Goldstein-Rose, Climate author
Solitaire Townsend, Sustainability solution seeker
Jim Hagemann-Snabe, Chairman, Maersk and Siemens
Nili Gilbert, Investment decarbonization expert
Vishaan Chakrabarti, Architect and author
Derek Sarno, Chef

One Planet – presented by Regina Hall, featuring:
Melati Wijsen, Activist, social entrepreneur
Sophia Kianni, Climate knowledge translator
Farwiza Farhan, Forest conservationist
Nemonte Nenquimo, Indigenous leader
Sister True Dedication, Zen Buddhist nun

Other features include:

• Musical performances by Valerie June, Dave Matthews, Charlie Puth
• Al Roker + Vice President Al Gore on extreme weather
• What is COP26? And why does it matter? With Christiana Figueres, Gonzalo Munoz and other climate leaders from around the world
• Climate justice with Reverend Lennox Yearwood
• A declaration to leaders around the world about the changes young people want to see in the real economy now, shared by Shiv Soin + Xiye Bastida
• TED’s Science Curator David Biello answering your questions
• An exciting update on the Drive Electric campaign with TED Countdown speaker Monica Araya
• Animated explainers and more!

Countdown is a global initiative to champion and accelerate solutions to the climate crisis. The goal is to build a better future by cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 in the race to a zero-carbon world — a world that is safer, cleaner and fairer for everyone. Every person, organization, company, city and nation is invited to collaborate with Countdown and take action on climate. It is a movement open to everyone — and everyone has a vital role to play.

Learn more about #TEDCountdown:
Website: https://countdown.ted.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TEDCountdown
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tedcountdown
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@tedtoks
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TED

One planet: Notes from Session 7 of Countdown Summit

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After a week of hearing from the cutting-edge of climate action, we’ve filled our minds and hearts with ideas and solutions for a net-zero future. We gather for this final session of Countdown energized, curious and hopeful, knowing that we all share this floating rock in space — and we that need to take care of it together.

Session 7 brings us an incredible group of speakers who are helping heal the world, from confronting greenwashing and increasing access to climate information in all languages to protecting Earth’s natural habitats and designing sustainable cities.

The event: Countdown Summit: Session 7, hosted by Future Stewards cofounder Lindsay Levin and TED’s Chris Anderson Bruno Giussani, at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre in Edinburgh, Scotland on Friday, October 15, 2021

Speakers: Patricia Espinosa, Laurence Tubiana, Gonzalo Muñoz, Xiye Bastida, Shiv Soin, Vishaan Chakrabarti, Nemonte Nenquimo, Sister True Dedication, Sophia Kianni

Performance: Experimental vocalist and virtuoso instrumentalist Reeps100 fills the room with otherworldly sounds and complex rhythms that transcend genre. Reminiscent of beatboxing, experimental jazz and electronic music, this new-wave pioneer treats the Countdown audience to a performance like no other, exploring the past, present and future of vocal expression.

A pledge: The children of Palau have created the Palau Pledge to protect their island, home to incredibly rich marine life, fertile soils and a population of 20,000 people. They promise to respect and preserve its culture, and they share this promise with visitors as part of the visa in their passports when they visit, so that all who come can bring this sentiment back home with them: “We do not inherit the land and waters from our ancestors. We borrow them from our children.”

The talks in brief:

Gonzalo Muñoz, UN’s High Level Climate Action Champion, COP25; Patricia Espinosa, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change; and Laurence Tubiana, CEO of the European Climate Foundation

Big idea: Just two and a half weeks out from the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, where are we?

The answer: Reflecting on the challenges of previous COP conferences, Patricia Espinosa — Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change — explains how important the human aspect is to these landmark meetings. Building trust and making people feel comfortable and welcome are top-of-mind for her heading into Glasgow, lessons she learned when Mexico played host to COP16 after a failed effort to reach a global climate agreement in Copenhagen in 2009. “We have the solutions. We have the creativity. We have the resources. We need to ask our leaders to make it happen,” she says of the upcoming meeting. For Laurence Tubiana, CEO of the European Climate Foundation, showing vulnerability is also part of the process of change. She shares the story of bringing the draft of the Paris Agreement to the negotiating group comprised of oil-producing countries and the world’s biggest emitters on the very last day of COP21 in 2015, describing what they would like and what they would hate in the new agreement. After a long, loud silence, her emotions broke and she began to cry, only to be greeted with compassion by the group — as well as a commitment to signing the agreement. Now, Tubiana sees both excitement and fear emerging ahead of COP26. “We have to bet that we can win,” she says.

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Xiye Bastida and Shiv Soin, climate activists

Big idea: A list of demands for leaders of the world.

How? Xiye Bastida and Shiv Soin come bearing a list of six demands for global leaders, written by youth climate activists this week at Countdown: 1) Divest from all fossil fuel investments, reinvest in green energy and ensure a just transition led by workers and impacted communities; 2) Center climate justice in all key policy decisions; 3) Stop all open pipelines and oil extraction initiatives from Line 3 in the United States to Cambo in Scotland; 4) Hold large corporations accountable for their actions that contribute directly to the climate crisis; 5) Create policies to protect activists’ rights to peaceful protest and safeguard democracy around the world; and 6) Remove the economic, political and social influence of fossil fuel companies from key international climate negotiations. This list of demands is not exhaustive to solve the climate crisis, they say — it’s the bare minimum.

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Vishaan Chakrabarti, architect and author

Big idea: To house the Earth’s growing population without worsening our climate, we need to construct new dwellings on a human scale. 

How? By 2100, the UN estimates that the Earth’s population will grow to just over 11 billion people. Architect and author Vishaan Chakrabarti wants us to start thinking about how we’ll house all these people, and how new construction can fight climate change rather than make it worse. While tall-timber construction, solar glass and green energy grids offer hope for future skyscrapers, these technologies are still new (and expensive). Chakrabarti proposes a “goldilocks” solution: compact, walkable neighborhoods where all buildings are human-scale, meaning two and three stories tall like the row houses in Boston or the hutongs in Beijing. By designing at this scale, we can construct buildings to accommodate more people than single-family homes and still have enough roof space to generate solar power to meet each building’s needs. The neighborhoods Chakrabarti imagines can also host more trees than typical urban dwellings and support green mass transit systems such as light rail, express buses and bike networks. It’s an inspiring vision for the future where housing works in harmony with the planet.

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Nemonte Nenquimo, Indigenous leader 

Big idea: People worldwide must stand with the Amazon’s Indigenous communities and demand that the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest stop.

Why? For thousands of years, the Amazonian rainforest has provided life, nourishment, water and spiritual connection to its Indigenous inhabitants, explains Waorani leader Nemonte Nenquimo — but the endless extraction of its natural resources by outsiders is destroying the forest and the lives of those who live there. When she walks through the Amazon rainforest, she sees plants she can eat, leaves she can use to heal, vines to make baskets and wood to build good homes. But outsiders, she says, are blind to the value of the jungle. They view the Amazon as land to plunder and exploit for oil, natural minerals, fertile soil — with dire consequences for the forest and the entire planet. The Amazon is burning, Nenquimo reminds us. Oil spills and mineral extraction have contaminated its waterways; big agriculture has clear-cut millions of hectares of forest, destroying wildlife and damaging the sacred spiritual connection the Amazon’s Indigenous communities have with the land. She demands that outsiders leave the guardianship of the forest to those who have inhabited it for thousands of years. “Mother Earth is waiting for us to respect her,” she says, “and we as Indigenous peoples expect the same.”

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Sister True Dedication, Zen Buddhist nun

Big idea: In order to take the kind of radical, decisive action that our planet is calling for, we need to be fully present, grounded and alert.

How? Why is it so hard to change the direction of our civilization? At this point, what’s missing is not more facts, information or even technology — it’s insight, says Zen Buddhist nun Sister True Dedication. We can’t hope to change the world if we can’t change our way of seeing things, says Sister True’s teacher, Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh. So, how do we do it? One step at a time — literally. Sister True guides us through the art of mindful walking, a powerful meditation practice centered in Zen tradition. Every moment of movement is a chance to become more aware of ourselves, the world around us and where those two experiences meet. While moving through space, Sister True puts forth three questions to help spark further awakening. The first: who are you? An invitation to reflect on how you are connected through time and being. Second: where are you? Check in with whether you’re present and comfortable. If not, embrace those feelings in order to understand why they’re there. And finally: what do you want? Explore ways to reconnect with what’s essential to creating innermost peace. We can’t help the planet if we’re numb or overwhelmed — nurturing mindful and radical love is the key to awakening to the preciousness of life and the strength we have to save it.

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Sophia Kianni, Climate knowledge translator

Big idea: The vast majority of scientific articles are written in English. That’s a big problem for climate change, because 75 percent of the world doesn’t speak it.

Why? When Sophia Kianni was just 12 years old, she witnessed smog so thick in her native Iran that it obscured the stars. When talking to her relatives about it, she was shocked that they knew almost nothing about how climate change was causing this — a direct result of the lack of climate resources available in Farsi. With 80 percent of scholarly articles written entirely in English according to a SCOPUS study, language remains a significant barrier in the transfer of scientific information. Kianni explains how this inaccessibility comes at a high cost — especially to countries that are at most risk of climate change. “As recently as six years ago, over 40 percent of adults in the world had never heard of climate change. Let me repeat that: two adults out of five had never heard of climate change,” says Kianni. In an effort to close that gap, she founded Climate Cardinals: an international youth-led nonprofit that’s working to make climate information more accessible. Having translated articles into hundreds of languages, word by word, they help protect the planet by not allowing English to be the barrier to climate action. “People who are being disproportionately affected by climate change deserve to have access to the resources they need to make sense of the disasters that are destroying their communities and what they can do about it,” Kianni.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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Tom Osborn, mental health innovator

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

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

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Jenna C. Lester, dermatologist

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

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

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Alicia Chong Rodriguez, health care technology entrepreneur

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

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

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Jim Chuchu, filmmaker

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

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

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Germán Santillán, cultural chocolatier

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

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

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Lei Li, medical imaging innovator

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

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

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Nithya Ramanathan, technologist

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

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

Well, well, well! Notes from Session 3 of TEDMonterey

The central topic of Session 3 is, surely, on many of our minds: health. From the technology powering the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine to new Alzheimer’s treatment possibilities, these amazing speakers give a glimpse at exciting new frontiers of medicine. Plus, an artist drawing live onstage!

The event: TEDMonterey: Session 3, hosted by TED’s Chris Anderson on Monday, August 2, 2021

Speakers: Uğur Şahin, Özlem Türeci, Kathryn Whitehead, Jarrett J. Krosoczka, Ian Kerner, Li-Huei Tsai, Nabiha Saklayen

The talks in brief:

Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, cofounders of BioNTech

Big idea: When COVID-19 first reared its many-crowned head in January of 2020, immunologists Özlem Türeci and Uğur Şahin saw an opportunity to develop a vaccine at “light speed,” using revolutionary mRNA technology to turn the body’s own immune system into a COVID-fighting factory.

How? Türeci and Şahin’s development of the first approved COVID-19 vaccine impacted the lives of millions — if not billions — of people worldwide, who were previously defenseless against the deadliest virus to hit humanity in a century. The husband-and-wife team had started their firm BioNTech as a way to bypass the glacial channels of traditional research, and thus were uniquely suited to bring a vaccine to market quickly. Their revolutionary approach used messenger RNA (mRNA) to address the body’s immune system at the cellular level, compiling chemical source code to “teach” cells how to produce antibodies personalized to each patient. As Türeci puts it: mRNA strands are the “generals which call all the different special forces and train them on the wanted poster of the attackers.” And far from being effective only against COVID-19, mRNA therapy offers the promise of individually adaptable treatments for a variety of cellular disorders, including cancer.

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Kathryn A. Whitehead, engineer, teacher, innovator

Big idea: Messenger RNA (or mRNA) is about to change the world forever.

How? After years of research, Kathryn A. Whitehead and her team have finally created the perfect vehicle for delivering life-saving yet delicate mRNA information through vaccines: lipid nanoparticles. She takes us down to the nano level to break down this fatty packaging into its four key ingredients: phospholipids, cholesterol, ionizable lipids and a polymer called PEG. These components make up the ideal “shipping materials” for delivering life-saving vaccines to our body’s cells. Amazingly, her work is paving the way for mRNA therapies that can treat or cure diseases that have unrelentingly plagued us, including cancer, Type 1 diabetes, muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis as well as the flu, malaria, Ebola, Zika and HIV. As she puts it: “mRNA therapies are going to usher in a new era of medicine in human health forever, and it’s all thanks to these fatty little balls that deliver this miracle medicine to exactly where it needs to go.”

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Jarrett J. Krosoczka, author, illustrator

Big idea: Stories keep people alive and help us remember, share and process the human experience.

How? Equipped with sheets of paper and a mug full of markers, Jarrett J. Krosoczka takes us on an autobiographical journey during a live drawing presentation. He begins by drawing his younger self surrounded by his grandfather and the ancestors he was introduced to through family stories. Krosoczka used his sketchbook as a means of escape from the chaos of his upbringing and as a way to connect with his incarcerated mother, who was also an artist. As a teenager, he volunteered at a camp for children with cancer, befriending a four-year-old boy named Eric who had recently been diagnosed with Leukemia. Krosoczka’s drawing of Eric is vibrant, depicting the boy with a Power Rangers sword in hand and a huge grin. Krosoczka shares the difficulties of recounting his experience at the camp in his graphic memoir, Sunshine, and how its creation forced him to come face-to-face with unspoken losses. While this can be painful, he explains, stories are an opportunity to understand the human experience, deal with absence and bring loved ones back to life on the page.

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Ian Kerner, psychotherapist

Big idea: If you’re experiencing a lack of sexual desire, increasing psychological stimulation can help boost feelings of arousal.

How? Failure to launch, or the inability to build and maintain sexual momentum, is a common problem plaguing the couples who work with sex therapist Ian Kerner. His solution? An “arousal runway” of psychological stimulation. In other words, he suggests getting the mind in on the action before anything physical begins. For couples dealing with shame around sex, he recommends starting with side-to-side experiences like listening to a sexy podcast together or reading literary erotica aloud. Other couples might try face-to-face experiences, such as sharing sexual fantasies to bring some psychological stimuli back into the relationship. After a year spent in a pandemic (and in our pajamas), Kerner reminds us that if we’re not feeling super sexy, there’s nothing wrong with our libidos — we just need to try some new strategies to get the sparks flying.

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Li-Huei Tsai, professor, neuroscientist

Big idea: A promising approach to Alzheimer’s and dementia treatment lies in a mind-blowing (or rather, mind-healing) application of gamma wave stimulation.

How? Of the many signals that fire our synapses, the brain relies on gamma frequencies, or waves, to coordinate cellular activity and keep everything in sync. So when these specific brain waves become weaker, it is often an early indication of dementia or Alzheimer’s. In seeking to understand and treat this degenerative disease, Li-Huei Tsai and her team asked an intriguing question and found promising answers: What if we artificially boosted the brain’s gamma waves? They started with mice and, through light and sound stimulation carrying the gamma frequency, discovered profound benefits, such as improved memory and less brain decay. But as Tsai says, mice are nice … but people are the point. Now they’re testing on humans with an at-home device that emits the same gamma output and the results, so far, are exciting: reduced brain atrophy, improved mental function and increased synchrony. While it’s early days and there’s still work to be done, she’s already seeing a lot of evidence that this approach seems safe and that humans tolerate gamma wave stimulation well — meaning this non-invasive treatment could prove accessible for those who need it and usher in a better world and brighter future for everyone.

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Nabiha Saklayen, biotech entrepreneur

Big idea: The future of regenerative medicine is personalized.

How? What if diseases could be treated with a patient’s own cells — precisely and on demand? This may sound like science fiction, but through personalized, stem-cell-derived therapies, Nabiha Saklayen says this future is closer than we think. How could this work? The answer lies in automation through machine learning. Currently, stem cells are painstakingly difficult (and expensive) to engineer, requiring scientists to manually remove unwanted cells from stem cell cultures. Saklayen describes how we could leverage physics, biology and algorithms to scale up an alternative, affordable approach — gathering the perfect culture of your own personal stem cells by utilizing the precision of a computer. Imagining a revolution in personalized pharmaceuticals, forecasts a world where every person could have a personalized bank of these cells to be used as needed.

Raise your voice: Notes from Session 2 of TEDWomen 2020

Diversity of ideas is more important now than ever. Session 2 of TEDWomen 2020 — hosted by poet Aja Monet, who gave a dazzling talk at TEDWomen 2018 — featured a dynamic range of talks and performances from some of the world’s most extraordinary risk-takers and innovators.

Music: From the stoop of her brownstone, singer-songwriter Madison McFerrin performs “TRY” — a synth-infused invitation to be your best self.

Special appearances: Mercy Akamo, organizer of TEDxLagos, and Keita Demming, organizer of TEDxPortofSpain, introduce this session’s TEDx speakers, part of a global collaboration between the TEDWomen team and an incredible group of TEDx organizers.

The session in brief:

Adie Delaney, circus performer and sexual harm prevention educator

Big idea: We need to broaden our definition of consent: it is not a box to check off but an active dialogue that centers trust, communication and care.

How? In her role as a circus instructor, Adie Delaney teaches students how to listen to and trust their bodies, and how to communicate when they’re no longer comfortable. She quickly realized that she wasn’t just teaching children how to balance on a trapeze — she was also passing along vital lessons on consent. In addition to her circus career, Delaney works with teenagers on sexual harm prevention, helping them better understand how to practice consent. It’s vital that we integrate asking for and giving consent into our daily lives, whether or not it’s in an intimate setting, Delaney says. Whenever we are interacting with the bodies of others, we need to be sure everyone involved is safe and comfortable. By ensuring young people have the framework and language to clearly communicate their needs around their bodies, we can help them better care for themselves and each other.

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Kemi DaSilva-Ibru, obstetrician and gynecologist

Big idea: Everybody has the right to live in a society free from gender-based violence — and communities can help. 

How? The mandatory lockdowns, quarantines and shelter-in-place orders that have confined people to their homes since the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis have placed some in another unsafe situation, prompting a shadow pandemic of domestic abuse worldwide. In Nigeria, the situation prompted the federal government to declare a state of emergency on rape. Dr. Kemi DaSilva-Ibru, founder of the Women at Risk International Foundation, which assists Nigerians facing gender-based violence, speaks from her home in Lagos on how the country is responding to this second crisis. More than 1,000 basic health care providers who service remote areas are being retrained as first responders to help in domestic violence situations, she says. These community-based men and women perform house visits, allowing people to share their stories and receive the medical care and support they need. To reach even more people, the program will soon train local police and religious leaders who have close ties to the community, providing even more accessible help and resources.

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Kylar W. Broadus, defense attorney

Big idea: See beyond bias and stereotypes and treat people as the human beings they are.

How? For 25 years, Kylar W. Broadus has witnessed both conscious and unconscious bias inhibit justice in the courtroom — a pattern, well documented throughout history, of skin color and identity dictating harsher, lengthier punishments. To effectively dismantle this bias, Broadus believes a gentle yet consistent nudge in the right direction makes a stronger impression in encouraging people to uphold the shared humanity of others. He practices this subtle signaling in his own work, as the bridge between the client and courtroom, by modeling the behavior he wants the court to mirror — and succeeding. All people live with biases, but if we’re ever going to change society for the better, then we must pivot toward respect and see each other for the content of our character and the humanity we share.

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Elizabeth Diller, architect, artist, designer

Big idea: Public space must be as free and abundant as the air we breathe.

Why? Our cities are becoming progressively privatized: commercial building projects and real estate dominate the streets, squeezing out space that once belonged to society at large. Elizabeth Diller says that architects must staunchly defend, advocate for and reclaim this public space, serving as a kind of creative protector against urban privatization, neglect and lack of vision. For her part, Diller helped convert a derelict railroad in New York City into the High Line, a stunning, elevated public park that is both a “portal into the city’s subconscious” and a landmark on the world tourism map. She likewise helped design a park in central Moscow — beating out plans for a giant commercial development — that has since become a bastion of civic expression and a home to social reform against a repressive regime. Now, she encourages other architects, artists and citizens to join in on this work subversively to (re)empower the public. As she puts it: “[We must] relentlessly advocate for a democratic public realm so dwindling urban space is not forfeited to the highest bidder.”

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Angélique Parisot-Potter, legal and business integrity leader

Big idea: Be an “upstander”: someone who doesn’t shy away from difficult moments and discussions.

How? As a consultant who helps brands build integrity by rooting out the “open secrets” that corrode workplace ethics, Angélique Parisot-Potter is used to overturning the wrong stones. But sometimes in the pursuit of doing the right thing, she has overturned one stone too many — and found herself at odds with powerful adversaries and ostracized by colleagues. How does one stand up to bad actors (and those who let them get away with their subterfuge), even in the face of threats, coercion and isolation? The most important thing to be, says Parisot-Potter, is an upstander: someone who doesn’t shy away from dark corners and instead exposes them to the light. Although this path is difficult, the rewards — like being able to face one’s self in the mirror every day — are as rich as they are intangible. Becoming an upstander is simple: when you see something wrong, don’t second guess yourself and instead ask the difficult questions no one else is asking. Most importantly, don’t be complicit — you always have the power to say “enough is enough.”

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Tracy Young, builder

Big idea: Don’t be afraid to show up to work as your complete, raw self. 

Why? Tracy Young cofounded a start-up in 2011, serving as the company’s CEO as it grew from five employees to 450. Along the way, she recalls worrying that employees and investors would value male leaders more, and that being a woman might compromise her position as CEO. Partly for that reason, she continued coming into work through the later months of her pregnancy, and was quick to return just six weeks after giving birth. She also shares the heart-rending story of having a miscarriage at work during her second pregnancy, and returning to a meeting as though nothing had happened. Now, she realizes her womanhood is nothing to be ashamed of: she shares the full range of her emotions at work, leading more authentically and actively asking her team for help. This has fundamentally changed how they build and problem solve together, she says, creating a work culture that is more close-knit and efficient. To her fellow leaders out there, Young’s advice is: “Don’t be afraid to trust and be yourself completely.”

Join us for TEDWomen 2020: Fearless on November 12

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

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

TEDWomen 2020 speakers and performers include:

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

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

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

Urgency: Notes from Session 1 of the Countdown Global Launch

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

Today, 10.10.2020, is the climate’s day of destiny: the Countdown Global Launch, a call to action on climate change and the first-ever free TED conference.

Launching Countdown means asking ourselves the big questions: What’s the state of the climate today? How are we going to achieve a net-zero future? How do we center climate justice in our work? We heard from experts, policymakers and activists in this opening session, cohosted by actor and director Don Cheadle and actor and climate change advocate Mark Ruffalo, who reflected on their own love for the environment, as people who grew up in the midwestern United States.

The opening remarks were followed by an introduction from head of TED Chris Anderson and head of Future Stewards Lindsay Levin, who teamed up to create Countdown a year ago. They laid out what we’re hoping to achieve at the Countdown Global Launch: taking a deep look at what it will take to tackle climate change, specifically by harnessing creativity and innovation to cut carbon emissions in half by 2030 and get to net-zero by 2050.

The talks in brief:

Johan Rockström, climate impact scholar

Big idea: Earth’s climate has reached a global crisis point. We have 10 years to avoid irreparably destabilizing the planet.

How? In his TED Talk from 2010, Johan Rockström outlined nine planetary boundaries that keep earth’s ecosystems in a state of stability, allowing humanity to prosper. At that time, evidence showed that just one planetary boundary was at risk of being breached: Arctic sea ice. A decade later, Rockström warns us that nine out of the 15 big biophysical systems that regulate climate — from the permafrost of Siberia to the great forests of the North to the Amazon rainforest — are approaching tipping points, which would create a “hot-house Earth” largely uninhabitable for humanity. “These systems are all linked like dominoes: you cross one tipping point, you lurch closer to others,” Rockström says. So what are we to do? Over the next 10 years, we need to get serious about stabilizing the planet. Rockström proposes a model of “planetary stewardship” rooted in science-based targets for all global commons (i.e., the ecosystems that support the planet’s stability) and an economy based on well-being, which would decarbonize big systems like energy, industry, transport and buildings. “This is our mission,” he says. “To protect our children’s future.”

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Angel Hsu, climate and data scientist

Big idea: Tackling climate change must start in cities, and many around the world are already implementing ambitious plans.

How? Cities are at the highest risk of the damaging effects of climate change: all-time temperature highs, sweltering humidity, rising sea levels, suffocating air pollution. The irony is that cities are also the biggest offenders in causing this shift in climate, says Angel Hsu. Cities pump out 70 percent of the world’s total carbon emissions and gobble up between 60 to 80 percent of global energy resources. The good news, Hsu says, is that cities are quickly becoming leaders in the fight against climate change by forging new, low-emission pathways. Already, 10,000 cities have pledged to undertake sweeping climate initiatives. Now Hsu asks: What impact could we make if 20,000 cities made these same efforts? At the same time, she points out that cities must fairly and equitably implement these initiatives across all populations, especially for those most at risk. For example, expanded bike paths in Latin America will connect more people to jobs, schools and parks, while in Africa, green power grids have the ability to electrify nearly 73 million power-deficient households. Cities may be causing climate change, but they also have the power to mitigate it while raising the quality of life for their populations.

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António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations

Big idea: The race to a zero emission world is under way. If we don’t act now, this coming century may be one of humanity’s last.

How? As the world continues to struggle through the COVID-19 pandemic, António Guterres urges us to use this moment to rebuild with ambitious climate action in mind. Momentum is increasing, he says, as companies, cities and countries commit to reaching net zero emissions by 2050. He outlines six actions that governments can take to keep ramping up their climate ambitions: invest in green jobs, drop polluting industries, end fossil fuel subsidies, put a price on carbon, take climate risks into account in all financial and policy considerations and work together in solidarity — leaving no one behind. During next year’s Countdown Summit (October 12-15, 2021, Edinburgh, Scotland), Guterres expects to share an actionable blueprint for a net-zero future and celebrate the progress that’s already been made. “We can only win the race to zero together,” he says. “So I urge you all to get on board. The countdown has begun.” 

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Climate Action Tracker, an interactive online map that monitors the climate commitments of countries worldwide

Big idea: With the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, 197 countries agreed to set emission targets that would limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius by capping greenhouse emissions at “net zero” — or absorbing as much carbon as they emit — by 2050. So far, only two countries (Gambia and Morocco) are hitting their targets, while the biggest emitters are falling flat, or ignoring their goals entirely. How can we hold these countries accountable?

How? Enter the Climate Action Tracker, an interactive tool that allows citizens to track the climate commitments and actions of the 36 countries that emit 86 percent of global greenhouse gases. Emissions are still rising, according to the Tracker, and there’s more bad news: the US has withdrawn from the Paris Agreements, and while China’s goals alone could drop global warming by .3 degrees, their actions are troubling, as they continue to invest in new coal plants while touting green energy. The good news: the Tracker reveals that many cities and businesses within some of the biggest economies are committed to green electricity and emission-free transportation and construction.

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David Lammy, Member of Parliament, UK

Big idea: There cannot be true climate justice without addressing racial, social and intergenerational issues. The global community must invite Black voices to lead in repairing our systems, society and planet. 

Why? Black people and people of color are most at risk of climate change due to cheap housing, polluted neighborhoods and other systemic inequities. So where are all the Black climate activists? According to David Lammy, the first Black MP to hold the Justice post in British Parliament, racial justice and climate justice have been viewed as distinct problems, with equality advocates seeing environmentalism as elitist while white climate activists rarely enlist the support of Black voices. Lammy sees the climate emergency as the direct result of generations of violent abuse, disregard and theft of minority communities. “The climate crisis is colonialism’s natural conclusion,” he says. To repair the Earth, we must solve the racial, social and economic injustices that plague communities of color. Lammy calls for environmental groups, international organizations, the press and everyone in between to support Black leaders on climate, including awarding scholarships for people of color, enacting stronger international laws to support vulnerable communities and even moving company headquarters to the urban areas most affected by the climate emergency.

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Christiana Figueres, stubborn optimist

Big idea: To face a problem as big as climate change, the world needs to adopt a new mindset: stubborn optimism.

How? Christiana Figueres, the climate leader who helped broker the historic Paris Agreement in 2015, learned stubborn optimism from her father, José Figueres Ferrer. He refused to give up on his country, Costa Rica, when it was thrown into political crisis in 1948. Instead, he took action, set out to restore democracy and bring peace to his homeland and was elected as the country’s president three times. Today, in the face of an extreme climate crisis that threatens the globe, Figueres champions her father’s special brand of optimism. “Our optimism cannot be a sunny day attitude,” she says. “It has to be gritty, determined, relentless. It is a choice we have to make every single day. Every barrier must be an indication to try a different way. ” With a remarkable fighting spirit and an unwillingness to accept defeat, she urges everyone to envision the future they want for humanity — and work to make it reality.

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Bronx-raised Latin music superstar Prince Royce also adds his voice to the call for action on climate. “Climate change is the defining issue of our time,” he says. “History is defined by moments when people rise up and cause change. The decisions we make as individuals add to this collective forward motion.” Backed by his band (donning face masks), he performs fan favorites “Luna Negra,” “Carita de Inocente,” “Corazón Sin Cara” and “Darte un Beso.”

TED and Future Stewards announce Countdown, a global initiative to champion and accelerate solutions to the climate crisis

Prince William, His Holiness Pope Francis, Yemi Alade, Monica Araya, Xiye Bastida, Jesper Brodin, Don Cheadle, Dave Clark, Christiana Figueres, Al Gore, António Guterres, Chris Hemsworth, Kara Hurst, Lisa Jackson, Rose Mutiso, Johan Rockström, Prince Royce, Mark Ruffalo, Sigrid, Jaden Smith, Nigel Topping and Ursula von der Leyen join scientists, activists, artists, schools and leaders from business and government to accelerate and amplify solutions

Countdown, a global initiative to champion and accelerate solutions to the climate crisis, will launch on October 10, 2020 with a free five-hour live virtual event featuring leading thinkers and doers. This is the moment to act, and they will outline what a healthy, abundant, zero-emission future can look like—turning ideas into action. The event will combine TED’s signature blend of actionable and research-backed ideas, cutting-edge science, and moments of wonder and inspiration. Countdown is one part of a broader series of actions and events this fall including the Bloomberg Green Festival, Climate Week NYC and others, all with the collective objective of informing and activating millions in the lead-up to a successful UN Climate Change Conference in November 2021.

The Countdown launch will be streamed live on TED’s YouTube channel. This global event will be the first-ever TED conference that is free and open to the public. Segments from the event, including the biggest talks and performances, will be made available immediately across all digital platforms. The program includes 50+ pieces of content—talks, performances, animations and more. Speakers will touch on topics such as:

• Climate science and the climate crisis: Where are we today?

• Why climate justice matters

• Putting climate back on the political and social agenda

• What businesses can do—and are doing—to transform and transition

• Rethinking our cities

• Stepping up at work and at home

• The path to a safer, cleaner, fairer future for people and the planet

A full agenda and speaker list can be found here.

In addition to the live global event, over 500 TEDx Countdown virtual events in nine languages are planned around the world, encouraging communities and citizens to take action locally while also feeding local solutions and ideas into the global conversation. Countdown has also convened a global Youth Council of recognized activists who will help shape the Countdown agenda throughout the year. Additionally, Countdown is working to engage people through art with ten public art installations in global cities around the 10.10.20 event and open calls for art––illustration and photography––to run throughout the year on the Countdown website.

“The moment to act on climate change has been upon us for too long, and now is the time to unite all levels of society—business leaders, courageous political actors, scientists and individuals—to get to net-zero emissions before 2050,” said Chris Anderson, Countdown founding partner and Head of TED. “Climate is a top priority for TED and members of our community, and we are proud to fully dedicate our organization in the fight for our collective future.”

“Countdown brings together a powerful collaboration of partners from all sectors to act on climate change,” said Lindsay Levin, Countdown founding partner and CEO of Leaders’ Quest. “We need to work together with courage and compassion to deliver a healthy, fair, resilient future for everyone.”

With so many people who have already committed to addressing climate change, Countdown is about radical collaboration—convening all stakeholders to build on the critical work already underway and bringing existing, powerful solutions to an even broader audience. Powered by TED and Future Stewards, Countdown aims to answer five fundamental, interconnected questions that inform a blueprint for a better future:

• ENERGY: How rapidly can we switch to 100% clean power?

• TRANSPORT: How can we upgrade the way we move people and things?

• MATERIALS: How can we re-imagine and re-make the stuff around us?

• FOOD: How can we spark a worldwide shift to healthier food systems?

• NATURE: How do we better protect and re-green the earth?

Countdown is asking companies and organizations to join the Race to Zero through Business Ambition for 1.5°C, which is a commitment to set science-based targets aligned with limiting global warming to 1.5°C, and through The Climate Pledge, which calls on signatories to be net-zero carbon by 2040—a decade ahead of the Paris Agreement goal of 2050.

“We can inspire others through action and example, because there is no hope without action,” said 17-year-old climate justice activist Xiye Bastida, a lead organizer of the Fridays for Future youth climate strike movement. “We are fighting to ensure this planet survives and flourishes for future generations, which requires intergenerational cooperation. Countdown is about coming together across ages and sectors to protect the earth and ensure we leave it better than we found it.”

“Five years after the unanimous signing of the Paris Agreement, many countries, companies and citizens are doing what they can about the climate crisis. But this is not enough,” said Christiana Figueres, former UN climate chief (2010-2016), now co-founder of Global Optimism. “We have this decisive decade to achieve what is necessary—cutting global emissions in half over the next ten years is vital to meeting the goal of net zero by 2050. I am delighted to partner with Countdown to increase the global stock of stubborn optimism that is needed to push every company and country—and engage citizens—in actions that decouple carbon from our economy and way of life in this decade.”

Following the launch, Countdown will facilitate a number of sector leader working groups along with the initiative’s network of partner organizations through November 2021. These will focus on delivering breakthrough progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the lead-up to the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow. During next year’s Countdown Summit (October 12-15, 2021, Edinburgh, Scotland), the initiative will share an actionable blueprint for a net-zero future and celebrate the progress that’s already been made.

Citizens are the critical component of this initiative and anyone can #JoinTheCountdown by:

• Joining us—sign up to become part of the movement

• Bringing Countdown to your community—by hosting your own TEDx event

• Tuning in on 10.10.2020—for the live event

• Committing to taking and inspiring action—at work and in your community

• Spreading the word on your own social media and throughout your networks

Connect at Countdown@ted.com

About TED

TED is a nonprofit organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading, often in the form of short talks delivered by leading thinkers and doers. Many of these talks are given at TED conferences, intimate TED Salons and thousands of independently organized TEDx events around the world. Videos of these talks are made available, free, on TED.com and other platforms. Audio versions of TED Talks are published to TED Talks Daily, available on all podcast platforms.

Follow TED on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and on LinkedIn.

About Future Stewards

Future Stewards is a coalition of partners (Leaders’ Quest, Global Optimism and We Mean Business) working together to build a regenerative future – where we meet the needs of all, within the means of the planet. Founded after the Paris Agreement, Future Stewards equips individuals, businesses and communities with the awareness and tools required to tackle systemic problems, scale what works and build cross-sector collaboration.

A smarter future: Notes from Session 7 of TED2020

For the penultimate session of TED2020, an exploration of amazing forces shaping the future — from cancer-fighting venom to spacecraft powered by lasers and much more. Below, a recap of the night’s talks and performances.

Amanda Gorman, poet

Big idea: We all have the power to end the devastation of climate change. Let’s get to work.

How? In a stunning spoken word poem, Gorman calls on us all to recognize the urgency of climate action. She weaves vivid imagery and metaphors to underscore searing insights on the state of global environmental damage, and hope for a sustainable future. Gorman encourages us to use our unique abilities and expertise to reverse the harm of climate change, and says that we all have a place in the movement. “We see the face of a planet anew, we relish the view … which inspires us to ask deeply, wholly, what can we do,” she says.

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Mandë Holford, molecular chemist

Big Idea: Venom can kill … or it can cure. We’re now learning how it can be used as a force for good. 

How: Chemist Mandë Holford is investigating the power of venom to treat diseases and disorders, like certain cancers. Beyond common venomous snakes and spiders, Holford introduces us to the underbelly of the animal kingdom: killer snails, deadly platypuses and assassin Gila monsters. But she sees these creatures as both the supervillain and superhero, and she’s harnessing their venom to transform lives. She explains that venom’s power lies in its complex mixture of deadly peptides — a “cluster bomb” that attacks specific physiological targets like the blood, brains or membranes of the victim. Holford’s research focuses on discovering and utilizing these peptides to create therapeutics that disrupt cancer cells communications, particularly liver cancer. Venomics, or the study of venom, is an especially attractive area of research because poison has been honed and tested by nature over millennia, making for particularly potent, successful concoctions. “Someday, snail venom might just save your life,” Holford says.

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Philip Lubin, physicist

Big idea: By using massive quantities of concentrated light as a propellant, we can fuel spacecraft to journey to explore solar systems beyond our own.

How? We’re making huge strides in the field of laser technology that will enable us to transform how we launch and fuel spacecraft. Much like wind in a sailboat, light can be concentrated as energy to push spacecraft towards new and farther destinations. This would work by synchronizing enormous numbers of lasers into “phased arrays”, which may be as large as a city, to build up the power necessary for inter-solar system flight. Though spacecraft may initially only be as big as a human hand, the discoveries this technology could reveal are awe-inspiring. Traveling to another solar system could alter our fundamental understanding of life itself — and breakthroughs in this technology could revolutionize how we live on Earth as well. “Everything is profound in life. The same is true of the lowly photon which we use to see every day,” says Lubin, “But when we look outside and imagine something vastly greater, we can imagine things which are extraordinary. The ability to go to another star is one of those extraordinary capabilities.”

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Guitarist and composer Antonio Muñoz Fernández keeps the session moving and lively with performances of plays “Taranta” and “Calblanque.”

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Shari Davis, executive director, Participatory Budgeting Project

Big idea: We have to throw out the top-down processes that have hobbled democracy, and throw the doors of government open so wide that all kinds of people will be inspired to claim the reins.

How? For most of US history, government has overwhelmingly consisted of rich white men, who installed systems rewarding people like themselves, says Davis. “What would America look like if everyone had a seat at the table?” she asks. Participatory budgeting is a grassroots democratic initiative that empowers marginalized voices from young queer communities, communities of color and the economically disenfranchised, by giving them chunks of city budgets to solve problems close to their hearts. In Boston, this came about via Youth Lead the Change, an initiative to increase education, expand technology access to students and give graffiti artists a space to legally practice their art. By nurturing new political leaders drawn from those historically denied governmental access, participatory budgeting has become a global phenomenon with the potential to transform democracy. “Participatory budgeting is actually about collective radical imagination,” Davis says. Everyone has a role to play in PB, and it works because it allows community members to craft real solutions to real problems. It provides the infrastructure for the promise of government.”

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Refik Anadol, media artist

Big idea: What does it mean to be an AI in the 21st century?

How? The year is simultaneously 1991 and 2019, media artist Refik Anadol having just seen Blade Runner and its sci-fi future for the first time — an experience which sets in motion his inspired career of using architectural spaces as canvases to make buildings dream and hallucinate via AI. Anadol brings us on a journey from that formative childhood moment to his studio’s collaborations with architects, data scientists, neuroscientists, musicians and storytellers in experimenting with ways of augmenting our perceptions to collide the virtual and physical worlds. Each project showcases the poetic, ethereal and dynamic power of data — such as “Archive Dreaming,” conceptualizing vast knowledge in the age of AI; “Machine Hallucination,” an exploration of time and space; and “Melting Memories,” which visualizes the moment of remembering — evoking a meditative experience beyond human imagination while simultaneously enveloping you into the mind of the machine. “If machines can learn, or process memories, can they also dream, hallucinate, involuntarily remember or make connections between multiple people’s dreams?” Anadol asks.

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Juan Enriquez, futurist

Big idea: Tech doesn’t always lead to unethical behavior. 

How? By making problematic systems obsolete, technology is actually a powerful force for ethical change. If we embrace these changes, we’ll put ourselves on the right side of history for issues like civil rights, climate change and economic justice. As ethics continue to evolve over time, technology’s explosive growth will lead to an exponential transformation of culture. Some examples: our tolerance of wasteful meat production will soon change with lab-created, cruelty-free beef, and as tech revolutionizes renewable energy, we will naturally leave behind coal and oil. “Technology is moving at exponential rates,” Enriquez says. “Technology is changing ethics, and therefore one might expect ethics could change exponentially, and that means your notion of right and wrong changes exponentially.”

Fragility, resilience and restoration at TED2020: The Prequel

It’s a new, strange, experimental day for TED. In a special Earth Day event, TED2020: The Prequel brought the magic of the TED conference to the virtual stage, inviting TED2020 community members to gather for three sessions of talks and engaging, innovative opportunities to connect. Alongside world-changing ideas from leaders in science, political strategy and environmental activism, attendees also experienced the debut of an interactive, TED-developed second-screen technology that gave them the opportunity to discuss ideas, ask questions of speakers and give real-time (emoji-driven) feedback to the stage. Below, a recap of the day’s inspiring talks, performances and conversations.

Session 1: Fragility

The opening session featured thinking on the fragile state of the present — and some hopes for the future.

Larry Brilliant, epidemiologist

Big idea: Global cooperation is the key to ending the novel coronavirus pandemic.

How? In a live conversation with head of TED Chris Anderson, epidemiologist Larry Brilliant reviews the global response to SARS-CoV-2 and reflects on what we can do to end the outbreak. While scientists were able to detect and identify the virus quickly, Brilliant says, political incompetence and fear delayed action. Discussing the deadly combination of a short incubation period with a high transmissibility rate, he explains how social distancing doesn’t stamp out the disease but rather slows its spread, giving us the time needed to execute crucial contact tracing and develop a vaccine. Brilliant shares how scientists are collaborating to speed up the vaccine timeline by running multiple processes (like safety testing and manufacturing) in parallel, rather than in a time-consuming sequential process. And he reminds us that to truly conquer the pandemic, we must work together across national boundaries and political divides. Watch the conversation on TED.com » 

Quote of the talk: “This is what a pandemic forces us to realize: we are all in it together, we need a global solution to a global problem. Anything less than that is unthinkable.”

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Huang Hung, writer, publisher

Big idea: Individual freedom as an abstract concept in a pandemic is meaningless. It’s time for the West to take a step toward the East.

How? By embracing and prizing collective responsibility. In conversation with TED’s head of curation, Helen Walters, writer and publisher Huang Hung discusses how the Chinese people’s inherent trust in their government to fix problems (even when the solutions are disliked) played out with COVID-19, the handling of coronavirus whistleblower Dr. Li Wenliang and what, exactly, “wok throwing” is. What seems normal and appropriate to the Chinese, Hung says — things like contact tracing and temperature checks at malls — may seem surprising and unfamiliar to Westerners at first, but these tools can be our best bet to fight a pandemic. What’s most important now is to think about the collective, not the individual. “It is a time to be together rather than to try to pull the world apart and crawl back into our own nationalistic shells,” she says.

Fun fact: There’s a word — 乖, or “guai” — that exists only in Chinese: it means a child who listens to their parents.

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Oliver Jeffers, artist, storyteller

Big idea: In the face of infinite odds, 7.5 billion of us (and counting) find ourselves here, on Earth, and that shared existence is the most important thing we have.

Why? In a poetic effort to introduce life on Earth to someone who’s never been here before, artist Oliver Jeffers wrote his newborn son a letter (which grew into a book, and then a sculpture) full of pearls of wisdom on our shared humanity. Alongside charming, original illustrations, he gives some of his best advice for living on this planet. Jeffers acknowledges that, in the grand scheme of things, we know very little about existence — except that we are experiencing it together. And we should relish that connection. Watch the talk on TED.com »

Quote of the talk: “‘For all we know,’ when said as a statement, means the sum total of all knowledge. But ‘for all we know’ when said another way, means that we do not know at all. This is the beautiful, fragile drama of civilization. We are the actors and spectators of a cosmic play that means the world to us here but means nothing anywhere else.”

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Musical interludes from 14-year old prodigy Lydian Nadhaswaram, who shared an energetic, improvised version of Gershwin’s “Summertime,” and musician, singer and songwriter Sierra Hull, who played her song “Beautifully Out of Place.”

 

Session 2: Resilience

Session 2 focused on The Audacious Project, a collaborative funding initiative housed at TED that’s unlocking social impact on a grand scale. The session saw the debut of three 2020 Audacious grantees — Crisis Text Line, The Collins Lab and ACEGID — that are spearheading bold and innovative solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic. Their inspirational work on the front lines is delivering urgent support to help the most vulnerable through this crisis.

Pardis Sabeti and Christian Happi, disease researchers

Big idea: Combining genomics with new information technologies, Sentinel — an early warning system that can detect and respond to emerging viral threats in real-time — aims to radically change how we catch and control outbreaks. With the novel coronavirus pandemic, Sentinel is pivoting to become a frontline responder to COVID-19.

How? From advances in the field of genomics, the team at Sentinel has developed two tools to detect viruses, track outbreaks and watch for mutations. First is Sherlock, a new method to test viruses with simple paper strips — and identify them within hours. The second is Carmen, which enables labs to test hundreds of viruses simultaneously, massively increasing diagnostic ability. By pairing these tools with mobile and cloud-based technologies, Sentinel aims to connect health workers across the world and share critical information to preempt pandemics. As COVID-19 sweeps the globe, the Sentinel team is helping scientists detect the virus quicker and empower health workers to connect and better contain the outbreak. See what you can do for this idea »

Quote of the talk: “The whole idea of Sentinel is that we all stand guard over each other, we all watch. Each one of us is a sentinel.”

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Jim Collins, bioengineer

Big idea: AI is our secret weapon against the novel coronavirus.

How? Bioengineer Jim Collins rightly touts the promise and potential of technology as a tool to discover solutions to humanity’s biggest molecular problems. Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, his team combined AI with synthetic biology data, seeking to avoid a similar battle that’s on the horizon: superbugs and antibiotic resistance. But in the shadow of the present global crisis, they pivoted these technologies to help defeat the virus. They have made strides in using machine learning to discover new antiviral compounds and develop a hybrid protective mask-diagnostic test. Thanks to funding from The Audacious Project, Collins’s team will develop seven new antibiotics over seven years, with their immediate focus being treatments to help combat bacterial infections that occur alongside SARS-CoV-2. See what you can do for this idea »

Quote of the talk: “Instead of looking for a needle in a haystack, we can use the giant magnet of computing power to find many needles in multiple haystacks simultaneously.”

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Nancy Lublin, health activist

Big idea: Crisis Text Line, a free 24-hour service that connects with people via text message, delivers crucial mental health support to those who need it. Now they’re going global.

How? Using mobile technology, machine learning and a large distributed network of volunteers, Crisis Text Line helps people in times of crisis, no matter the situation. Here’s how it works: If you’re in the United States or Canada, you can text HOME to 741741 and connect with a live, trained Crisis Counselor, who will provide confidential help via text message. (Numbers vary for the UK and Ireland; find them here.) The not-for-profit launched in August 2013 and within four months had expanded to all 274 area codes in the US. Over the next two-and-a-half years, they’re committing to providing aid to anyone who needs it not only in English but also in Spanish, Portuguese, French and Arabic — covering 32 percent of the globe. Learn how you can join the movement to spread empathy across the world by becoming a Crisis Counselor. See what you can do for this idea »

Quote of the talk: “This will be strangers helping strangers around the world — like a giant global love machine.”

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Music and interludes from Damian Kulash and OK Go, who showed love for frontline pandemic workers with the debut of a special quarantine performance, and David Whyte, who recited his poem “What to Remember When Waking,” inviting us to celebrate that first, hardly-noticed moment when we wake up each day. “What you can plan is too small for you to live,” Whyte says.

 

Session 3: Restoration

The closing session considered ways to restore our planet’s health and work towards a beautiful, clean, carbon-free future.

Tom Rivett-Carnac, political strategist

Big idea: We need stubborn optimism coupled with action to meet our most formidable challenges.

How: Speaking from the woods outside his home in England, political strategist Tom Rivett-Carnac addresses the loss of control and helplessness we may feel as a result of overwhelming threats like climate change. Looking to leaders from history who have blazed the way forward in dark times, he finds that people like Rosa Parks, Winston Churchill and Mahatma Gandhi had something in common: stubborn optimism. This mindset, he says, is not naivety or denial but rather a refusal to be defeated. Stubborn optimism, when paired with action, can infuse our efforts with meaning and help us choose the world we want to create. Watch the talk on TED.com »

Quote of the talk: “This stubborn optimism is a form of applied love … and it is a choice for all of us.”

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Kristine Tompkins, Earth activist, conservationist

Big idea: Earth, humanity and nature are all interconnected. To restore us all back to health, let’s “rewild” the world. 

Why? The disappearance of wildlife from its natural habitat is a problem to be met with action, not nostalgia. Activist and former Patagonia CEO Kristine Tompkins decided she would dedicate the rest of her life to that work. By purchasing privately owned wild habitats, restoring their ecosystems and transforming them into protected national parks, Tompkins shows the transformational power of wildlands philanthropy. She urgently spreads the importance of this kind of “rewilding” work — and shows that we all have a role to play. “The power of the absent can’t help us if it just leads to nostalgia or despair,” she says. “It’s only useful if it motivates us toward working to bring back what’s gone missing.”

Quote of the talk: “Every human life is affected by the actions of every other human life around the globe. And the fate of humanity is tied to the health of the planet. We have a common destiny. We can flourish or we can suffer, but we’re going to be doing it together.”

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Music and interludes from Amanda Palmer, who channels her inner Gonzo with a performance of “I’m Going To Go Back There Someday” from The Muppet Movie; Baratunde Thurston, who took a moment to show gratitude for Earth and reflect on the challenge humanity faces in restoring balance to our lives; singer-songwriter Alice Smith, who gives a hauntingly beautiful vocal performance of her original song “The Meaning,” dedicated of Mother Earth; and author Neil Gaiman, reading an excerpt about the fragile beauty that lies at the heart of life.

Ignite: The talks of TED@WellsFargo

World-changing ideas that unearth solutions and ignite progress can come from anywhere. With that spirit in mind at TED@WellsFargo, thirteen speakers showcased how human empathy and problem-solving can combine with technology to transform lives (and banking) for the better.

The event: TED@WellsFargo, a day of thought-provoking talks on topics including how to handle challenging situations at work, the value of giving back and why differences can be strengths. It’s the first time TED and Wells Fargo have partnered to create inspiring talks from Wells Fargo Team Members.

When and where: Wednesday, February 5, 2020, at the Knight Theater in Charlotte, North Carolina

Opening and closing remarks: David Galloreese, Wells Fargo Head of Human Resources, and Jamie Moldafsky, Wells Fargo Chief Marketing Officer

Performances by: Dancer Simone Cooper and singer/songwriter Jason Jet and his band

The talks in brief:

Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez, sales and trading analyst

Big idea: As an immigrant, learning to thrive in America while watching other immigrants struggle oddly echoes what flight attendants instruct us to do when the oxygen masks drop in an emergency landing: if you want to help others put on their masks, you must put on your own mask first.

How? At age 15, Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez found herself alone in the US when her parents were forced to return to Mexico, taking her eight-year-old brother with them. For eight years, she diligently completed her education — and grappled with guilt, believing she wasn’t doing enough to aid fellow immigrants. Now working as a sales and trading analyst while guiding her brother through school in New York, she’s learned a valuable truth: in an emergency, you can’t save others until you save yourself.

Quote of the talk: “Immigrants [can’t] and will never be able to fit into any one narrative, because most of us are actually just traveling along a spectrum, trying to survive.”

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Matt Trombley, customer remediation supervisor

Big idea: Agonism — “taking a warlike stance in contexts that are not literally war” — plagues many aspects of modern-day life, from the way we look at our neighbors to the way we talk about politics. Can we work our way out of this divisive mindset?

How: Often we think that those we disagree with are our enemies, or that we must approve of everything our loved ones say or believe. Not surprisingly, this is disastrous for relationships. Matt Trombley shows us how to fight agonism by cultivating common ground (working to find just a single shared thread with someone) and by forgiving others for the slights that we believe their values cause us. If we do this, our relationships will truly come to life.

Quote of the talk: “When you can find even the smallest bit of common ground with somebody, it allows you to understand just the beautiful wonder and complexity and majesty of the other person.”

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Dorothy Walker, project manager

Big idea: Anybody can help resolve a conflict — between friends, coworkers, strangers, your children — with three simple steps.

How? Step one: prepare. Whenever possible, set a future date and time to work through a conflict, when emotions aren’t running as high. Step two: defuse and move forward. When you do begin mediating the conflict, start off by observing, listening and asking neutral questions; this will cause both parties to stop and think, and give you a chance to shift positive energy into the conversation. Finally, step three: make an agreement. Once the energy of the conflict has settled, it’s time to get an agreement (either written or verbal) so everybody can walk away with a peaceful resolution.

Quote of the talk: “There is a resolution to all conflicts. It just takes your willingness to try.”

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Charles Smith, branch manager

Big idea: The high rate of veteran suicide is intolerable — and potentially avoidable. By prioritizing the mental health of military service members both during and after active duty, we can save lives.

How? There are actionable solutions to end the devastating epidemic of military suicide, says Charles Smith. First, by implementing a standard mental health evaluation to military applicants, we can better gauge the preliminary markers of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or depression. Data is a vital part of the solution: if we keep better track of mental health data on service members, we can also predict where support is most needed and create those structures proactively. By identifying those with a higher risk early on in their military careers, we can ensure they have appropriate care during their service and connect them to the resources they need once they are discharged, enabling veterans to securely and safely rejoin civilian life.

Quote of the talk: “If we put our minds and resources together, and we openly talk and try to find solutions for this epidemic, hopefully, we can save a life.”

Rob Cooke, premier banker

Big idea: Work-related stress costs us a lot, in our lives and the economy. We need to reframe the way we manage stress — both in our workplaces and in our minds.

How? “We tend to think of [stress] as a consequence, but I see it as a culture,” says Rob Cooke. Despite massive global investments in the wellness industry, we are still losing trillions of dollars due to a stress-related decrease in employee productivity and illness. Cooke shares a multifaceted approach to shifting the way stress is managed, internally and culturally. It starts with corporations prioritizing the well-being of employees, governments incentivizing high standards for workplace wellness and individually nurturing our relationship with our own mental health.

Quote of the talk: “We all know retirement is all about saving more now, for later. What if we treated our mental health and overall well-being in the same capacity? Develop and save more of you now, for later in life.”

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Aeris Nguyen, learning and development facilitator

Big idea: What would our world be like if we could use DNA to verify our identity?

Why? Every year, millions of people have their identities stolen or misused. This fact got Aeris Nguyen thinking about how to safeguard our information for good. She shares an ambitious thought experiment, asking: Can we use our own bodies to verify our selves? While biometric data such as facial or palm print recognition have their own pitfalls (they can be easily fooled by, say, wearing a specially lighted hat or using a wax hand), what if we could use our DNA — our blood, hair or earwax? Nguyen acknowledges the ethical dilemmas and logistical nightmares that would come with collecting and storing more than seven billion files of DNA, but she can’t help but wonder if someday, in the far future, this will become the norm.

Quote of the talk: “Don’t you find it strange that we carry around these arbitrary, government assigned numbers or pieces of paper with our picture on it and some made-up passwords to prove we are who we say we are?  When, in fact, the most rock-solid proof of our identity is something we carry around in our cells — our DNA.”

France Villarta, communications consultant

Big idea: Modern ideas of gender are much older than we may think.

How? In many cultures around the world, the social construct of gender is binary — man or woman, assigned certain characteristics and traits, all designated by biological sex. But that’s not the case for every culture. France Villarta details the gender-fluid history of his native Philippines and how the influence of colonial rule forced narrow-minded beliefs onto its people. In a talk that’s part cultural love letter, part history lesson, Villarta emphasizes the beauty and need in reclaiming gender identities. “Oftentimes, we think of something as strange only because we’re not familiar with it or haven’t taken enough time to try and understand,” he says. “The good thing about social constructs is that they can be reconstructed — to fit a time and age.”

Quote of the talk: “To anyone reeling from forces trying to knock you down and cram you into these neat little boxes people have decided for you — don’t break. I see you. My ancestors see you. Their blood runs through me as they run through so many of us. You are valid. And you deserve rights and recognition. Just like everyone else.”

Dean Furness, analytic consultant

Big idea: You can overcome personal challenges by focusing on yourself, instead of making comparisons to others.

How? After a farming accident paralyzed Dean Furness below the waist, he began the process of adjusting to life in a wheelchair. He realized he’d have to nurture and focus on this new version of himself, rather than fixate on his former height, strength and mobility. With several years of rehabilitation and encouragement from his physical therapist, Furness began competing in the Chicago and Boston marathons as a wheelchair athlete. By learning how to own each day, he says, we can all work to get better, little by little.

Quote of the talk: “Take some time and focus on you, instead of others. I bet you can win those challenges and really start accomplishing great things.”

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John Puthenveetil, financial advisor

Big idea: Because of the uncertain world we live in, many seek solace from “certainty merchants” — like physicians, priests and financial advisors. Given the complex, chaotic mechanisms of our economy, we’re better off discarding “certainty” for better planning.

How? We must embrace adaptable plans that address all probable contingencies, not just the most obvious ones. This is a crucial component of “scenario-based planning,” says John Puthenveetil. We should always aim for being approximately right rather than precisely wrong. But this only works if we pay attention, heed portents of possible change and act decisively — even when that’s uncomfortable.

Quote of the talk: “It is up to us to use [scenario-based planning] wisely: Not out of a sense of weakness or fear, but out of the strength and conviction that comes from knowing that we are prepared to play the hand that is dealt.”

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Johanna Figueira, digital marketing consultant

Big idea: The world is more connected than ever, but some communities are still being cut off from vital resources. The solution? Digitally matching professional expertise with locals who know what their communities really need.

How? Johanna Figueira is one of millions who has left Venezuela due to economic crisis, crumbling infrastructure and decline in health care — but she hasn’t left these issues behind. With the help of those still living in the country, Figueira helped organize Code for Venezuela — a platform that matches experts with communities in need to create simple, effective tools to improve quality of life. She shares two of their most successful projects: MediTweet, an intelligent Twitter bot that helps Venezuelans find medicinal supplies, and Blackout Tracker, a tool that helps pinpoint power cuts in Venezuela that the government won’t report. Her organization shows the massive difference made when locals participate in their own solutions.

Quote of the talk: “Some people in Silicon Valley may look at these projects and say that they’re not major technological innovations. But that’s the point. These projects are not insanely advanced — but it’s what the people of Venezuela need, and they can have a tremendous impact.”

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Jeanne Goldie, branch sales manager

Big idea: We’re looking for dynamic hotbeds of innovation in all the wrong places.

How? Often, society looks to the young for the next big thing, leaving older generations to languish in their shadow until being shuffled out altogether, taking their brain power and productivity with them. Instead of discarding today’s senior workforce, Jeanne Goldie suggests we tap into their years of experience and retrain them, just as space flight has moved from the disposable rockets of NASA’s moon launches to today’s reusable Space X models.

Quote of the talk: “If we look at data and technology as the tools they are … but not as the answer, we can come up with better solutions to our most challenging problems.”

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Rebecca Knill, business systems consultant

Big idea: By shifting our cultural understanding of ability and using technology to connect, we can build a more inclusive and human world.

How? The medical advances of modern technology have improved accessibility for disabled communities. Rebecca Knill, a self-described cyborg who has a cochlear implant, believes the next step to a more connected world is changing our perspectives. For example, being deaf isn’t shameful or pitiful, says Knill — it’s just a different way of navigating the world. To take full advantage of the fantastic opportunities new technology offers us, we must drop our assumptions and meet differences with empathy.

Quote of the talk: “Technology has come so far. Our mindset just needs to catch up.”

Anastasia Penright, business consultant

Big idea: No workplace is immune to drama, but there are steps we can follow to remove ourselves from the chatter and focus on what’s really important.

How? No matter your industry, chances are you’ve experienced workplace drama. In a funny and relatable talk, Anastasia Penright shares a better way to coexist with our coworkers using five simple steps she’s taken to leave drama behind and excel in her career. First, we must honestly evaluate our own role in creating and perpetuating conflicts; then evaluate our thoughts and stop thinking about every possible scenario. Next, it’s important to release our negative energy to a trusted confidant (a “venting buddy”) while trying to understand and accept the unique communication styles and work languages of our colleagues. Finally, she says, we need to recognize when we’re about to step into drama and protect our energy by simply walking away.

Quote of the talk: “We have to learn to accept where people are and adjust ourselves to handle those situations … to recognize when it is time to professionally walk away from someone.”

We the Future 2019: Talks from TED, the Skoll Foundation and the United Nations Foundation

At “We the Future,” a day of talks from TED, the Skoll Foundation and the United Nations Foundation at the TED World Theater in New York City, 18 speakers and performers shared daring ideas, deep analysis, cautionary tales and behavior-changing strategies aimed at meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the global goals created in partnership with individuals around the world and adopted at the United Nations in 2015.

The event: We the Future, presented by TED, the Skoll Foundation and the United Nations Foundation to share ingenious efforts of people from every corner of the globe

When and where: Tuesday, September 24, 2019, at the TED World Theater in New York, NY

Music: Queen Esther with Hilliard Greene and Jeff McGlaughlin, performing the jazzy “Blow Blossoms” and the protest song “All That We Are”

The talks in brief:

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David Wallace-Wells, journalist

Big idea: The climate crisis is too vast and complicated to solve with a silver bullet. We need a shift in how we live: a whole new politics, economics and relationship to technology and nature.

Why? The climate crisis isn’t the legacy of our ancestors, but the work of a single generation — ours, says Wallace-Wells. Half of all the emissions from the burning of fossil fuels in the history of humanity were produced in the last 30 years. We clearly have immense power over the climate, and it’s put us on the brink of catastrophe — but it also means we’re the ones writing the story of our planet’s future. If we are to survive, we’ll need to reshape society as we know it — from building entirely new electric grids, planes and infrastructures to rethinking the way the global community comes together to support those hit hardest by climate change. In we do that, we just might build a new world that’s livable, prosperous and green.

Quote of the talk: “We won’t be able to beat climate change — only live with it and limit it.”

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Kristen Wenz, legal identity expert

Big idea: More than one billion people — mostly children — don’t have legal identities or birth certificates, which means they can’t get vital government services like health care and schooling. It’s a massive human rights violation we need to fix.

How? There are five key approaches to ensuring children are registered and protected — reduce distance, reduce cost, simplify the process, remove discrimination and increase demand. In Tanzania, the government helped make it easier for new parents to register their child by creating an online registration system and opening up registration hubs in communities. The results were dramatic: the number of children with birth certificates went from 16 to 83 percent in just a few years. By designing solutions with these approaches in mind, we can provide better protection and brighter opportunities for children across the world.

Quote of the talk: “When the cost of inaction is that innocent children are left unprotected, unvaccinated, unable to go to school … trapped in a cycle of poverty, exclusion and invisibility, it’s on us to take this issue out of darkness and into the light.”

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Don Gips, CEO of the Skoll Foundation, in conversation with TEDWomen curator and author Pat Michell

Big idea: Don Gips turned away from careers in both government and business and became CEO of the Skoll Foundation for one reason: the opportunity to take charge of investing in solutions to the most urgent issues humanity faces. Now, it’s the foundation’s mission to identify the investments that will spark the greatest changes.

How?

By reaching deeper into communities and discovering and investing in social entrepreneurs and other changemakers, the Skoll Foundation supports promising solutions to urgent global problems. As their investments yield positive results, Gips hopes to inspire the rest of the philanthropic community to find better ways to direct their resources.

Quote of the interview: “We don’t tell the changemaker what the solution is. We invest in their solution, and go along on the journey with them.”

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Alejandro Durán, artist

Big Idea: Art can spotlight the environmental atrocities happening to our oceans — leaving viewers both mesmerized and shocked.

Why? From prosthetic legs to bottle caps, artist Alejandro Durán makes ephemeral environmental artworks out of objects he finds polluting the waters of his native region of Sian Ka’an, Mexico. He meticulously organizes materials by color and curates them into site-specific work. Durán put on his first “Museo de La Basura or Museum of Garbage“ exhibition in 2015, which spoke to the horrors of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and he’s still making art that speaks to the problem of ocean trash. By endlessly reusing objects in his art, Durán creates new works that engage communities in environmental art-making, attempting to depict the reality of our current environmental predicament and make the invisible visible.

Quote of the talk: “By making aesthetic, some might say beautiful, arrangements out of the world’s waste, I hope to hook the viewer, to draw in those that are numb to the horrors of the world, and give them a different way to understand what is happening.”

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Andrew Forrest, entrepreneur, in conversation with head of TED Chris Anderson

Big idea: The true — and achievable! — business case for investing in plastic recycling.

How? Since earning his PhD in marine ecology, Forrest has dedicated his time and money to solving the global plastic problem, which is choking our waterways and oceans with toxic material that never biodegrades. “I learned a lot about marine life,” he says of his academic experience. “But it taught me more about marine death.” To save ourselves and our underwater neighbors from death by nanoplastics, Forrest says we need the big corporations of the world to fund a massive environmental transition that includes increasing the price of plastic and turning the tide on the recycling industry.

Quote of the talk: “[Plastic] is an incredible substance designed for the economy. It’s the worst substance possible for the environment.”

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Raj Panjabi, cofounder of medical NGO Last Mile Health

Big idea: Community health workers armed with training and technology are our first line of defense against deadly viral surges. If we are to fully protect the world from killer diseases, we must ensure that people living in the most remote areas of the planet are never far from a community health worker trained to throttle epidemics at their outset.

How? In December 2013, Ebola broke out in West Africa and began a transborder spread that threatened to wipe out millions of people. Disease fighters across Africa joined the battle to stop it — including Liberian health workers trained by Last Mile Health and armed with the technology, knowledge and support necessary to serve their communities. With their help, Ebola was stopped (for now), after killing 11,000 people. Panjabi believes that if we train and pay more community health workers, their presence in underserved areas will not only stop epidemics but also save the lives of the millions of people threatened by diseases like malaria, pneumonia and diarrhea.

Quote of the talk: “We dream of a future when millions of people … can gain dignified jobs as community health workers, so they can serve their neighbors in the forest communities of West Africa to the fishing villages of the Amazon; from the hilltops of Appalachia to the mountains of Afghanistan.”

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Tashka and Laura Yawanawá, leaders of the Yawanawá in Acre, Brazil

Big idea: To save the Amazon rainforest, let’s empower indigenous people who have been coexisting with the rainforest for centuries.

Why? Tashka Yawanawá is chief of the Yawanawá people in Acre, Brazil, leading 900 people who steward 400,000 acres of Brazilian Amazon rainforest. As footage of the Amazon burning shocks the world’s consciousness, Tashka and his wife, Laura, call for us to transform this moment into an opportunity to support indigenous people who have the experience, knowledge and tools to protect the land.

Quote of the talk: “Indigenous people have the answer. If we want to save the Amazon, we have to act now.”

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Alasdair Harris, ocean conservationist

Big idea: To the impoverished fishers that rely on the sea for their food, and who comprise 90 percent of the world’s fishing fleet, outside interference by scientists and marine managers can seem like just another barrier to their survival. Could the world rejuvenate its marine life and replenish its fish stocks by inspiring coastal communities rather than simply regulating them?

How? When he first went to Madagascar, marine biologist Alasdair Harris failed to convince local leaders to agree to a years-long plan to close their threatened coral reefs to fishing. But when a contained plan to preserve a breeding ground for an important local species of octopus led to rapid growth in catches six months later, the same elders banded together with leaders across Madagascar to spearhead a conservation revolution. Today, Harris’s organization Blue Ventures works to help coastal communities worldwide take control of their own ecosystems.

Quote of the talk: “When we design it right, marine conservation reaps dividends that go far beyond protecting nature — improving catches, driving waves of social change along entire coastlines, strengthening confidence, cooperation and the resilience of communities to face the injustice of poverty and climate change.”

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Bright Simons, social entrepreneur and product security expert

Big idea: A global breakdown of the trustworthiness of markets and regulatory institutions has led to a flurry of counterfeit drugs, mislabeled food and defective parts. Africa has been dealing with counterfeit goods for years, and entrepreneurs like Bright Simons have developed myriad ways consumers can confirm that their food and drug purchases are genuine. Why are these methods ignored in the rest of the world?

How? Bright Simons demonstrates some of the innovative solutions Africans use to restore trust in their life-giving staples, such as text hotlines to confirm medications are real and seed databases to certify the authenticity of crops. Yet in the developed world, these solutions are often overlooked because they “don’t scale” — an attitude Simons calls “mental latitude imperialism.” It’s time to champion “intellectual justice” — and look at these supposedly non-scalable innovations with new respect.

Quote of the talk: “It just so happens that today, the most advanced and most progressive solutions to these problems are being innovated in the developing world.”

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LaToya Ruby Frazier, artist 

Big Idea: LaToya Ruby Frazier’s powerful portraits of women in Flint, Michigan document the reality of the Flint water crisis, bringing awareness to the ongoing issue and creating real, positive change.

How? Frazier’s portraits of the daily lives of women affected by the Flint water crisis are striking reminders that, after all the news crews were gone, the people of Flint still did not have clean water. For one photo series, she closely followed the lives of Amber Hasan and Shea Cobb — two activists, poets and best friends — who were working to educate the public about the water crisis. Frazier has continued collaborating with Hasan and Cobb to seek justice and relief for those suffering in Flint. In 2019, they helped raise funds for an atmospheric water generator that provided 120,000 gallons of water to Flint residents. 

Quote of the talk: “Water is life. It is the spirit that binds us from sickness, death and destruction. Imagine how many millions of lives we could save if [the atmospheric water generator] were in places like Newark, New Jersey, South Africa and India — with compassion instead of profit motives.”

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Cassie Flynn, global climate change advisor

Big idea: We need a new way to get citizen consensus on climate change and connect them with governments and global leaders.

How? The United Nations is taking on an entirely new model of reaching the masses: mobile phone games. Flynn shares how their game “Mission 1.5” can help people learn about their policy choices on climate change by allowing them to play as heads of state. From there, the outcomes of their gameplay will be compiled and shared with their national leaders and the public. Flynn foresees this as a fresh, feasible way to meet citizens where they are, to educate them about climate change and to better connect them to the people who are making those tough decisions.

Quote of the talk: “Right now, world leaders are faced with the biggest and most impactful decisions of their entire lives. What they decide to do on climate change will either lead to a riskier, more unstable planet or a future that is more prosperous and sustainable for us all.”

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Wanjira Mathai, entrepreneur

Big Idea: Corruption is a constant threat in Kenya. To defeat it there and anywhere, we need to steer youth towards integrity through education and help them understand the power of the individual.

Why? In 1989, the Karura Forest, a green public oasis in Nairobi, Kenya, was almost taken away by a corrupt government until political activist Wangari Maathai, Nobel Prize recipient and founder of the Greenbelt Movement, fought back fiercely and won. Continuing Maathai’s legacy, her daughter Wanjira explains how corruption is still very much alive in Kenya — a country that loses a third of its state budget to corruption every year. “Human beings are not born corrupt. At some point these behaviors are fostered by a culture that promotes individual gain over collective progress,” she says. She shares a three-pronged strategy for fighting corruption before it takes root by addressing why it happens, modeling integrity and teaching leadership skills.

Quote of the talk: “We cannot complain forever. We either decide that we are going to live with it, or we are going to change it. And if we are going to change it, we know that today, most of the world’s problems are caused by corruption and greed and selfishness.”

Border Stories: A night of talks on immigration, justice and freedom

Immigration can be a deeply polarizing topic. But at heart, immigration policies and practices reflect no less than our attitude towards humanity. At TEDSalon: Border Stories, we explored the reality of life at the US-Mexico border, the history of the US immigration policy and possible solutions for reform — and investigated what’s truly at stake.

The event: TEDSalon: Border Stories, hosted by criminal justice reformer Anne Milgram and author and academic Juan Enriquez

When and where: Tuesday, September 10, 2019, at the TED World Theater in New York City

Speakers: Paul A. Kramer, Luis H. Zayas, Erika Pinheiro, David J. Bier and Will Hurd

Music: From Morley and Martha Redbone

A special performance: Poet and thinker Maria Popova, reading an excerpt from her book Figuring. A stunning meditation on “the illusion of separateness, of otherness” — and on “the infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives” that inhabit this universe — accompanied by cellist Dave Eggar and guitarist Chris Bruce.

The talks in brief:

Paul A. Kramer, historian, writer, professor of history

• Big idea: It’s time we make the immigration conversation to reflect how the world really works.
• How? We must rid ourselves of the outdated questions, born from nativist and nationalist sentiments, that have permeated the immigration debate for centuries: interrogations of usefulness and assimilation, of parasitic rhetoric aimed at dismantling any positive discussions around immigration. What gives these damaging queries traction and power, Kramer says, is how they tap into a seemingly harmless sense of national belonging — and ultimately activate, heighten and inflame it. Kramer maps out a way for us to redraw those mental, societal and political borders and give immigrants access to the rights and resources that their work, activism and home countries have already played a fundamental role in creating.
• Quote of the talk: “[We need] to redraw the boundaries of who counts — whose life, whose rights and whose thriving matters. We need to redraw … the borders of us.”

Luis H. Zayas, social worker, psychologist, researcher

• Big idea: Asylum seekers — especially children — face traumatizing conditions at the US-Mexico border. We need compassionate, humane practices that give them the care they need during arduous times.
• Why? Under prolonged and intense stress, the young developing brain is harmed — plain and simple, says Luis H. Zayas. He details the distressing conditions immigrant families face on their way to the US, which have only escalated since children started being separated from their parents and held in detention centers. He urges the US to reframe its practices, replacing hostility and fear with safety and compassion. For instance: the US could open processing centers, where immigrants can find the support they need to start a new life. These facilities would be community-oriented, offering medical care, social support and the fundamental human right to respectful and dignified treatment.
• Quote of the talk: “I hope we can agree on one thing: that none of us wants to look back at this moment in our history when we knew we were inflicting lifelong trauma on children, and that we sat back and did nothing. That would be the greatest tragedy of all.”

Erika Pinheiro, nonprofit litigation and policy director

• Big idea: The current US administration’s mass separations of asylum-seeking families at the Mexican border shocked the conscience of the world — and the cruel realities of the immigration system have only gotten worse. We need a legal and social reckoning.
• How? US immigration laws are broken, says Erika Pinheiro. Since 2017, US attorneys general have made sweeping changes to asylum law to ensure fewer people qualify for protection in the US. This includes all types of people fleeing persecution: Venezuelan activists, Russian dissidents, Chinese Muslims, climate change refugees — the list goes on. The US has simultaneously created a parallel legal system where migrants are detained indefinitely, often without access to legal help. Pinheiro issues a call to action: if you are against the cruel and inhumane treatment of migrants, then you need to get involved. You need to demand that your lawmakers expand the definition of refugees and amend laws to ensure immigrants have access to counsel and independent courts. Failing to act now threatens the inherent dignity of all humans.
• Quote of the talk: “History shows us that the first population to be vilified and stripped of their rights is rarely the last.”

David J. Bier, immigration policy analyst

• Big idea: We can solve the border crisis in a humane fashion. In fact, we’ve done so before.
• How? Most migrants who travel illegally from Central America to the US do so because they have no way to enter the US legally. When these immigrants are caught, they find themselves in the grips of a cruel system of incarceration and dehumanization — but is inhumane treatment really necessary to protect our borders? Bier points us to the example of Mexican guest worker programs, which allow immigrants to cross borders and work the jobs they need to support their families. As legal opportunities to cross the border have increased, the number of illegal Mexican immigrants seized at the border has plummeted 98 percent. If we were to extend guest worker programs to Central Americans as well, Bier says, we could see a similar drop in the numbers of illegal immigrants.
• Quote of the talk: “This belief that the only way to maintain order is with inhumane means is inaccurate — and, in fact, the opposite is true. Only a humane system will create order at the border.”

Will Hurd, US Representative for Texas’s 23rd congressional district

• Big idea: Walls won’t solve our problems.
• Why? Representing a massive district that encompasses 29 counties and two times zones and shares an 820-mile border with Mexico, Republican Congressman Will Hurd has a frontline perspective on illegal immigration in Texas. Legal immigration options and modernizing the Border Patrol (which still measures their response times to border incidents in hours and days) will be what ultimately stems the tide of illegal border crossings, Hurd says. Instead of investing in walls and separating families, the US should invest in their own defense forces — and, on the other side of the border, work to alleviate poverty and violence in Central American countries.
• Quote of the talk: “When you’re debating your strategy, if somebody comes up with the idea of snatching a child out of their mother’s arms, you need to go back to the drawing board. This is not what the United States of America stands for. This is not a Republican or a Democrat or an Independent thing. This is a human decency thing.”

Juan Enriquez, author and academic

• Big idea: If the US continues to divide groups of people into “us” and “them,” we open the door to inhumanity and atrocity — and not just at our borders.
• How? Countries that survive and grow as the years go by are compassionate, kind, smart and brave; countries that don’t govern by cruelty and fear, says Juan Enriquez. In a personal talk, he calls on us to realize that deportation, imprisonment and dehumanization aren’t isolated phenomena directed at people crossing the border illegally but instead things are happening to the people who live and work by our sides in our communities. Now is the time to stand up and do something to stop our country’s slide into fear and division — whether it’s engaging in small acts of humanity, loud protests in the streets or activism directed at enacting legislative or policy changes.
• Quote of the talk: “This is how you wipe out an economy. This isn’t about kids and borders, it’s about us. This is about who we are, who we the people are, as a nation and as individuals. This is not an abstract debate.”

The Big Rethink: Notes from Session 3 of TEDSummit 2019

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

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

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

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

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

The talks in brief:

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

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

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

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

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Nick Hanauer, entrepreneur and venture capitalist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Marco Tempest, cyber illusionist

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

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

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

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Rachel Kleinfeld, democracy advisor and author

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

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

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

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Danielle Citron, professor of law and deepfake scholar

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

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

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

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Patrick Chappatte, editorial cartoonist and graphic journalist

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

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

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

A first glimpse at the TEDSummit 2019 speaker lineup

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

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

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

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

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

Anna Piperal, digital country expert

Bob Langert, corporate changemaker

Carl Honoré, author

Carole Cadwalladr, investigative journalist

Diego Prilusky, immersive media technologist

Eli Pariser, organizer and author

Fay Bound Alberti, historian

George Monbiot, thinker and author

Hajer Sharief, youth inclusion activist

Howard Taylor, children safety advocate

Jochen Wegner, editor and dialogue creator

Kelly Wanser, geoengineering expert

Ma Yansong, architect

Marco Tempest, technology magician

Margaret Heffernan, business thinker

María Neira, global public health official

Mariana Lin, AI personalities writer

Mariana Mazzucato, economist

Marwa Al-Sabouni, architect

Nick Hanauer, capitalism redesigner

Nicola Jones, science writer

Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister of Scotland

Omid Djalili, comedian

Patrick Chappatte, editorial cartoonist

Pico Iyer, global author

Poet Ali, Philosopher, poet

Rachel Kleinfeld, violence scholar

Raghuram Rajan, former central banker

Rose Mutiso, energy for Africa activist

Sandeep Jauhar, cardiologist

Sara-Jane Dunn, computational biologist

Sheperd Doeleman, black hole scientist

Sonia Livingstone, social psychologist

Susan Cain, quiet revolutionary

Tim Flannery, carbon-negative tech scholar

Tshering Tobgay, former Prime Minister of Bhutan

 

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

Djazia Satour, singer

ELEW, pianist and DJ

KT Tunstall, singer and songwriter

Min Kym, virtuoso violinist

Radio Science Orchestra, space-music orchestra

Yilian Cañizares, singer and songwriter

 

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

A new mission to mobilize 2 million women in US politics … and more TED news

TED2019 may be past, but the TED community is busy as ever. Below, a few highlights.

Amplifying 2 million women across the U.S. Activist Ai-jen Poo, Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza and Planned Parenthood past president Cecile Richards have joined forces to launch Supermajority, which aims to train 2 million women in the United States to become activists and political leaders. To scale, the political hub plans to partner with local nonprofits across the country; as a first step, the co-founders will embark on a nationwide listening tour this summer. (Watch Poo’s, Garza’s and Richards’ TED Talks.)

Sneaker reseller set to break billion-dollar record. Sneakerheads, rejoice! StockX, the sneaker-reselling digital marketplace led by data expert Josh Luber, will soon become the first company of its kind with a billion-dollar valuation, thanks to a new round of venture funding.  StockX — a platform where collectible and limited-edition sneakers are bought and exchanged through real-time bidding — is an evolution of Campless, Luber’s site that collected data on rare sneakers. In an interview with The New York Times, Luber said that StockX pulls in around $2 million in gross sales every day. (Watch Luber’s TED Talk.)

A move to protect iconic African-American photo archives. Investment expert Mellody Hobson and her husband, filmmaker George Lucas, filed a motion to acquire the rich photo archives of iconic African-American lifestyle magazines Ebony and Jet. The archives are owned by the recently bankrupt Johnson Publishing Company; Hobson and Lucas intend to gain control over them through their company, Capital Holdings V. The collections include over 5 million photos of notable events and people in African American history, particularly during the Civil Rights Movement. In a statement, Capital Holdings V said: “The Johnson Publishing archives are an essential part of American history and have been critical in telling the extraordinary stories of African-American culture for decades. We want to be sure the archives are protected for generations to come.” (Watch Hobson’s TED Talk.)

10 TED speakers chosen for the TIME100. TIME’s annual round-up of the 100 most influential people in the world include climate activist Greta Thunberg, primatologist and environmentalist Jane Goodall, astrophysicist Sheperd Doeleman and educational entrepreneur Fred Swaniker — also Nancy Pelosi, the Pope, Leana Wen, Michelle Obama, Gayle King (who interviewed Serena Williams and now co-hosts CBS This Morning home to TED segment), and Jeanne Gang. Thunberg was honored for her work igniting climate change activism among teenagers across the world; Goodall for her extraordinary life work of research into the natural world and her steadfast environmentalism; Doeleman for his contribution to the Harvard team of astronomers who took the first photo of a black hole; and Swaniker for the work he’s done to educate and cultivate the next generation of African leaders. Bonus: TIME100 luminaries are introduced in short, sharp essays, and this year many of them came from TEDsters including JR, Shonda Rhimes, Bill Gates, Jennifer Doudna, Dolores Huerta, Hans Ulrich Obrest, Tarana Burke, Kai-Fu Lee, Ian Bremmer, Stacey Abrams, Madeleine Albright, Anna Deavere Smith and Margarethe Vestager. (Watch Thunberg’s, Goodall’s, Doeleman’s, Pelosi’s, Pope Francis’, Wen’s, Obama’s, King’s, Gang’s and Swaniker’s TED Talks.)

Meet Sports Illustrated’s first hijab-wearing model. Model and activist Halima Aden will be the first hijab-wearing model featured in Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue, debuting May 8. Aden will wear two custom burkinis, modestly designed swimsuits. “Being in Sports Illustrated is so much bigger than me,” Aden said in a statement, “It’s sending a message to my community and the world that women of all different backgrounds, looks, upbringings can stand together and be celebrated.” (Watch Aden’s TED Talk.)

Scotland post-surgical deaths drop by a third, and checklists are to thank. A study indicated a 37 percent decrease in post-surgical deaths in Scotland since 2008, which it attributed to the implementation of a safety checklist. The 19-item list created by the World Health Organization is supposed to encourage teamwork and communication during operations. The death rate fell to 0.46 per 100 procedures between 2000 and 2014, analysis of 6.8 million operations showed. Dr. Atul Gawande, who introduced the checklist and co-authored the study, published in the British Journal of Surgery, said to the BBC: “Scotland’s health system is to be congratulated for a multi-year effort that has produced some of the largest population-wide reductions in surgical deaths ever documented.” (Watch Gawanda’s TED Talk.) — BG

And finally … After the actor Luke Perry died unexpectedly of a stroke in February, he was buried according to his wishes: on his Tennessee family farm, wearing a suit embedded with spores that will help his body decompose naturally and return to the earth. His Infinity Burial Suit was made by Coeio, led by designer, artist and TED Fellow Jae Rhim Lee. Back in 2011, Lee demo’ed the mushroom burial suit onstage at TEDGlobal; now she’s focused on testing and creating suits for more people. On April 13, Lee spoke at Perry’s memorial service, held at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank; Perry’s daughter revealed his story in a thoughtful instagram post this past weekend. (Watch Lee’s TED Talk.) — EM

Wonder: Notes from Session 11 of TED2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Es Devlin, artist and stage designer

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

Juna Kollmeier, astrophysicist

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

Co-creating an “experiential experiment” to measure awe

“You have to start with an interesting question,” says neuroscientist Beau Lotto. We’re talking over Skype with collaborator Geneviève Laurendeau, the corporate PR manager at Cirque du Soleil, to discuss their year-long science project: an experiment to measure awe. When and how do we feel awe? And: Why does it matter?

One great place to find awe is a Cirque du Soleil live show. That’s why, a few months ago at one of the company’s long-running shows, O, in Las Vegas, you could find 20 members of the Lab of Misfits, Lotto’s creative neuroscience group, running an “experiential experiment.” With the help of a clown and a zebra from the Cirque cast, they asked audience members whether they’d volunteer to wear an EEG helmet while researchers watched their brain activity, then take some tests to measure what awe does to them.

As Laurendeau says: “O is an iconic show that generates strong audience reaction and emotional connection. We have audience members who are going back to this specific show every year over and over, and the feeling is the same.” O was a great platform for research, both for its stability (it has its own purpose-built theater, versus being in a traveling circus tent) and for its sheer astonishment factor: the show combines circus arts with dreamlike performances in and around 1.5 million gallons of water. As Lotto puts it, O creates an environment where people feel “brought elsewhere.”

Of working with Cirque, Lotto says, “It was a true co-creation and collaboration.” Which started, as many great things do, with a lot of meetings. “It took about one year to plan,” he says, to Laurendeau’s agreement.

The people behind Cirque were as eager as Lotto to learn the results of the experiment. As Laurendeau says, “For over 35 years now, our audience, they can’t describe what they felt. They say, ‘wow!’ — that’s how they describe what they felt. Is that the only way they can really identify or really share what they experienced? That’s what we were curious to know.”

Lotto says, “The experiments themselves ran over 10 shows, two shows a night. So we were in Vegas for roughly 10 days, but we were running experiments for about five, six days of that. And it was constant, completely continuous. And it’s super high-energy. Exhausting. But beautiful, beautiful. And we can’t complain; I mean, look at the performers, they’re doing two shows a night forever.”

As acrobats, dancers, clowns and swimmers performed during the 90-minute show, lab members monitored the data that streamed from the EEG helmets, and collected self-reported reactions before and after the show. They measured 23 specific “awe moments” identified in the show, from a collective 280 audience members, over the course of the experiment.

The team found some surprising results around a specific brain wave signature that’s associated with a feeling of awe — and their tests drew connections between awe and some core human feelings: a sense of connection, a desire to take risk, and our impressions of the future and the past. The results are shared in a white paper; Lotto is discussing his initial findings today, onstage at TED, with help from Cirque performers and other artists.

“A lot of what we discovered isn’t known yet,” Lotto says. “There is some research on wonder, but not much on awe. A great deal of it comes out of professor Dacher Keltner’s lab at Berkeley, where they’ve demonstrated an effect of pro-social behavior, which we can confirm, but no one has been able to get into the brain. People thought maybe awe is created by a social effect. And we’re saying, no, actually it’s something far deeper.“

Lotto surmises that awe evolved as a way to help humans try new things that scare them. “It’s maybe evolution’s solution that enabled us to go to the very place that we evolved to avoid, which is the north, is the unknown.”

The experiment has stimulated more questions at the Lab of Misfits, of course. “We want to explore the pro-social impact,” says Lotto, “how awe connects people, how it facilitates growth and expansion in others. It really gives you energy to continue.”

As Lotto says: “When you can truly unite science and art, you’ll see they’re the same thing.”

Imagination: Notes from Session 6 of TED2019

What can we envision, together, to create a world with more joy, love, humanity? At Session 6 of TED2019, we take a deep dive into the world of imagination with some of the authors, designers, architects and filmmakers who are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.

The event: Talks from TED2019, Session 6: Imagination, hosted by TED’s Helen Walters and Chee Pearlman

When and where: Wednesday, April 17, 2019, 11:15am, at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, BC

Speakers: Jacqueline Woodson, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, Jonny Sun, Sarah Sze, Rahul Mehrotra and Bjarke Ingels

The talks in brief:

Jacqueline Woodson, award-winning author and savorer of stories

• Big idea: Reading slowly is a simple, fulfilling way to counter the whiplash of technology and the speed of life today.
• How? Take your sweet time, says Jacqueline Woodson. Stories should not only be honored but savored, too. They help us travel through place and time, through the fictional and real-life perspectives of those who have experienced the past (and, sometimes, the future). In the pages of well-imagined books and generations-old oral histories, storytelling weaves together communities, fosters understanding and allows us to look deeply at the world around us. All we need to do is give these narratives the space and time to flourish and take root in our lives.
• Quote of the talk: “Isn’t that what it’s all about: finding a way at the end of the day to not feel alone in this world, and a way to feel like we’ve changed it before we leave?”

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, documentary filmmaker and storyteller

• Big idea: Film can make positive change by exposing people to alternate views of the world, shifting how we think about ourselves, our cultures, our societies.
• How? Obaid-Chinoy wanted to do something about violence against women in her native Pakistan. So she directed A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness, which documents the country’s tradition of honor killings. It made waves globally, winning an Oscar and even inspiring Pakistan’s prime minister to denounce honor killings, but it wasn’t enough. Obaid-Chinoy took her film on the road, visiting small towns and villages with a mobile cinema. With a big screen plastered to the outside of a truck and a mini theater inside, the mobile cinema offered a safe space for women in segregated communities to watch. Side by side, through film, Obaid-Chinoy and her team encouraged conversation about the harmful traditional practice of honor killings.
• Quote of the talk: “In small towns and villages across Pakistan, there is a revolution. Men are changing the way they interact with women; children are changing the way they see the world. One village at a time — through cinema.”

Jonny Sun, illustrator, author, screenwriter, all-round creative person

• Big idea: The Internet can feel like a lonely, chaotic place. But in learning to be more vulnerable with each other online, we find that we are alone together.
• How? Sun’s not here to tell you that social media is a force for unalloyed good. But it does have something important to offer us: each other. In sending jokes and endearing, misspelled, illustrated observations on the human condition “out to the void,” he has found that the void is often willing to talk back, reminding us of our shared human-ness, even if only for a moment. Read more about Jonny Sun’s talk here.
• Quote of the talk: “If someone shares that they feel sad or afraid or alone … it actually makes me feel less alone. Not by getting rid of any of my loneliness, but by showing me that I am not alone in feeling lonely.”

Sarah Sze, an artist who has worked in places like the Seattle Opera House and the NYC subway system and whose work encompasses painting, sculpture, video and installation

• Big idea: Art is a way to explore and express the wonders of the materials of our lives — along with their fragility and mutability.
• How? Sze crafts immersive pieces — some as tall as buildings, splashed across walls or orbiting through galleries. They contain vast constellations of stuff as she plays with scale, time and memory and blurs the lines between what is art and what is everyday life. Just as our human experience is a visual palimpsest, a constantly redrawn sketch of all that we do, see and remember, Sze’s work strives to embody these actions and the tensions that exist among them.
• Quote of the talk: “Female cheetahs are faster than male cheetahs and the reason is because, while they’re smaller, they have bigger hearts. That is a true fact and that may be the only true fact in here. The rest of it is art.”

Rahul Mehrotra, architect, urban designer, professor of design

• Big idea: When it comes to designing cities, we’re obsessed with permanence and predictability. Yet by studying impermanent settlements, we can learn to build cities that are more adaptable, efficient and sustainable.
• How? Every 12 years, a megacity springs up around the confluence of the India’s Yamuna and Ganges rivers. It houses the seven million pilgrims who live there for the 55-day duration of the Kumbh Mela religious festival. The city is fully functional yet impermanent and reversible — built in ten weeks and completely disassembled after the festival. In studying this singular event, Mehrotra realized that our preoccupation with permanence is shortsighted, locking resources into “permanent” solutions to problems that could be irrelevant within a decade. The ideal future of urban design? Elastic settlements with flexible elements that can travel, evolve or even disappear as the situation demands, leaving the lightest possible footprint on this fragile planet.
• Quote of the talk: “We need to make a shift in our imagination about cities. … We need to use our resources more efficiently to extend the expiry date of our planet. We need to change urban design cultures to think of the temporal, the reversible, the disassemblable.”

Bjarke Ingels, architect and designer

• Big idea: By designing architecture that adapts and shifts, we can create stronger communities and better prepare for the changing climate.
• How? From a toxin-free power plant (with a rooftop you can ski on!) to a floating ocean city powered by solar energy, Ingels is expanding architecture’s vision. By tapping into our human adaptability, he shows how we can design buildings and habitats that are beautiful, accessible and resilient to climate change. We need to imagine vibrantly and design flexibly, he says — and, in doing so, we can forge a sustainable future for all.
• Quote of the talk: “This is our collective human superpower: that we have the power to adapt to change and we have the power to give form to our future.”

These young women might just save the planet

One of anthropologist Margaret Mead’s most famous quotes instructs us: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” We might amend Mead’s observation to honor a group of thoughtful, committed teenagers across the world who are standing up for their lives (and their future lives) in extraordinarily powerful and moving ways.

Valentine’s Day marked the one-year anniversary of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre in Parkland, Florida. In the aftermath of that tragic shooting that claimed 17 lives, surviving students rejected their representatives’ “thoughts and prayers” and organized a nationwide school walkout on March 14, 2018. Ten days later, the March for Our Lives drew over a million people from around the country to Washington to rally for safe schools and gun control. And the Parkland students have continued throughout the year to travel this country and the world, advocating for stricter gun regulations.

In Sweden, a teenage girl named Greta Thunberg observed the actions of the Parkland students and took an action of her own: deciding to skip school every Friday in order to lobby the Swedish government into action on climate change.

Since Greta began her solo protest, it’s estimated that more than 70,000 students around Europe and the world have joined her protest each week, in over 270 towns and cities. Pictures of Greta and other young activists have made their way around on social media (Greta has nearly 300,000 followers on Instagram), inspiring other teens to join her in protest.

Strikes have been organized all over Europe, the United States, India and Australia over the past five months. The movement is notable in that it is being led by teenage girls. Katrien Van der Heyden of Brussels, whose 17-year-old daughter, Anuna de Wever, organizes marches there, observed to BuzzFeed: “’It’s the very first time in Belgium that a [mass movement was] started by two women and not about feminist rights.’ When the protests drew tens of thousands, Van der Heyden said, she was stunned to see as many boys as girls in the crowds, “and yet no one ever challenged the leadership of the female organizers.”

Seventeen-year-old Jamie Margolin, the founder and executive director of Zero Hour, a group organizing the US protests for the International Day of Action planned for March 15, told BuzzFeed that climate activism has given young women a chance to be heard.

“’There aren’t very many spaces that I can be in charge of, and what I’m going to say is going to be heard,’ Margolin said. Her group is led largely by young women of color, which she said should come as no surprise, because people who are already vulnerable are going to be disproportionately hit by climate change.”

Recently, TED posted Greta’s TEDxStockholm talk which she gave in November. Her talk has been up three weeks and has already been viewed over 1.2 million times. In it, she explained why she decided to skip school and protest, saying:

“I school striked for the climate. Some people say that I should be in school instead. Some people say that I should study to become a climate scientist so that I can ‘solve the climate crisis.’ But the climate crisis has already been solved. We already have all the facts and solutions. All we have to do is to wake up and change.”

At the end of her talk, Greta says she’s not going to end on a positive, hopeful note, like most TED talks.

“Yes, we do need hope, of course we do. But the one thing we need more than hope is action. Once we start to act, hope is everywhere. So instead of looking for hope, look for action. Then, and only then, hope will come.”
                                                                                                                — Greta Thunberg

As I observe Greta and Jamie and all the other girls taking up leadership and the young boys who are marching and protesting with them,  no longer waiting for some adult with a plan or for corporations or governments to take actions, but creating their own actions, I feel more hope than I have felt in a long time that we — all of us at every age — will also take up actions to address the climate crisis before it’s too late.

My daughter in law, Laura Turner Seydel, signs off every email with the Native American proverb: We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children. The world’s children are reminding us that we have a big debt to repay and an earth to repair and restore. Time’s up on our loan of the earth.

Inspired,

— Pat

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

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

The partner: Bezos Family Foundation and ENDLESS

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

Music: Nora Brown fingerpicking the banjo

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

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

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

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

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The talks in brief:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Joel Levin, a technology teacher and the cofounder of MinecraftEdu

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

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

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

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

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

Getting started: Notes from Session 2 of TEDWomen 2018

In an early morning session hosted by podcaster and TED2017 speaker Manoush Zomorodi, six speakers — Lucy Cooke, Ayanna Howard, Nivruti Rai, Monique W. Morris, Karissa Sanbonmatsu and Amanda Williams — brought us insights from the worlds of AI, robotics, epigenetics, education, and the wonderfully slow world of the sloth.

Sustainability lessons from the sloth. Sloths have a reputation for being languorous and lazy — they’re named after one of the seven deadly sins, after all. But they are misunderstood, says zoologist Lucy Cooke, who has spent more than a decade documenting the strange lives of the world’s slowest mammal. She’s come away with an important insight: “Learning the truth about the sloth may help save us and the planet we both call home,” she says. Sloths come from an ancient line of mammals that has been around for more than 40 million years (compared to around 300,000 years for humans). The secret to their success lies in their slow, sustainable and, well, slothful existence — which is more mindful than lazy, Cooke says. For instance, sloths have a massive four-chambered stomach and an unbelievably slow metabolism, sometimes taking up to one month to process a single leaf. This pace lets them eat many varieties of leaves, including some that would poison other, faster-digesting animals. They also have more neck bones than any other mammal — even giraffes — allowing them to turn their heads up to 270 degrees to graze without having to waste energy moving their body. Cooke thinks we can take a lesson from the sloth’s playbook: While we might not be able to lower our metabolism, we can slow down, reduce waste, and be more economical with our energy. If we can do this, we just might have a chance to hang around as long as the sloth.

Building robots that are friends, not foes. Robots aren’t perfect — after all, their algorithms are trained by flawed humans. AI can inherit our biases; an AI might recognize a man with a spatula as a woman, or a woman driving a car as a man. Roboticist Ayanna Howard asks: Why do we rely on biased algorithms to run our robots, and how do we fix them? We have an emotional connection to these robotic systems, Howard suggests. They take the chaos that is in our life and make it a little bit manageable — and thus, we treat them as authority figures, and allow them to pressure us to making emotional decisions. But there is hope. We can train robots to be better than us, and we can hold robot creators accountable for their creations. It’s not really the robots that we fear, Howard says — at the end of the day, we fear ourselves. She implores us to create a better future where robots are our friends, not foes.

Building AI “guardian angels.” Imagine an extra brain that knows us better than we know ourselves, that exists “with us, beside us, experiencing our world with us … always connected, always processing, always watching.” Nivruti Rai believes that AI systems could become these kinds of guardian angels. She and her research team have analyzed mountains of traffic data In India, where vehicles of every type and speed compete with humans (and animals) for road space. Machine-learning algorithms thrive on regular, repetitive data, but Indian roadways are loaded with “corner cases” — one-in-a-million incidents that present major obstacles to comprehending complex traffic systems. Rai is using these to her advantage, building an open-source database that includes corner cases to help train safer, more robust autonomous driving algorithms. If AI systems can safely navigate India’s traffic patterns, then they surely can solve other complex problems, she says — as long as we have a sufficiently robust data set.

Education is freedom work. “Around the world, black girls are struggling to be seen, working to be free and fighting to be included in the landscape of promise that a safe educational space provides,” says author and social justice scholar Monique W. Morris. In America, she tells us, black girls are seven times more likely than others to get suspended and three times more likely to be sent to juvenile court; they are overrepresented across the spectrum of disciplinary action in schools. Age compression is partly to blame — studies show that people perceive black girls as older (and less in need of protection) than they actually are — and their very appearance can be targeted for punishment, like the group of high-schoolers in South Africa who were penalized for wearing their hair in its natural state. (“Where can we be black if we can’t be black in Africa?” the girls asked.) Morris advises parents to start conversations with schools so that practices that harm black girls are eliminated. If schools are to be places of healing, she says, they’ll need fewer police officers and more counselors. “If we commit to this notion of education as freedom work, we can shift educational conditions so that no girl — even the most vulnerable among us –will get pushed out of school,” Morris says. “And that’s a win for all of us.”

What does it mean to be a woman? A scientist’s perspective. Biology researcher Karissa Sanbonmatsu studies DNA and why it gets itself all tied up in knots: the bends and folds that affect our lives on a fundamental level. As a scientist and trans woman, she and several other women across scientific disciplines are using epigenetics to search for the biomarkers that define gender on a molecular level by observing these twisty DNA structures. “One of the stunning things about our cells is that the components inside them are actually biodegradable,” she says. “They dissolve and then they’re rebuilt each day — kind of like a traveling carnival.” It’s this discovery that’s led to several others, specifically insights during pregnancy. Hormones, it turns out, trigger the formation of knots that can alter how we process life events, as well as the biological sex and brain development between trimesters — meaning that gender may develop separately in the womb. Asking what it means to be a woman, when people come in so many shapes and sizes, may not be the right question, says Sanbonmatsu. “Maybe becoming a woman means accepting ourselves for who we really are and acknowledging the same for each other.”

The intersection of color, race and space. Growing up in segregated Chicago, artist Amanda Williams thought that color could not be separated from race. As she puts it: “Racism is my city’s vivid hue.” While studying color theory in college, Williams learned about Josef Albers’ theory of color, which holds that the way we view color is actually subjective, relational, each color affected by its neighbor. Williams used this theory to understand the redlining in her neighborhood: In the 1930s, the federal government created a color-coding system for neighborhoods, and black neighborhoods, marked as “red,” didn’t receive federal housing loans. In response to this unfair characterization, Williams decided to create her own color palette, one that would speak to the people in her neighborhood. The result was “Color(ed) Theory,” a two-year art project that projected her own palette onto her neighborhood. She started by gathering stories and memories to reveal colors uniquely understood by black people. She then went for the biggest canvas she could find: houses, specifically ones that were going to be demolished. The boldly painted houses provoked a fresh reaction from the people around her and beyond. “Color(ed) Theory made unmistakably visible, the uncomfortable questions that institutions and governments have to ask themselves about why they do what they do,” says Williams. “They ask equally difficult questions of myself and my neighborhood counterparts about our value systems and what our path to collective agency needs to be.”

Showing up: Notes from Session 1 of TEDWomen 2018

Women the world over are no longer accepting the status quo. They’re showing up and pushing boundaries. Whatever their focus and talent — business, technology, art, science, politics — pioneers and their allies are joining forces in an explosion of discovery and ingenuity to drive real, meaningful change.

At TEDWomen 2018 — three days of ideas and connections at La Quinta Resort and Club in La Quinta, California — a dynamic and diverse group of leaders, thinkers and people seeking change are facing challenges head-on while empowering us all to shape the future we want to see. The conference kicked off with an electrifying session hosted by TEDWomen curator Pat Mitchell on Wednesday night — with talks and performances by Simona Abdallah, Tarana Burke, Ai-jen Poo, Dolores Huerta, Ashweetha Shetty, Katharine Wilkinson, Marian Wright Edelman and Flor de Toloache.

A rallying beat to show up and be. Percussionist Simona Abdallah opens TEDWomen with a rapturous bang of the darbuka, a drum of Middle Eastern origin traditionally played by men. Beneath a spotlight with eyes closed and face alight with expression, Abdallah fills the room with the crisp, resounding rhythms of her drum. Her passion and talent in percussion has vaulted her over barriers to international success. And as she welcomes the audience to clap along, it feels like an invitation for everyone watching to find the rhythm of their own.

Propelled by possibility. In 2006, Tarana Burke was consumed by a desire to do something about the rampant sexual violence she saw in her community. She took out a piece of paper, wrote “Me Too” across the top and laid out an action plan for a movement centered on the power of empathy between survivors. More than a decade later, she reflects on the state of what has now become a global movement — and makes a powerful call to action to end sexual violence. “We owe future generations nothing less than a world free of sexual violence,” she says. “I believe we can build that world.” Read a full recap of her talk here.

What domestic workers can teach us about creating a more humane world. What is it like to be both absolutely essential and yet completely invisible? What is it like to care for the world’s most treasured humans but not be seen as possessing value of one’s own? These riddles help capture the painful existence of domestic workers — the nannies, cleaners, elder-care attendants and other low-paid laborers to whom many people entrust their loved ones and their homes. Their lack of status is tied to gender and race, as domestic workers are overwhelmingly women of color, says Ai-jen Poo, executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA). For the past two decades, NDWA has pressed state legislatures to pass laws protecting such employees from discrimination and harassment and granting them basic benefits like paid time off and days of rest. But despite mistreatment and outright abuse, the workers she’s met are unstinting in their devotion to the people they’re hired to nurture, “to care no matter what.” In June 2018, Poo and other allies stood vigil at a border processing center in Texas, where they saw separated migrant children herded onto buses, their hands reaching through the windows for help. She recalls thinking, “If domestic workers were in charge, this never would have happened. Our humanity would never be so disposable that they would be treated this way.” She concludes: “We live in a time of moral choices. Everywhere we turn is full of moral choices, whether it’s at the border, at the ballot box, in our workplaces or in our homes. As you go about your day and you encounter these moral choices … think like a domestic worker who shows up and cares no matter what.”

Can women change the world? “¡Si se puede!” — “Yes we can!” Helen Keller once pointed out that while science has been able to cure many evils, it has found no remedy for the worst human evil of all: apathy. And legendary civil rights activist Dolores Huerta believes that this evil cripples those who should wield the most power: women. Why do so many women become apathetic? Huerta believes that they’re traumatized by aggression, taught to be victims, and are so overwhelmed by their emotive duties that they feel they don’t have the resources to become activists or to make demands of elected officials. But if the world is going to change, women must not only vote, they also must get others to vote — and vote people-centric activists into power. According to Huerta (building on an idea of Coretta Scott King), we will never have peace in the world until feminists take power. “We have power. Poor people have power. Every citizen has power, but in order to achieve the peace that we all yearn for, then we’ve all got to get involved.”

One woman’s story of perseverance. In a powerful personal talk, education advocate Ashweetha Shetty describes how she fought societal assumptions in her rural community in India — and ultimately found purpose creating opportunities for others through her foundation, Bodhi Tree. Throughout her life, Shetty felt boxed into the traditional domestic role assigned to her and other women in her village; she was told that because she was a poor rural girl, she wasn’t worthy of education. But she persisted, defying norms to graduate from college and land a prestigious year-long fellowship in Delhi. Now, she works to empower rural girls to pursue education and reclaim their voices and passions. Through Bodhi Tree, Shetty is determined to help create “a world where a girl like me is no longer a liability or a burden but a person of use, a person of value, a person of worthiness.”

Women and girls can heal mother earth. Author and environmentalist Katharine Wilkinson believes in the potential of girls and women to fight climate change — that by rising up to fight, emissions can be brought down. As vice president of communication and engagement at Project Drawdown, Wilkinson has spent the past several years studying how we can reverse global warming — and how climate change disproportionately affects women and girls. But if we can gain ground on gender equity, we also gain ground on addressing global warming. She outlines three key areas to tackle in order to fight global warming and empower women. First, we must support women smallholders — women who grow food on small areas of land with little resources. If we give these women access to better resources, their farm yields could increase by as much as 30 percent. Better farming on smaller plots could cause emissions from deforestation to drop. Wilkinson’s second solution is education. When women and girls are educated, they have more control over their health and finances, as well as the ability to succeed in a climate-changing world, she says. Educated women also marry later in life and have fewer children. Finally, Wilkinson calls for access to voluntary and high-quality reproductive healthcare. Giving more women control over the size of their family may mean one billion fewer people inhabiting Earth in 2050. “We need to break the silence around the condition of our planet,” Wilkinson says. “To address climate change, we must make gender equity a reality. And in the face of a seemingly impossible challenge, women and girls are a fierce source of possibility.”

Passion, purpose and advocacy. Marian Wright Edelman started the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) 45 years ago. She’s been on the front lines fighting for children ever since. In conversation with Pat Mitchell, Wright Edelman discusses her upbringing in the segregated American South, the beginning of the CDF and how growing older has made her more radical. “God runs a full-employment economy, and if you just follow the need, you’ll never lack for purpose in life,” Wright Edelman says, echoing the call to action she heard her father repeat growing up. After working with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on the Poor People’s Campaign for two years, Wright Edelman started the CDF, and since then the Fund has taken up causes borne out of the experiences Wright Edelman had growing up — things like immunization against preventable diseases and unequal access to education. Now she sees her purpose as drawing attention to injustice wherever it harms children and building a better world for the next generation. “We are not finished,” she says. “We are not ever going to feel finished until we end child poverty in the richest nation on earth.”

Mariachi that will put a spell on you. Named after the Mexican medicinal flower (also known for its use in love potions), Latin Grammy-winning mariachi band Flor de Toloache wrapped the opening session of TEDWomen 2018 with heartfelt music played from the soul. Between songs, the all-female group shared the tale of how they came together in New York City, connected by passion and the desire to create a sound that both celebrates and expands the genre and tradition of mariachi. Their soaring, bilingual vocals and masterful playing brought the stage to life with light, sincerity and spell-binding melodies.

Humanizing our future: A night of talks from TED and Verizon

There are moments when the world begins to shift beneath our feet. Sometimes slowly, sometimes dramatically. Now more than ever we are living and working in an era of exponential technological advancement. How we address rapid change, what collaborative relationships we create, how we find our humanity — all this will determine the future we step into.

For the first time, TED has partnered with Verizon for a salon focused on building that future. In a night of talks at the TED World Theater in New York City — hosted by TED curators Bryn Freedman and Kelly Stoetzel — six speakers and one performer shared fresh thinking on healing our hospital system, empowering rural women, creating a safer internet, harnessing intergenerational wisdom and much more.

How intergenerational wisdom helps companies thrive. In 2013, Chip Conley, who built a multi-decade career running boutique hotels, was brought into Airbnb to be the mentor of CEO Brian Chesky. Conley was 52 (and thus 21 years older than Chesky) and he wondered what, if anything, he could offer these digital natives. But he realized he could become what he calls a “Modern Elder,” someone with the “ability to use timeless wisdom and apply it to modern-day problems.” For instance, he shares with the younger employees the people skills he gained over decades, while they teach him about technology. Nearly 40 percent of Americans have a boss who is younger than them — and when people of all ages exchange knowledge and learn from each other, good things happen. “This is the new sharing economy,” Conley says.

Can hospitals heal our environmental illness? “It’s not possible to have healthy people on a sick planet,” says healthcare change agent Gary Cohen. Working in healthcare for 30 years, Cohen has seen firsthand the pollution created by hospitals in the United States — if American hospitals were a country, he says, they would have more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire United Kingdom. Cohen suggests that it’s time for hospitals to go beyond medical practice and become centers of holistic community healing. What could that look like? Investment in sustainable, renewable energy and transportation, green and affordable housing, and partnership with schools to pool local food resources. “Transform hospitals from being cathedrals of chronic disease to beacons of community wellness,” Cohen says.

Empowering rural women through solar-powered education. The innovators best prepared to cope with the issues of the future won’t be found in Silicon Valley or at an Ivy League school, says Barefoot College CEO Meagan Fallone. Instead, they’ll be found among the impoverished women of the Global South. Fallone works on groundbreaking programs at Barefoot College, a social work and research center, helping illiterate women break cycles of poverty through solar power education and training. Nearly 3,000 women have completed Barefoot College’s six-month business and solar engineering curriculum, and their skills have brought solar light to more than one million people. Following the success of the solar education program, and at the request of graduates, Barefoot College developed a follow-up program called “Enriche,” which offers a holistic understanding of enterprise skills, digital literacy, human rights and more. By democratizing and demystifying technology and education, Fallone says, we can empower illiterate women with the skills to become leaders and entrepreneurs — and make real change in their communities.

Dystopia is a choice. From The Matrix to Black Mirror, many of us crave science-fiction tales of rogue technologies: robots that will take our jobs, enslave us, destroy us or pit us against one another. Is our dread of dystopia a self-fulfilling prophecy? Rima Qureshi offers a warning — and some hopeful advice to remind us that dystopia is a choice. Our love for dystopia courts actual disaster through “target fixation”: the phenomenon where a driver or a pilot panics when a hazard looms, and thus becomes more likely to actually strike it. Although we should always keep cyber threats in our peripheral vision, Qureshi says, we should remain focused on the technologies that will help us: virtual classrooms, drones that race into burning buildings to find survivors, or VR that allows doctors to perform surgery remotely. We should not assume the future will be terrible (though we can still enjoy the next apocalyptic movie about how technology will destroy us all).

How drums build community. In 1995, entrepreneur Doug Manuel made a trip to West Africa and fell in love — with a drum. That drum is called the djembe, a rope-tuned instrument played with the hands; it’s one of the world’s oldest forms of communication. “With its more than 300 different traditional rhythms, it’s accompanied every aspect of life — from initiations to celebrations and even sowing the seeds for an abundant harvest,” Manuel says. Since his life-changing trip, Manuel has used the djembe to develop team-building programs and build bridges between Africa and the West. In a live demo of his work, Manuel invites the audience to try their hands at the djembe during two upbeat drum lessons. Backed by two professional drummers, Manuel teaches a few beats — and shows how the djembe can still bring people together around a collective rhythm.

Healing the pain of racial division. During the Civil Rights era, Ruby Sales joined a group of freedom fighters in Alabama, where she met Jonathan Daniels, a fellow student. The two became friends, and in 1965 they were jailed during a labor demonstration, ostensibly to save them from vigilantes. After six days in jail, the sheriff released the activists — but shortly after, they were attacked by a man with a shotgun. Daniels pulled Sales out of the way, and he was killed by the blast. In this moment, Sales witnessed “both love and hate coming from two very different white men that represented the best and the worst of white America.” Traumatized, she was stricken silent for six months. Fifty years later, our nation is still mired in what Sales calls a “culture of whiteness”: “a systemic and organized set of beliefs … [that] maintain a hierarchical power structure based on skin color.” To battle this culture, Sales calls for each of us to embrace our multi-ethnic identities and stories. Collectively shared, these stories can relieve racial tension and, with the help of connective technology, expand our vistas beyond our segregated daily lives.

What the internet is missing right now. Technology architect Fadi Chehadé helped set up the infrastructure that makes the internet work — basic things like the domain name system and IP address standards. Today as an advisory board member with the World Economic Forum’s Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution and a member of the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation, Chehadé is focused on finding ways for society to benefit from technology and on strengthening international cooperation in the digital space. In a crisp conversation with Bryn Freedman, curator of the TED Institute, Chehadé discusses the need for norms on issues like privacy and security, the ongoing war between the West and China over artificial intelligence, how tech companies can become stewards of the power they have to shape lives and economies, and what everyday citizens can do to claim power on the internet. “My biggest hope is that we will each become stewards of this new digital world,” Chehadé says.

New insights on climate change action, a milestone for Maysoon Zayid and more TED news

As usual, the TED community is making headlines. Below, some highlights.

Does local action make a difference when fighting climate change? Environmental scientist Angel Hsu teamed up with experts at several climate research institutes on a fascinating new report about the potential effects of local action in reducing greenhouse gas emissions globally. Hsu synthesized data from thousands of cities, regions and companies at Data-Driven Yale, the Singapore-based research group she founded and leads. The study found that committed action by local entities could help bring the world closer to the goals of 2015’s Paris Climate Agreement. Researchers also found that local action by American entities could reduce emissions by at least half of America’s initial Paris Agreement pledge, even without federal support. On the study, Hsu said, “The potential of these commitments to help the world avoid dangerous climate change is clear – the key is now to ensure that these commitments are really implemented.” (Watch Hsu’s TED Talk.)

A groundbreaking comedy show. Actor, comedian and disability activist Maysoon Zayid will write and star in a new show inspired by her life for ABC. The show, titled Can, Can, will follow a Muslim woman with cerebral palsy as she navigates the intricacies of her love life, career and her opinionated family. Much of Zayid’s comedy explores and expands the intersections of disability and Muslim-American identity. Zayid will be joined by writer Joanna Quraishi to help produce and write the single-camera series. (Watch Zayid’s TED Talk.)

Meet 2018’s Humanist of the Year. For his advocacy work on responsible and progressive economic ethics, Nick Hanauer will be honored as Humanist of the Year by the Humanist Hub, an organization based at MIT and Harvard. In a statement, Hanauer said, “It is an honor both to receive this award, and to join the Humanist Hub in helping to change the way we think and talk about the economy. It turns out that most people get capitalism wrong. Capitalism works best when it works for everybody, not just for zillionaires like me.” The Humanist Hub, a nonreligious philosophy group, annually celebrates a public individual they believe embodies the ideals of humanism, a philosophy of living ethically to serve the greater good of humanity. (Watch Hauner’s TED Talk.)

Are you saving enough for retirement? Behavioral economist Dan Ariely doesn’t think so — in a new study conducted with Aline Holzwarth at the Center for Advanced Hindsight at Duke University, Ariely found that we can expect to spend up to 130% of our preretirement income once we retire. Ariely and Holzwarth urge us to abandon the conventional idea that 70% of our income will be enough for retirement. Instead, they suggest we approach saving for retirement with a personalized methodology that takes into account the seven most prominent spending categories: eating out, digital services, recharge (relaxing and self-care), travel, entertainment and shopping, and basic needs. Moving past a generic one-size measurement, they advocate planning your retirement spending only after you spending time understanding your individual needs. (Watch Ariely’s TED Talk.)

In Italy, a bridge offers hope after tragedy. Following a devastating bridge collapse that killed 43 people in Genoa, Italian architect Renzo Piano has offered to donate a new bridge design to help his beloved hometown recover from the traumatic loss. Preliminary designs present a bridge that is distinctly ship-like, alluding to Genoa’s maritime history; it includes 43 illuminated posts resembling sails to memorialize each of the victims. Meanwhile, Piano has worked closely with England’s Royal Academy of the Arts to design and curate an expansive retrospective of his work called “The Art of Making Buildings,” opening September 15. On the exhibition, Piano said, “[M]aking buildings is a civic gesture and social responsibility. I believe passionately that architecture is about making a place for people to come together and share values.” (Watch Piano’s TED Talk.)