Infinite possibilities: The talks of TED@BCG 2025

We live in a time of great risk — and thrilling possibility. To make sense of it all, 21 speakers and performers gathered to draft a blueprint for our future.

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

When and where: October 23, 2025 at The Lana, Dorchester Collection, in Dubai, UAE

Speakers: Riyad Joucka, Suresh Subudhi, Vinciane Beauchêne, Mary Martin, Edmond Rhys Jones, Sharon Price John, Stephen Remedios, Maegan Stephens, Nicole Lowenbraun, Akram Awad, His Excellency Khalfan Belhoul, Qahir Dhanani, Kirsten Rulf, Lance Katigbak, Kanika Sanghi, Chris Musser, Alessandra Catozzella, Wolfgang Schnellbaecher, Melissa M. Mikus, Christian Busch

5 big ideas from the day:

Climate chaos is colliding with the global economy. Climate change isn’t just reshaping our planet — it’s also shaking the very foundations of the economy, says climate pathfinder Edmond Rhys Jones. He explores the massive gap between what science tells us about the climate crisis and how the economy measures its impact, advocating for economists to borrow tools from science — like simulations and systems thinking — to prepare for the turbulence ahead. Meanwhile, health insurance leader Alessandra Catozzella thinks insurance could be one of the best tools to prevent and manage the climate-fueled health crisis. She gives examples of how insurers, governments and businesses can work together to turn insurance into a force that keeps people healthier for longer.

AI is transforming everyday life — and our systems need to keep up. Leadership and AI maverick Stephen Remedios offers a cautionary tale, recounting how he built an AI model (“DaddyGPT”) to answer his sons’ questions while he was busy — only to find himself out-parented by a bot. He quickly learned that while outsourcing care might be convenient, it comes at a steep cost to our most valued relationships. AI futurist Akram Awad picks up on this thread, adding that we must learn to value relationships and community over productivity and wealth — or else we’ll find ourselves in an identity crisis. With the right education and compensation models, he says, we can find meaning in societal contributions, not just job titles. This systemic change should impact governance, too, according to digital sovereignty expert Kirsten Rulf. She thinks regulation is too focused on the output of AI, as opposed to the algorithm behind it. Laws should be written as “living, adaptive, responsive code that learns like AI does,” she says, allowing safety and security to evolve alongside the technology.

Gen Z is reshaping culture, but not in the ways you might think. Consumer trends expert Kanika Sanghi dives into how Gen Z embraces novelty, remixes traditions and celebrates a relatable lifestyle over polished success. She shows why brands, leaders and creators need to stay authentic in order to keep up with a generation that’s already building the future. “Keep evolving, keep remixing, keep pushing us forward — because that is what will build a better tomorrow,” she says.

Living a fulfilling life starts with tracking what truly matters. Personal metrics expert Chris Musser shares how he turned a single question — “Am I living a good life?” — into a daily practice, tracking progress across nine dimensions, from faith and relationships to work and wellbeing. By measuring his life each day, Musser shows how he learned to spot patterns, balance trade-offs and focus on what truly matters.

Dreams are the real measure of progress. Consumer research expert Lance Katigbak reveals why a country’s true story is found in its people’s aspirations — not just its GDP. Surveying Filipinos nationwide, he finds a generation dreaming for their families, chasing financial security and often feeling unsupported by institutions. Imagine having a “Department of Dreams,” he says, urging governments and organizations to help people turn ambition into reality — and build a society where everyone can thrive.

What we learned at day 2 of TED2025

Celebrating the joy of learning unexpected things, day 2 of TED2025 kicks off with a bang — or, more specifically, a howl, as we learn about the communication of wolves. From there, speakers explore a wide range of ideas, from the surprising parallels between evolution and language to jaw-dropping live demos of humanoid robots, AI-powered 3D games and more. Learn about bold visions for cleaning up the ocean, ending child hunger and aligning AI with humanity’s best interests. Are you ready to dive into what you didn’t know you needed to know?

Day 2 included talks curated by linguist John McWhorter, creative technologist Bilawal Sidhu and educator and podcaster Liv Boeree. Here are some key takeaways:

From wolves to humans, communication shapes survival and success. With the help of AI, we’re closer to understanding animal conversations. Linguist and software engineer Jeffrey T. Reed’s research on wolf vocalizations reveals how these creatures use sound not just for survival but also to negotiate, signal and stay in sync. This mirrors human communication, as cognitive scientist Steven Pinker suggests, where “common knowledge” allows us to do everything from navigating cities to sparking revolutions through coordinated action. None of this would be possible without the ever-evolving relationship between genes and language, explored in a fascinating conversation between evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and linguist John McWhorter (who also guest curated and hosted Session 2 of TED2025). Whether it’s a peacock’s colorful display, a wolf’s howl to reunite with its pack or a poet’s words to inspire — communication is the thread that ties us all together.

Bold takes on parenting and the role of culture in today’s biggest challenges. Journalist Lenore Skenazy makes the case that giving kids more independence, instead of micromanaging their every move, helps build resilience and — counterintuitively — eases both parents’ and children’s anxiety. Economist and entrepreneur Roland Fryer brings real-world perspective to how systemic inequalities shape our world. While hip-hop often gets blamed for its controversial lyrics, he flips the script, showing how the genre can reflect deeper societal issues, offering a voice to the unheard and shedding light on the complexities of race, class and opportunity in a way few other mediums can.

Technology continues to infiltrate our lives. In a series of live demos, speakers show how technology is poised to integrate even more deeply into our daily lives. Roboticist Bernt Børnich brings the robot NEO onstage, showing that humanoid home helpers are no longer science fiction — they’re just around the corner. Meanwhile, Shahram Izadi takes us inside the development of Google’s new Android XR platform, which aims to give users the power of AI (on their faces) via headsets and smart glasses. Lastly, technologist Kiran Bhat previews the future of AI-powered 3D gaming, building an immersive, wintry Japanese village with only a series of text prompts.

Inside the high-tech arms race. AI in warfare is no longer a hypothetical — it’s an inevitability, says Palmer Luckey, an inventor and founder of defense technology company Anduril Industries. He asserts that the US military must embrace mass-producible, AI-powered autonomous weapons in order to overwhelm adversaries with technological superiority. The stakes are no less than the ability to protect our way of life for a generation, he says: We need to summon every possible advantage to win.

Africa has a blueprint for feeding children sustainably and at scale. Food trailblazer Wawira Njiru urges a reimagining of Africa not as a crisis zone but as the source of innovative solutions to child hunger. By focusing on school meals that use locally grown foods, engaging local communities and governments and innovating with simple but powerful technology, her nonprofit Food4Education has served more than 100 million meals — and they’re showing no signs of slowing down. With support from the Audacious Project, TED’s innovative funding initiative, Food4Education will feed one million kids daily in Kenya by 2030 and two million more across Africa, offering a blueprint for the rest of the world to follow in ensuring that every child has access to nutritious food.

Protecting the planet from every angle. On a scuba trip in Greece as a teenager, marine custodian Boyan Slat found more plastic bags than fish in the water. This shocking experience sparked The Ocean Cleanup, an ambitious effort to use technology to capture ocean trash at its source. After an initial (and very public) setback, Slat has now deployed trash “Interceptors” in eight countries, capable of capturing millions of kilograms of plastic in just hours of deployment, with plans to expand to 30 more countries. Back on land, farm animal welfare champion Lewis Bollard pulls back the curtain on the everyday horrors of factory farming — from crowded cages for hens to crates that confine pregnant pigs — and reveals how consumer demand has already driven major corporate and legislative reforms. By blending big data, inventive tech and grassroots pressure, Slat and Bollard illustrate that massive environmental problems can be tackled — if we decide to act.

We urgently need to find the “narrow path” to building safe AI — before it’s too late. The current path of AI development is dangerous, unsustainable and “insane,” says technologist Tristan Harris, as profit- and influence-seeking companies create frontier models that are proving themselves to be untrustworthy and downright deceitful. But creating an AI dystopia is not inevitable — rather, it’s a choice we’re making. By gaining clarity on the risks and taking cues from how humanity has faced other existential challenges, like nuclear proliferation and ozone depletion, we can find what Harris calls the “narrow path,” where AI is rolled out into society with wisdom and foresight — and where powers match responsibility.

Meet the 2025 class of TED Fellows

We are thrilled to announce this year’s 2025 cohort of TED Fellows, whose work spans four continents and represents 11 countries. This year’s TED Fellows are tackling some of the world’s most urgent issues with bold and groundbreaking solutions. Among them are an entrepreneur transforming organic waste into bioplastics, a pilot teaching a generation of young African women to fly, a scientist using satellites to fight food insecurity and an illustrator capturing powerful stories that go beyond the headlines.

For 16 years, the TED Fellows program has been committed to finding and supporting the next generation of innovators. The fellowship offers communication training, network-building opportunities and amplification for remarkable individuals who are pushing boundaries in their fields and tackling the world’s greatest challenges.

TED is honored to welcome these new Fellows into a dynamic and active network — of more than 500 global changemakers in over 100 countries — who are driving meaningful impact in their communities and beyond.

To learn more about these TED Fellows and follow their journey, check out @tedfellow or join our newsletter.

Patricia Aymà Maldonado
Biotechnologist | Spain
Patricia Aymà Maldonado, the cofounder of VEnvirotech, has invented technology that uses bacteria to transform organic waste into 100-percent biodegradable plastic in just 24 hours. It’s a low-cost, sustainable approach that stands to revolutionize the plastics industry.

George Butler
Reportage artist | UK
Illustrator George Butler reports on the ground from conflict zones, climate hotspots and humanitarian crises, using pen, ink and watercolors to highlight personal stories of perseverance. By slowing down and going deeper than the headlines, his humanistic approach is shifting how we think about the news.

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Dion Dawson
Food equity champion | US
Dion Dawson founded Dion’s Chicago Dream to fight food insecurity in his hometown. Different than the food pantry model that relies on donations, his team purchases, packs and delivers fresh, high-quality produce, ensuring access to healthy meals.

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Molly Hemstreet
Sustainable textile entrepreneur | US
Molly Hemstreet, cofounder of The Industrial Commons, is rebuilding the textile industry in her home of Appalachia. By putting workers first and focusing on sustainability, she’s reimagining a $96-billion industry — and creating a model that can be replicated in other rural manufacturing regions, too.

Refilwe Ledwaba
Aviation and aerospace educator | South Africa
Refilwe Ledwaba is a pilot, flight instructor and the founder of Girls Fly Africa — a nonprofit inspiring a generation of young people, particularly young women, to learn to fly. Her work provides training and opportunities for youth in aviation and aerospace, boosting their economic and social independence.

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Dieuveil Malonga
Culinary innovator | Republic of the Congo + Rwanda
Dieuveil Malonga is a chef who’s elevating African cuisine globally. Through his restaurant, Meza Malonga, and his Culinary Innovation Village, he’s mentoring the next generation of African culinary talent while supporting local economies and promoting sustainable gastronomy.

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Catherine Nakalembe
Food security specialist | Uganda + US
Catherine Nakalembe uses satellite technology and machine learning to monitor smallholder farming and improve disaster preparedness. As the director of NASA Harvest’s Africa program, she supports millions of farmers while strengthening food security on the continent.

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César Ramírez-Sarmiento
Protein engineer and designer | Chile
César Ramírez-Sarmiento leads educational efforts in protein design in Latin America. His lab designs proteins with AI for therapeutic and environmental applications, including enzymes that break down PET plastic — work that could revolutionize how we manage plastic waste.

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Txai Suruí
Land defender | Brazil
Txai Suruí is an Indigenous leader and activist from the Amazon. Deeply committed to her culture’s ancient practices, she also embraces new technology. By using drones to protect ancestral forests and social media to amplify her message globally, she’s securing land rights and creating policy changes.

Claudia Vega
Rainforest toxicologist | El Salvador + Peru
Running a world-class lab in the middle of the Amazon, Claudia Vega studies the effects of mercury pollution from illegal gold mining, highlighting an urgent environmental and public health problem with far-reaching impact.

Announcing AI-adapted multilingual TED Talks, unblocking language barriers

Imagine the world’s most captivating TED Talks at your fingertips, voiced in your own language.

At TED, we believe that ideas are universal and that they should be accessible to everyone. Yet language barriers often hinder access to our talks, many of which are delivered in English. To tackle this issue head-on, we’re expanding our multilingual initiatives, building on the success of TED’s subtitling program by combining human and artificial intelligence. This approach aims to enhance inclusivity and enrich the experiences for TED’s diverse global audiences.

Launching TED’s pilot program

By integrating generative AI, including voice-cloning and lip-syncing capabilities, in collaboration with Panjaya.ai and TED’s global Translators community, we’ve created the first AI-adapted TED Talks, delivered in multiple languages while preserving each speaker’s unique voice and style. Unlike traditional dubbing methods, which can feel awkward and clunky, TED’s AI adaptation prioritizes a seamless viewing experience. This marks a new era in multilingual content delivery.

Speakers’ voices adapted to multiple languages

A key aspect of this initiative is prioritizing the individuality of our diverse speakers’ voices. To achieve this, we worked closely with each speaker to obtain their consent and ensure that their message is faithfully conveyed in multiple languages, allowing their talks to resonate with audiences worldwide. The pilot launches in Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Italian and Spanish with plans to expand to more languages soon.

Environmental awareness

Mindful of the environmental impact, we prioritize sustainability while minimizing our ecological footprint. Unlike real-time AI products, our approach focuses on one-time AI adaptation, reducing our environmental impact while delivering an innovative solution.

Join us in experiencing a new way of unlocking knowledge across languages and cultures. Watch the world’s first AI-adapted multilingual TED Talks, and share them with your friends around the world!

Watch TED’s first AI-adapted multilingual TED Talks and share them with others!

Lera Boroditsky: How language shapes the way we think

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Guy Winch: How to fix a broken heart

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Lisa Bu: How books can open your mind

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Angelica Dass: The beauty of human skin in every color

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Terry Moore: A mysterious design that appears across millennia

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Chris Anderson: It’s time for infectious generosity. Here’s how

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Monica Araya: How cities are detoxing transportation

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Manoush Zomorodi: How boredom can lead to your most brilliant ideas

Explorers: Notes on Session 8 of TED2024

From redefining the boundaries of artificial intelligence to unraveling the mysteries of the human genome, Session 8 of TED2024 inspired us to reimagine our relationship with technology and its impact on society.

This session’s explorers offered profound insights into the intersection of technology and human experience — and envisioned a future where innovation fosters greater understanding and connection.

The event: Talks from Session 8 of TED2024: The Brave and the Brilliant, hosted by TED’s Helen Walters

When and where: Thursday, April 18, 2024, at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, BC, Canada

Speakers: Ray Kurzweil, Keolu Fox, Cliff Kapono, Catie Cuan, Pau Garcia, Peace Itimi, Anjan Sundaram, Amy Kurzweil

The talks in brief: 

We’ve always used technology to enhance our capacities, but the rapid progress of AI is poised to transform our world in radical and beautiful ways. From nanocomputers to “longevity escape velocity,” AI visionary Ray Kurzweil shares why he believes the advent of artificial general intelligence will revamp human life for the better.

Tapping into Indigenous wisdom and cutting-edge technology, Keolu Fox, cofounder of the Native BioData Consortium, and professional surfer and scientist Cliff Kapono propose an eco-friendly approach to data storage — one that relies on the genomes of living organisms like sugar cane. This approach not only mitigates environmental impact but also honors Indigenous heritage by fostering resilience within ecosystems.

Robot choreographer Catie Cuan gives insight into the curiously beautiful world of robotic movement, proposing that robots who can dance — i.e. move with intention and grace — will be better caregivers, teachers and companions who can more seamlessly function among us.

What’s your favorite memory? This is a question that Pau Garcia often explores as part of his project Synthetic Memories, which uses generative AI to create visualizations of people’s memories. He explores the poignant power of this work — from reconnecting people with long-gone moments to potentially helping Alzheimer’s patients tap into lost memories — and shows how we might use technology to understand the past.

Peace Itimi takes us inside Africa’s thriving tech ecosystem starting with MainOne, a Nigerian company that laid West Africa’s first privately owned undersea cable and brought faster connectivity to the region. She introduces us to a range of start-up success stories — from the East African fintech company Kopo Kopo to South Africa’s open-banking platform Stitch.

Small Indigenous communities make up only five percent of the world’s population, but they defend 80 percent of the biodiversity that remains on Earth, says war reporter Anjan Sundaram. He takes us to our planet’s bloody ecological frontlines, where invisible heroes are battling corporations and cartels to save our planet’s last natural ecosystems.

What if AI could breathe new life into the words of a deceased loved one? Cartoonist Amy Kurzweil’s grandfather, Fred, fled Vienna before World War II. When she set about building a chatbot with his archives, she thought the project might feel like a resurrection. Instead, conversations with Fred became a journey into the past, one that changed her ideas about art.

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.

Meet the 2024 class of TED Fellows

In this complex world, it’s easy to believe that the future is out of our hands. But there are some who understand that the future doesn’t just happen — it’s made. Among these are the TED Fellows: innovators, activists, artists, inventors and dreamers. The TED Fellows program, now celebrating its fifteenth year, provides communication training, professional tools, network-building opportunities and amplification on the global stage to early-stage innovators working across multiple disciplines in over 100 countries.  

We are thrilled to announce the 2024 cohort of TED Fellows, whose work spans five continents and represents 11 countries — including, for the first time, Georgia. This year’s TED Fellows include an entrepreneur who is reshaping health care in conflict zones, an engineer who created a cold chain solution saving lives in rural African communities and a scientist pioneering new, safer AI technologies — to name just a few. 

Each TED Fellow was selected for their remarkable achievements, the potential impact of their work and their commitment to community building. TED is honored to welcome these new Fellows into this dynamic global network of 500+ Fellows creating meaningful change in their communities and the world.

Mohamed Aburawi
Health systems entrepreneur | Libya + Canada
Mohamed Aburawi is a surgeon and founder of Speetar, a digital health platform reshaping health care in conflict zones across the Middle East and Africa, especially his native Libya. Through this work, Speetar is helping to dismantle barriers to quality care and advocate for health care as a fundamental human right.

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Sahba Aminikia
Composer, artistic director | Iran + US
Iranian-born composer, pianist and educator Sahba Aminikia is the founder and artistic director of Flying Carpet Children Festival, an annual mobile arts festival and artist residency for refugee children escaping conflict zones.

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Joel Bervell
Medical mythbuster | Ghana + US
Joel Bervell is a medical student educating people about health care disparities and biases through viral social media content. By sharing stories and studies with his audience of more than one million about the neglect of marginalized groups, he advocates for change in the health care system.

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Lehua Kamalu
Ocean navigator | Hawaii + US
Lehua Kamalu is a captain and navigator of traditional Hawaiian ocean-voyaging canoes. She preserves and teaches these ancient sustainable navigation practices by integrating them into digital storytelling and daily life for future generations.

Huiyi Lin
Visual artist, poverty researcher | Singapore + China
Huiyi Lin is an economic policy researcher and one half of Chow and Lin, an artist duo using statistical, mathematical and computational techniques to address food insecurity and poverty. Chow and Lin combine research, design and photography to raise awareness about global inequality in visually arresting ways.

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Ramin Hasani
AI scientist, entrepreneur | US, Austria + Iran
Ramin Hasani is cofounder and CEO of Liquid AI, where he helped invent liquid neural networks: a new AI technology inspired by living brains and physics. These revolutionary networks are more flexible and efficient than current AI solutions, shaping the future of machine learning and artificial intelligence research.

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Paule Joseph
Chemosensory researcher, nurse | Venezuela + US
Taste and smell researcher Paule Joseph explores how conditions such as COVID-19, obesity, neurodegenerative disorders and substance abuse affect the chemical senses. Her lab combines clinical research, behavioral neuroscience, genomics and molecular biology, offering insights on how taste and smell affect our daily lives.

 

Norah Magero
Mechanical engineer | Kenya
Norah Magero is a mechanical engineer and creator of VacciBox, a cold chain solution saving lives in rural communities. She is working to build an Africa that manufactures and produces its own climate-health care technology.

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Royal Ramey
Wildland firefighter | US
Royal Ramey is the cofounder of the Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program (FFRP), a nonprofit providing career opportunities to formerly incarcerated firefighters in California. A 12-year wildland firefighter veteran, Ramey draws on his own lived experience, rethinking job training for the formerly incarcerated and addressing the challenges they face re-entering the workforce.

Daro Sulakauri
Photojournalist, visual artist | Georgia
Photojournalist Daro Sulakauri chronicles social and political issues in the Caucasus. By focusing on issues that are considered taboo, such as early marriages and the impact of Russian occupation, she defends against the erasure of Georgian culture, history and borders.

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Erika Moore Taylor
Equity bioengineer | US
Biomedical engineer Erika Moore Taylor researches how ancestry and sociocultural data affect disease development. Unlike many researchers, she accounts for diverse populations when building regenerative tissue models to create more equitable disease models.

A world view: Talks from day 1 of TEDWomen 2023

TEDWomen 2023 kicked off in its new home of Atlanta, Georgia with a moving and wide-ranging session of talks and performances about the future of global democracy, the pursuit of freedom in Russia and Ukraine, the path to recovery for survivors and more.

The event: Session 1 of TEDWomen 2023, hosted by TEDWomen editorial director Pat Mitchell, TED’s head of curation Helen Walters and activist, filmmaker and entrepreneur Maya Penn

When and where: Wednesday, October 11, 2023, at the Woodruff Arts Center in Atlanta, Georgia

Speakers: Yordanos Eyoel, Irina Karamanos Adrian, Oleksandra Matviichuk, Jane Ferguson, Dasha Navalnaya, Ava DuVernay, Christine Schuler Deschryver, Chris Anderson

Music: Introduced by Atlanta Symphony Orchestra music director Nathalie Stutzmann, chamber music group The Merian Ensemble open the week with an evocative and transporting performance of Nicole Chamberlain’s “Atalanta” for flute, oboe, bass clarinet, harp and viola.

It’s not news that democracy is under attack globally. In order to encourage new democracies (and protect established ones), we need more than robust institutions — we need grassroots action, says democracy entrepreneur Yordanos Eyoel, who explores innovative ways to nurture nascent pro-democracy groups wherever they’re threatened.

As a feminist, Irina Karamanos Adrian was not thrilled to become Chile’s First Lady. She shares how she overturned the position’s institutionalized responsibilities in an effort to make them more transparent, asserting that it’s undemocratic for an unelected position to have such power.

How do we defend people’s freedom and dignity against authoritarianism, asks human rights lawyer Oleksandra Matviichuk. In the face of Russian troops occupying Ukraine, she emphasizes the extraordinary capabilities of ordinary people — and urges us all to stand together.

Women journalists shape the way the world sees wars, says war reporter Jane Ferguson. Illuminating the historic impact of female-led reporting, she highlights the perspective-broadening power of humanizing stories from war zones.

Dasha Navalnaya is the daughter of an important man: Alexey Navalny, the leader of the Russian opposition and one of Vladimir Putin’s top critics. She shares the story of her father’s poisoning and imprisonment — and why Russians need your help to bring down Putin’s authoritarian regime.

In conversation with TEDWomen editorial director Pat Mitchell, writer, producer and filmmaker Ava DuVernay discusses how she turned Caste — Isabel Wilkerson’s Pulitzer-Prize winning nonfiction analysis of race in the US — into Origin, a gripping narrative film exploring both the book’s thesis and the author’s life story.

Human rights activist Christine Schuler Deschryver shares how her organization, City of Hope, is modeling a new recovery program for women survivors of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, one that allows women to reclaim their bodies while developing skills to become future community leaders.

We’re well aware of how quickly hate and misinformation go viral. But in a one-of-a-kind preview of his upcoming book, head of TED Chris Anderson argues generosity can be infectious as well — creating powerful ripple effects that help us thrive.

Closing performance: Mahogany-N-Motion, a student-run women’s dance group from Spelman College — a historically Black liberal arts college in Atlanta, Georgia — close out the session with an energetic, drumline-infused performance that brought the TEDWomen crowd to its feet.

Momentum: Notes from Session 7 of TED Countdown Summit 2023

TED Countdown Summit 2023 concluded with a wide-ranging session featuring eight inspiring takes from around the world on how to ensure a fast, fair transition to a clean energy future.

The event: Talks from Session 6 of TED Countdown Summit 2023, hosted by TED’s David Biello and Lindsay Levin with journalist Orlando P. Bailey.

When and where: Friday, July 14, 2023, at the Fillmore Detroit in Detroit, Michigan

Speakers: Kala Constantino, Rebecca Collyer, Rich Powell, Zainab Usman, Amir Nizar Zuabi, Sims Witherspoon, Ramón Méndez Galain, Mike Posner

There’s a green energy wave swelling in the Philippines. Kala Constantino, director of the ecology advocacy group Tara Climate Foundation introduces us to a cross-section of the actors working to build a grid for cheap and clean renewable power throughout Asia. Electricity consumers in the Philippines pay one of the highest bills in Southeast Asia due to imported fossil fuels. Yet, as an island nation, the country also loses hundreds of millions of dollars every year to the impacts of climate disasters aggravated by carbon emissions. Activists have already encouraged the government to set aside funds for renewables and slow down the construction of coal-fired plants. With their help, Constantino hopes to see the Philippines become energy independent through solar and wind power, which will not only reduce electricity costs but also create jobs in a new, profitable sector.

Rebecca Collyer is the executive director of 2023 Audacious Project grantee ReNew2030, a global coalition to scale the use of wind and solar energy. In conversation with TED science curator David Biello, Collyer explores how to ensure the transition to renewable energy is fast and fair — a crucial task, as the power sector produces more carbon emissions than any other sector in the world. She shows how, by mobilizing governments, businesses and local communities around the world, ReNew2030 aims to scale wind and solar power capacity by 2030 and set the world up for a climate-secure future — all while creating local jobs and clean air.

We’ve all heard of the dangers of NIMBY-ism (“not in my backyard”). Climate innovation leader Rich Powell takes it a step further, saying that the true barrier to immediate implementation of clean energy projects is BANANA-ism: “build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything.” This means that critical infrastructure like windmills, nuclear plants and flexible power grids can get bogged down for years in the permitting process — or killed by wealthy lobbyists seeking to keep wind farms or solar panels away from their property. Powell believes that the quickest way to solve our clean energy crisis is to remove these barriers, while keeping environmental protections like the Clean Water Act. If voters and regulators can find common ground, then he says we’ll be well on our way toward replacing our existing power grid with one focused on renewables.

Solving the climate crisis requires collective action on a global scale, but today’s economy is becoming fractured between four regions: the US, China, Europe and the rest of the world. Political economist Zainab Usman says the solution lies with policymakers, business leaders and activists. Working together worldwide, they can distribute low-carbon technology globally; prioritize consumer welfare to make green tech more accessible; and set global standards to govern the sourcing of strategic, nonrenewable materials (such as the minerals in solar panels and other green products). With these goals, Usman says, we don’t have to live out the divided, dystopian future predicted by George Orwell and other such writers long before.

Tapping into the power of theater and its ability to turn pressing issues into human stories that spark hope, theater director and playwright Amir Nizar Zuabi shares the journey of Little Amal — a 10-year-old refugee girl (who is actually a 13-foot puppet) that went on an epic, 5,000-mile migration across eight countries in a globe-trotting art piece called “The Walk.” She embodied the broken global refugee system that has left so many people vulnerable and displaced. Inspired by the impact Little Amal had on the communities she passed through, Zuabi unveils for the first time his next piece: “The Herds,” a massive migration of animal puppets that will start in West Africa and end in Norway, set to begin their travels in 2025. Evolving as they move, the herds will take on new species native to each country they encounter, raising awareness about climate change and the threat it poses to animals and humans alike in a devastating, powerful and beautiful way.

Sims Witherspoon wants to use artificial intelligence to tackle climate change. When building a sustainable future, she believes AI can help us better understand the impact of climate change on Earth’s ecosystems, accelerate the breakthrough science we need to create a carbon-free energy supply and speed up the transition to renewable energy sources. Witherspoon explains how she and her team recently partnered with Google to develop an AI that accurately predicts wind availability on one of Google’s wind farms. They trained a neural net on weather forecasts and Google’s historical turbine data and then deployed it on the wind farm to test its accuracy. Their AI ultimately performed 20 percent better than Google’s existing system, and Google has since decided to scale the technology — a win for the company and the planet.

Fifteen years ago, Uruguay was experiencing an energy crisis; today, the tiny nation produces 98 percent of its electricity from renewable sources — and even exports extra energy to countries like Argentina and Brazil. Former particle physicist Ramón Méndez Galain charted the country’s transition to renewables as head of the country’s National Energy Agency. He shares how they achieved energy stability with widespread political support by shifting away from fossil fuels toward clean energy sources like wind, solar and sustainable biomass made from rice hulls, bagasse and pulp. Uruguay also developed technologies to predict the availability of intermittent sources, like wind and solar, to determine which energy sources to rely on and when. Although the transition required massive effort, coordination and innovation, the country can now depend on a stable, sustainable and, yes, profitable energy sector.

Singer-songwriter Mike Posner performs two hit songs, “I Took a Pill in Ibiza” and “Could You Do the Same,” and delivers an inspiring talk about how he walked nearly 3,000 miles across the United States. A lot happened along the way, he says — including a life-threatening rattlesnake bite — but the journey left him with five crucial life lessons and a sense of deep, true happiness.

Dare to discover: TEDinArabic hosts third regional event in Ben Guerir, Morocco

TEDinArabic brought together some of the world’s brightest minds to share ideas on the importance of outside-the-box thinking to change minds, embrace our shared humanity and shape the future.

The event: TEDinArabic, hosted by Al Jazeera correspondent Mohamed Errammach, included four talks centered on the theme “Dare to Discover,” a series of interactive workshops curated by partners at afikra, a performance by students of the Joudour Sahara music school and a series of interstitials by Arab artists. The event was attended by a number of dignitaries from Qatar, Morocco and Saudi Arabia, 50 students from across the region and more than 900 participants from Morocco. It was the third in a series of TEDinArabic regional events organized in the lead-up to the TEDinArabic Summit in March, 2023 in Doha, Qatar. The summit will feature 16 speakers from the Arabic-speaking world sharing their ideas for the first time with a global audience — all in Arabic.

When and where: Thursday, October 13, 2022 at the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Ben Guerir, Morocco

Opening remarks: Moza Al-Hajri, a student at Georgetown University in Qatar and a youth advocate for the Education Above All Foundation, emphasized the importance of the Arabic language to Arab identity and upholding cultural heritage.

The talks in brief:

Charles Mouhannad Malek, molecular and cellular biologist 

Big idea: We can build bridges and increase empathy through science.

How? Dr. Charles Malek thinks the only way for the Arabic-speaking world to transition from a consumer to a producer market is through investing in scientific research and technology here at home. Many students decide to work abroad because their home countries don’t provide them with the necessary tools and infrastructure to pursue their scientific research. The key to solve this problem is to teach with the scientific method – which relies on empirical observation, information gathering, analysis, conclusion and critical thinking – as opposed to lectures and rote memorization. Malek emphasizes the need to develop and promote scientific content in the Arabic language as a vehicle to build knowledge across the region. “If we decide to prioritize science education and make that the compass of the north, change will come,” he says.

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Aziza Chaouni, civil engineer, architect, professor 

Big idea: A model for sustainable living and preserving cultural heritage lies in the desert.

How? The creation of oases, through careful land and building management, has made desert living possible for centuries. Increased tourism and climate change, however, are forcing local communities to leave, abandoning their cultural heritage as the desert creeps in. Aziza Chaouni is focused on reversing the damage by designing a new approach to sustainability and cultural heritage preservation. In her hometown of Fez, Morocco, the oasis of M’hamid Al Ghizlan was on its way to extinction until Chaouni established Joudour Sahara, a music school built with sustainable, local materials – such as rammed earth, stone, wood and bamboo – and powered by an autonomous, photovoltaic energy system. Thanks to the project, the desert has stopped trying to eat M’hamid, residents are staying in their homes and their cultural heritage is now thriving. She concludes her talk with a live performance by the students of Joudour Sahara.

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Suzanne Talhouk, author, poet

Big idea: Embrace the vibration of the Arabic language to shape your life and the life of those around you.

How? Words carry a vibration that can affect your other senses, says Suzanne Talhouk. She makes an impassioned case to get in touch with your inner voice and to embrace a world that stays away from using inflammatory, charged words. “If you want to improve your life and the life of those around you, start by using words that express love, harmony and forgiveness,” she says. She concludes by exploring the power of the Arabic language, saying that words shape the way we think and act. Arabic is one of the many languages that has a myriad of words that carry vibrations and high energy – so why are we abandoning our mother tongue so easily?

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Hayat Sindi, biotechnologist 

Big idea: A new model to foster innovation, address social challenges and build a bridge between possibility and hope.

How? Dr. Hayat Sindi has established a social entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystem for scientists and innovators to address pressing issues in their communities in the Middle East and beyond. The i2 Institute – launched in partnership with Harvard Innovation Lab, MIT, National Geographic, Pop Tech, PWC and McKinsey – was the beginning of Sindi’s journey to bring tangible solutions to the most vulnerable. Through its flagship program “Transform,” Sindi and her team worked with a group of innovators around the globe to launch a number of projects: battery-powered refrigerators that use solar energy in the borders of Uganda and Mozambique to store and preserve produce (and, later, COVID-19 vaccines); solar-powered houses in refugee camps in Bangladesh; and an electronic medical platform that employs 60,000 female doctors in Pakistan, providing dignified medical assistance to 100 million women and children in the outskirts of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Iraq. “We can come up with amazing and visionary ideas,” she says. “However, they will become real and stronger only when they are connected to society.”

This piece was written by Lobna Hassairi and Doha Summaqah.

Reducing: Notes from Session 4 of Countdown Summit

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

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

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

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

The talks in brief:

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

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

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

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Ilissa Ocko, atmospheric scientist

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

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

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Ermias Kebreab, animal scientist

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

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

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Rainn Wilson, actor and activist

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

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

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Nat Keohane, climate policy advocate

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

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

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Gabrielle Walker, writer, carbon removal thinker

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

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

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

Big idea: The path to decarbonizing fossil fuels.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Tom Osborn, mental health innovator

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

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

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Jenna C. Lester, dermatologist

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

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

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Alicia Chong Rodriguez, health care technology entrepreneur

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

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

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Jim Chuchu, filmmaker

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

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

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Germán Santillán, cultural chocolatier

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

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

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Lei Li, medical imaging innovator

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

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

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Nithya Ramanathan, technologist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fairness and Our Future: A day of talks in partnership with the UNDP

How do we ensure that tomorrow is better than today, not just for ourselves but also for future generations and the entire planet? Fairness is ultimately the central challenge of sustainable development — development that benefits all, without harming or leaving any behind. At TED Salon: Fairness and Our Future — a virtual program presented in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and hosted by TED curator, writer and activist Sally Kohn and Special Advisor, Strategic Planning & Innovation, UNDP Joseph D’Cruz — four speakers explored the intersection of development and fairness, asking us all to imagine what truly shared prosperity and possibility looks like.

The talks in brief:

Sarah Brosnan, primatologist

Big idea: The value of fairness transcends species. Much like capuchin monkeys, humans evolved to care about equality because society is fortified by cooperation — and we all do better when everybody plays fair.

Why? In her time studying and interacting with capuchin monkeys, Sarah Brosnan and her graduate adviser, Frans de Waal, performed a simple study: they sat two monkeys, Lance and Winter, side by side, and gave them rewards in exchange for tokens. Lance traded tokens for cucumbers and Winter traded for grapes. In the hierarchy of monkey preferences, a grape is a better reward than a cucumber — but still, Lance was happy with her trade until she saw Winter start receiving grapes instead of cucumbers. After observing that Winter’s trade deal was different from her own — and feeling a sense of unfairness — Lance began to throw her cucumbers away. A similar pattern of behavior can be observed in humans, too, whether it’s a child getting a smaller piece of cake than her sibling or an employee making less money than his coworkers. Amazingly, across primates the same holds true for the opposite situation: we also care when we get more than others for doing the same task. Why? Because humans are interconnected and interdependent, and we recognize the importance of cooperative partnerships where everybody gets their fair share. Without cooperation, the whole system falls apart, Brosnan says. This evolutionary pull towards fairness extends far beyond the lab and underpins our fight for racial justice and equitable access to resources. The issues humans face are far more complex than cucumbers and grapes, but if capuchin monkeys can teach us anything, it’s that we evolved to care about fairness — and we rely on each other to prosper.

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‘Gbenga Sesan, tech inclusionist

Big idea: We must eradicate inequality by giving everybody fair access to technology.

How? Centuries of inequality can’t simply be solved with gadgets — we need to supply training and resources that fully level the playing field, says ‘Gbenga Sesan. That’s why he started the Paradigm Initiative, to help those in his native Nigeria learn how to use technology in a way that sustains their hopes and dreams and ultimately leads to greater development for the entire African continent. In creating systemic solutions for tackling the inequality that 40 percent of the world experiences, Sesan seeks to create lasting fairness for all by offering the opportunities, support and equal advantages for the next generations to succeed.

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Angela Mahecha Adrar, climate justice leader

Big idea: Corporations and big business helped create the climate crisis — but frontline communities are leading the world to clean, innovative and just climate solutions.

How? All over the world, low income and BIPOC people disproportionately live in so-called “sacrifice zones”: urban areas polluted and poisoned by industry and corporate greed. These frontline communities bear the brunt of disastrous environmental changes they did not cause. Since economic and racial injustice helped create climate change, climate solutions must include economic and racial justice, says Angela Mahecha Adrar. She believes frontline communities are the key to developing innovative, effective solutions that deliver climate justice. For example, Cooperativa Tierra y Libertad, a local farm co-op in Washington State, is breaking into the United States’s multibillion-dollar berry business. The co-op renews land, pays its workers $15 an hour and has plans to create energy-efficient worker housing and community spaces. Like Tierra y Libertad, frontline communities across the globe are standing up to big business by creating climate solutions tailored to their neighborhood’s needs.

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Achim Steiner, sustainability champion

Big idea: The dominant risk to humanity’s survival is … humanity itself. But across the world, people are choosing to do things differently and writing a new, sustainable and equitable chapter for people and the planet. 

How? Achim Steiner, head of the UNDP, traces the origins of the United Nations back to the effort to build peace out of the ashes of World War II. Now, he says, another kind of war is brewing — one we’re waging against ourselves. In the current geological age of the Anthropocene, humans have the unprecedented power to shape the planet — for better or worse. We’ve achieved great things (like eradicating smallpox), but we’ve also taken humankind and many other species to the brink, a reality reinforced by the coronavirus pandemic. In order to survive and prosper, we must choose to do things differently. So what’s the path forward? Steiner takes us on a global tour of individuals and societies that are building a better future. For example, Costa Rica abolished its army in order to redirect military spending to education, health and the environment (including paying people to regenerate forests); Denmark has committed to producing all of its electricity from renewable sources by 2050; and Bhutan measures its progress based on gross national happiness, rather than GDP. These are but a few examples of people working to put the planet back in balance. Though we are different, Steiner says, we must choose to be united in building lasting, sustainable peace.

Onward! Notes from Session 3 of TEDWomen 2020

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

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

The session in brief:

Gloria Steinem, feminist activist, writer

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

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

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Jamila Gordon, AI advocate

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

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

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

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

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

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Kesha, musician, actress, activist

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

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JayaShri Maathaa, monk

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

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

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Megan McArthur, NASA astronaut

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

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

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

Bring it on: Notes from Session 1 of TEDWomen 2020

In this moment of great uncertainty, it’s time to be fearless. TEDWomen 2020, a day-long event hosted on TED’s virtual event platform, is all about fearlessness — in the way we think, act, participate — and how this collective mentality can empower us to take a global step forward, together. The day kicked off with an inspiring session of talks and performances, all designed to take us on a journey of curiosity, wonder and learning. Hosted by TEDWomen curator Pat Mitchell and TEDx learning specialist Bianca DeJesus, seven speakers and performers showed us how to find the strength and clarity needed to navigate an ever-changing, ever-challenging world. 

Music: The group Kolinga performs “Nguya na ngai,” an original song that’s equal parts music, poetry and dance.

Special appearance: Grace Yang, organizer of TEDxMontrealWomen, joins the event to represent the global TEDx community, through which more than 140 TEDx teams in 51 countries are organizing TEDxWomen events alongside the main show.

The session in brief:

To open the session, activist and poet Apiorkor Seyiram Ashong-Abbey delivers a powerful hymn to the universal matriarch in all of her manifestations — exalting her fearlessness as she faces the unknown, praising her body down to the folds of her skin, shouting against the silence surrounding her oppression, and above all shattering the chains (political and social) that bind her across the globe.

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Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, politician

Big idea: In the face of authoritarianism, the path to fearlessness lies in unity and solidarity.

How? The people of Belarus have been under authoritarian rule since 1994, subject to police violence and everyday assaults on their freedoms. But this year, something changed. Tens of thousands have taken to the streets to participate in anti-government demonstrations, supporting Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya’s campaign in opposition to the country’s authoritarian leader, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko. Tsikhanouskaya stepped in for her husband, who was jailed, to run against Lukashenko in the nation’s recent presidential election — an election she is widely viewed to have won, despite falsified results released by the regime. Now, she tells the story of how a small collection of women-led protests in the capital of Minsk sparked massive, peaceful demonstrations across the country — the likes of which Belarus has never seen — that continue amid calls for a new free and fair election. Even after being forced into exile with her children, Tsikhanouskaya remains determined. “Our courage is born from unity,” she says. “Our solidarity is our strength.”

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Sophie Rose, infectious disease researcher

Big idea: To quickly and equitably vaccinate the world’s eight billion people against COVID-19, we will need several approved vaccines. Human challenge trials may help speed up the development and deployment of effective vaccines.

How? In April 2020, Sophie Rose volunteered to be infected with COVID-19. As a young, healthy adult, she’s participating in a “human challenge trial” — a type of trial in which participants are intentionally exposed to infection — that may help researchers develop, manufacture and implement vaccines in record time, saving the lives of thousands of people. She explains her decision and the difference between challenge trials and the phase III clinical trials typically carried out for drugs and vaccines. Unlike phase III trials, where participants receive a vaccine and are subsequently monitored for possible infection throughout the course of their normal lives, challenge trial participants are purposely exposed to the virus after vaccination. Deliberate exposure allows researchers to know more quickly if the vaccine works (usually within a matter of months, instead of years) and requires fewer participants (around 50 to 100 instead of thousands). Because exposure is certain, challenge trial volunteers must be young, typically between ages 20 and 29, and have no preexisting conditions that could put them at an elevated risk. Since choosing to participate, Rose cofounded 1Day Sooner, a nonprofit that advocates for challenge trial participants and has helped more than 39,000 people around the world volunteer for these trials.

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Renee Montgomery, WNBA champion, activist

Big idea: For people’s voices to be heard in the face of injustice, they need to be “felt.” We can do this by opting out of our comfort zones and taking positive social action.

How? Renee Montgomery hadn’t planned to quit her dream job in the middle of a pandemic, but it was a leap of faith she made in order to do her part in fighting America’s racial injustice. By “opting out” of her career as a WNBA player, she made space to focus on others’ voices and amplify them with her platform. Montgomery explains that, to truly have these experiences heard, they need to be felt: “Making it felt for me is an action,” she says. “It’s not just protesting and raising your voice, but also doing something to show your intentions.” Her intentions? To level the playing field so everyone has the same opportunities, regardless of race, and to turn this moment into positive, lasting momentum.

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Kluane Adamek, Yukon Regional Chief

Big idea: Leadership and matriarchal wisdom of the Yukon First Nations people.

Tell us more: In the Yukon First Nations, women lead — and have done so for generations. Their matriarchs have forged trade agreements, created marriage alliances and ensured business happens across their land for generations. Their matrilineal society is one that deeply values, honors and respects the roles of women. Much of the world doesn’t reflect this way of living, but Yukon Regional Chief Kluane Adamek urges others to follow in the footsteps of her people — by putting more women at the table and learning from the power of reciprocity. There’s so much women can share with the world, she says, encouraging all women to seek spaces to share their perspective and create impact.

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María Teresa Kumar, civic leader

Big idea: The engaged and growing Latinx vote turned out in record numbers during the US 2020 presidential election and has the potential to shape American politics for decades to come. 

How? A historic number of Latinx voters cast a ballot in the US 2020 presidential election. As the nation’s most rapidly growing demographic, Latinx youth are voting for a brighter future. María Teresa Kumar, CEO of Voto Latino, reflects on the issues closest to young Latinx voters and their families, which include health care, climate equity and racial justice. With a look back to FDR’s New Deal, which catalyzed growth, nation-building and paved the way for JFK’s century-defining Moonshot mission, Kumar peeks into the future of the United States and sees the potential for the newest generation of voters to shape the years ahead.

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!

Transformation: Notes from Session 3 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.

Transforming big systems is a huge task. Energy, transportation, industry and infrastructure all pose their own challenges. And yet that transformation is already happening. The experts in Session 3 showed us how and where, and offered powerful ideas for accelerating it: developing an economy without coal, decarbonizing fossil fuels, electrifying mobility and more.

This session was cohosted by actor and activist Jane Fonda and climate activist Xiye Bastida, who kicked off the hour by discussing what it means to fight for climate justice and how to ignite large-scale change.

The talks in brief:

Varun Sivaram, clean energy executive, physicist, author

Big idea: India has a historic opportunity to power its industrialization with clean energy. 

How? In a country where fossil fuels are still a luxury for many (only six percent of Indians own cars, and only two percent have air conditioning), India has a unique opportunity to build a new, green energy infrastructure from the ground up. An incredible 70 percent of India’s infrastructure of 2030 hasn’t been built yet, says Varun Sivaram, CTO of India’s largest renewable energy company, presenting the nation with a historic opportunity to industrialize using clean energy. By making renewable energy “the beating heart of a reimagined economy,” Sivaram thinks India can add thousands of gigawatts of solar and wind production capacity, green the country’s power grid and transportation system, and radically improve energy efficiency — electrifying communities that remain beyond the reach of the power grid.

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Myles Allen, climate science scholar

Big idea: The fossil fuel industry can play a central role in solving climate change by decarbonizing their product. Oil and gas companies know how to decarbonize their fuels, and they have the money to do it. Now, they need the will.

How? The fossil fuel industry contributes 85 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions. To stop global warming, oil and gas companies need to stop dumping carbon into the atmosphere — but that doesn’t mean they have to stop selling their product altogether, says climate scientist Myles Allen. In lieu of a total ban on fossil fuels, which would harm the growth of developing countries (and is frankly unrealistic), Allen proposes a bold plan for fossil fuel companies to progressively decarbonize their product and reach net zero emissions by 2050. Engineers at energy companies have known how to decarbonize fossil fuels for years: collect CO2 as it burns, purify and compress it, and inject it deep into the Earth from which it came, where it can be stored for thousands of years. This process is expensive, so fuel companies haven’t done it yet at scale. But Allen puts forth a progressive decarbonization model in which 10 percent of fuels can be decarbonized by 2030, 50 percent by 2040 and 100 percent by 2050, allowing companies time to build a robust carbon dioxide disposal industry that works for everyone. With the know-how, money and plan to get to net zero emissions, all fossil fuel companies need now is will power. 

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Rose M. Mutiso, energy researcher

Big idea: The world must reach a zero emission future. On the way there, Africa deserves its fair share of the carbon budget to make that transition possible and equitable. 

Why? 48 African countries, combined, are responsible for less than one percent of the world’s carbon footprint, says Rose M. Mutiso. Pointing to this stark divide between those with limited energy access and those who have it in abundance, she highlights why Africa’s energy needs must be prioritized when reimagining the global carbon budget. The solution may sound counterintuitive, but to achieve a zero emission future, Africa needs to produce more carbon in the short term in order to develop in the long term — all while wealthier continents drastically cut their own emissions. For climate adaptation to be possible, Mutiso says, the world must recognize the vulnerability of developing countries and grant them the resources needed to build resilient infrastructures.

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Monica Araya, electrification advocate

Big idea: The global shift to 100-percent clean transportation is under way.

How? People around the world are demanding clean air — and cities are responding, says Monica Araya. In her home base of Amsterdam, for instance, the city is rolling out a plan to make all transportation fully emission-free by 2030. The city will ban petrol and diesel vehicles, starting with public buses and working up to all kinds of traffic, from taxis, trucks and ferries to personal cars and motorcycles. Other cities across the globe are following suit by electrifying transportation options and championing sustainable forms of travel. There is (and will be) resistance to change, Araya notes — our addiction to fossil fuels runs deep. So we need clever combinations of finance and policy. Whether we can create healthy cities, while meeting our transportation needs, all depends on the choices we make this decade. “The end of the internal combustion engine is within sight,” Araya says. “The question is no longer whether this will happen, but when.”

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Al Gore and climate activists Ximena Loría, Nana Firman, Gloria Kasang Bulus and Tim Guinee

Big idea: It’s been almost 15 years since Al Gore sounded the alarm on climate change with An Inconvenient Truth. Today, with the Climate Reality Project, he’s helping mold future leaders to build the movement for climate survival and social justice from the ground up.

How? Gore introduces us to four of the graduates of the Climate Reality Project, who each confront climate change on their own terms and on their own doorsteps: Ximena Loría, founder of Misión 2 Grados, an NGO influencing public policy in Central America; Nana Firman, “daughter of the rainforest” and advocate for climate justice among Indigenous peoples; Gloria Kasang Bulus, a Nigerian activist for women and education; and Tim Guinee, a first responder and climate change fighter in upstate New York. Together, they’re gathering local actors into a global, grass-roots movement that aims to turn the climate fight around. “The global pandemic, structural and institutional racism with its horrific violence, the worsening impacts of the climate crisis: all of these have accelerated the emergence of a new and widespread collective understanding of our connection to the natural world, the consequences of ignoring science and our sacred obligation to build a just society for all,” Gore says.

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Stephen Wilkes, photographer

Big idea: When we look at a landscape in the wild, we see only a moment in time. Photographer Stephen Wikes seeks to grasp the complex choreography of the natural world as it transitions from day to night — and to more deeply feel the impacts the human race is having on Earth’s ecosystems.

How? Using a special technique that captures the passage of time from day to night in a single image, Stephen Wilkes is able to photograph vanishing habitats and species in astonishing detail. These narrative images reveal how Earth changes over time, in all its beautiful complexity, and drive home the impacts of climate change with unprecedented force — from the threat of melting ice to the Arctic food chain to the disruption of flamingo migrations in Africa. “Our planet is changing before our eyes, but to witness that change is also to witness the remarkable relationships between all of nature — to see the infinite beauty of it, to learn how much bigger than us it is, and why it is worth fighting for,” Wilkes says.

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With an acoustic guitar on her knee, folk songwriter Raye Zaragoza sings her original song “Fight For You,” dedicated to everyone who stands up for the Earth. Later in the session, musician and actor Yemi Alade returns to sing “Africa,” a celebration song for a continent already experiencing the harmful effects of climate change.

Conversations on rebuilding society: Week 4 of TED2020

For week 4 of TED2020, leaders in international development, history, architecture and public policy explored how we might rebuild during the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing protests against racial injustice in the United States. Below, a recap of their insights.

Achim Steiner, head of the United National Development Programme

Big idea: The public and private sectors must work together to rebuild communities and economies from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Why? When the coronavirus hit, many governments and organizations were unprepared and ill-equipped to respond effectively, says Achim Steiner. He details the ways the UNDP is partnering with both private companies and state governments to help developing countries rebuild, including delivering medicine and supplies, setting up Zoom accounts for governing bodies and building virus tracking systems. Now that countries are beginning to think broadly about life after COVID-19, Steiner says that widespread disenchantment with the state is leading people to question the future of society. They’re rethinking the relationship between the state and its citizens, the role of the private sector and the definition of a public good. He believes that CEOs and business leaders need to step forward and forge alliances with the public sector in order to address societal inequalities and shape the future of economies. “It is not that the state regulates all the problems and the private sector is essentially best off if it can just focus on its own shareholders or entrepreneurial success,” he says. “We need both.”

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Ibram X. Kendi, Author and historian

Big idea: To create a more just society, we need to make antiracism part of our everyday lives.

How? There is no such thing as being “not racist,” says Ibram X. Kendi. He explains that an idea, behavior or policy is either racist (suggesting that any racial group is superior or inferior in any way) or antiracist (suggesting that the racial groups are equals in all their apparent differences). In this sense, “racist” isn’t a fixed identity — a bad, evil person — but rather a descriptive term, highlighting what someone is doing in a particular moment. Anyone can be racist or antiracist; the difference is found in how we choose to see ourselves and others. Antiracism is vulnerable work, Kendi says, and it requires persistent self-awareness, self-examination and self-criticism, grounded in a willingness to concede your privileges and admit when you’re wrong. As we learn to more clearly recognize, take responsibility for and reject prejudices in our public policies, workplaces and personal beliefs, we can actively use this awareness to uproot injustice and inequality in the world — and replace it with love. “The heartbeat of racism itself has always been denial,” he says. “The heartbeat of antiracism is confession.” Watch the full discussion on TED.com.

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Aaron Maniam, Poet and policymaker

Big idea: By crafting a range of imaginative, interlocking metaphors, we can better understand COVID-19, its real-time impacts and how the pandemic continues to change our world.

How? As a poet and a policymaker in Singapore, Maniam knows the importance of language to capture and evoke the state of the world — and to envision our future. As people across the world share their stories of the pandemic’s impact, a number of leading metaphors have emerged. In one lens, humanity has “declared war” on COVID-19 — but that angle erases any positive effects of the pandemic, like how many have been able to spend more time with loved ones. In another lens, COVID-19 has been a global “journey” — but that perspective can simplify the way class, race and location severely impact how people move through this time. Maniam offers another lens: that the pandemic has introduced a new, constantly evolving “ecology” to the world, irrevocably changing how we live on local, national and global levels. But even the ecology metaphor doesn’t quite encompass the entirety of this era, he admits. Maniam instead encourages us to examine and reflect on the pandemic across a number of angles, noting that none of these lenses, or any others, are mutually exclusive. Our individual and collective experiences of this unprecedented time deserve to be told and remembered in expansive, robust and inclusive ways. “Each of us is never going to have a monopoly on truth,” he says. “We have to value the diversity that others bring by recognizing their identity diversity … and their competent diversity — the importance of people coming from disciplines like engineering, history, public health, etc. — all contributing to a much richer understanding and totality of the situation we’re in.”

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Vishaan Chakrabarti, Architect

Big idea: Cities are facing a crisis of inequity and a crisis in health. To recover and heal, we need to plan our urban areas around inclusion and equality. 

How? In order to implement a new urban agenda rooted in equity, Vishaan Chakrabarti says that we need to consider three components: affordable housing and accessible health care; sustainable urban mobility; and attainable social and cultural resources. Chakrabarti shatters the false narrative of having to choose between an impoverished city or a prosperous one, instead envisioning one whose urban fabric is diverse with reformed housing policies and budgets. “Housing is health,” he says. “You cannot have a healthy society if people are under housing stress or have homelessness.” With a third of public space dedicated to private cars in many cities, Chakrabarti points to the massive opportunity we have to dedicate more space to socially distanced ways to commute and ecologically conscious modes of transportation, like walking or biking. We will need to go directly to communities and ask what their needs are to build inclusive, eco-friendly and scalable solutions. “We need a new narrative of generosity, not austerity,” he says.

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.”

Weaving Community: Notes from Session 1 of TEDSummit 2019

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

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

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

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

Opening: A warm Scottish welcome from raconteur Mackenzie Dalrymple

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

The talks in brief:

Pico Iyer, novelist and nonfiction author

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

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

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

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Jochen Wegner, journalist and editor of Zeit Online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Mariana Lin, AI character designer and principal writer for Siri

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Susan Cain, quiet revolutionary, with violinist Min Kym

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

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

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

A first glimpse at the TEDSummit 2019 speaker lineup

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

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

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

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

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

Anna Piperal, digital country expert

Bob Langert, corporate changemaker

Carl Honoré, author

Carole Cadwalladr, investigative journalist

Diego Prilusky, immersive media technologist

Eli Pariser, organizer and author

Fay Bound Alberti, historian

George Monbiot, thinker and author

Hajer Sharief, youth inclusion activist

Howard Taylor, children safety advocate

Jochen Wegner, editor and dialogue creator

Kelly Wanser, geoengineering expert

Ma Yansong, architect

Marco Tempest, technology magician

Margaret Heffernan, business thinker

María Neira, global public health official

Mariana Lin, AI personalities writer

Mariana Mazzucato, economist

Marwa Al-Sabouni, architect

Nick Hanauer, capitalism redesigner

Nicola Jones, science writer

Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister of Scotland

Omid Djalili, comedian

Patrick Chappatte, editorial cartoonist

Pico Iyer, global author

Poet Ali, Philosopher, poet

Rachel Kleinfeld, violence scholar

Raghuram Rajan, former central banker

Rose Mutiso, energy for Africa activist

Sandeep Jauhar, cardiologist

Sara-Jane Dunn, computational biologist

Sheperd Doeleman, black hole scientist

Sonia Livingstone, social psychologist

Susan Cain, quiet revolutionary

Tim Flannery, carbon-negative tech scholar

Tshering Tobgay, former Prime Minister of Bhutan

 

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

Djazia Satour, singer

ELEW, pianist and DJ

KT Tunstall, singer and songwriter

Min Kym, virtuoso violinist

Radio Science Orchestra, space-music orchestra

Yilian Cañizares, singer and songwriter

 

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

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

Meaning: Notes from Session 12 of TED2019

The final session of TED2019 was a spectacle. From powerful calls to civic engagement and ancestorship to stories of self and perseverance, the session wrapped an incredible week and soared through the end with an unforgettable, totally improvised wrap-up.

The event: Talks and performances from TED2019, Session 12: Meaning, hosted by TED’s Chris Anderson, Helen Walters and Kelly Stoetzel

When and where: Friday, April 19, 2019, 9am, at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, BC

Speakers: Eric Liu, Yeonmi Park, Suleika Jaouad, David Brooks, America Ferrera, Bina Venkataraman

Music: Richard Bona on guitar

Mindblowing, completely improvised wrap-up covering the whole week: Freestyle Love Supreme: Anthony Veneziale, Chris Jackson, Chris “Shockwave” Sullivan, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Arthur Lewis

The talks in brief:

Eric Liu, author and CEO of Citizen University

• Big idea: Instead of feeling despair at the state of the world, we need to commit to living as active, responsible citizens of our societies.
• How? At a time when the free world seems leaderless, Liu says that we should seek hope not in leadership but in each other. His proposal: that we learn to practice “civic religion” and commit to being active in our citizenship. In pursuit of this, Liu started Civic Saturdays in 2016. These take a similar format to faith-based gatherings, with songs and sermons, but they all stem from shared ideals and a desire for fellowship. Participants then work together to organize rallies, register voters and improve their communities. Liu hopes this can counter the emerging culture of hyperindividualism, where “we are realizing now that a free-for-all is not the same as freedom for all,” and instead build community where we feel empowered to bring about, and not wait for, meaningful change.
• Quote of the talk: “Power without character is a cure worse than the disease.”

Yeonmi Park, human rights activist

• Big idea: Everything must be taught, even the fundamentals we sometimes take for granted: freedom, compassion, love.
• How? Right vs. wrong, justice vs. injustice — these aren’t concepts we inherently understand, says human rights activist Yoenmi Park. Telling her story of escape from North Korea, Park says that life there is “a totally different planet.” She gives an unsettling example: there’s only one definition of love in North Korea — “love for the Dear Leader.” Romantic love doesn’t exist as a concept or possibility. And for most North Koreans, neither does freedom. Now a US citizen, Park calls for us to fight for North Koreans — for all oppressed people around the world — who cannot speak for themselves. Freedom is fragile, she says. Who will fight for us when we’re not free?
• Quote of the talk: “Nothing is forever in this world, and that’s why we have every reason to be hopeful.”

David Brooks, political and cultural commentator, New York Times Op-Ed columnist

• Big idea: Our society is not only sinking into economic, environmental and political crises — we’re also mired in a deepening social crisis, trapped in a valley of isolation and fragmentation. How do we find our way out of this valley?
• How? Society tells us that success is everything, that those with less success are less important, and that we can bootstrap ourselves to happiness without the help of other people. All of these maxims, says David Brooks, are lies. Brooks believes that those he calls “weavers” — community workers who re-knit social bonds on a local level — will create a “cultural and relational revolution” that leads each of us out of loneliness and into a new world of joy and social connection.
• Quote of the talk: “We need a cultural and relational revolution … My theory of social change is that society changes when a small group of people find a better way to live, and the rest of us copy them.”

Suleika Jaouad, cancer survivor and author of the soon-to-be-published memoir Between Two Kingdoms

• Big idea: As we start to live longer, we will spend more of our lives navigating between being sick and well. We need to break down the idea that the two are wholly separate.
• How? Jaouad’s recovery from leukemia in her mid-20s is best described in her own words: “The hardest part of my cancer experience began once the cancer was gone. That heroic journey of the survivor we see in movies and watch play out on Instagram? It’s a myth. It isn’t just untrue; it’s dangerous, because it erases the very real challenges of recovery.” Nothing about being ill had prepared her for re-entering the world of the well. So Jaouad calls on us to break down the boundary between the two. “If we can all accept that we are not either ‘well’ or ‘sick’ but sometimes in between, sometimes forever changed by our experiences, we can live better.”
• Quote of the talk: “You can be held hostage by the worst thing that’s ever happened to you and allow it you hijack your remaining days, or you can find a way forward.”

America Ferrera, actor, director and activist

• Big idea: By putting representation into practice in our media, we can honor the extraordinary richness of humanity.
• How? In her breakthrough hits Real Women Have Curves and Ugly Betty, Ferrera brought her authentic self to her work, leading to critical, cultural and financial success. She gave voice to multi-dimensional characters typically uncentered in media, allowing them to “exist in the center of their own lives.” But that wasn’t enough: though directors and producers would privately praise diversity efforts, the entertainment industry was slow to change. This was frustrating because shows like Ugly Betty gave people around the world — including Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai — their first chance to see themselves onscreen. But if we stay courageous and ensure our actions follow our intentions, Ferrera says, we can create media that reflects the world we live in and honors the genuine humanity of all.
• Quote of the talk: “Change will come when each of us has the courage to question our own fundamental values and beliefs and see to it that our actions lead to our best intentions.”

Bina Venkataraman, writer and futurist

• Big idea: As both descendants and ancestors of civilization, we must step out of our culture of immediacy and fight the allure of everyday minutiae, and think of generations to come.
• How? Own up to the mistakes we’ve made and redesign the communities, businesses and institutions that fail at helping us prepare for things to come. What we measure, reward and fail to imagine keeps us from making strides toward shared, significant success as a species. Our foresight is impaired — in order to fix it, we need to shift and see the world and the people in it as a part of a shared resource, where the progress we make now can make be passed down to our collective children and grandchildren.
• Quote of the talk: “When we think about the future, we tend focus on predicting exactly what’s next; whether we’re using horoscopes or algorithms to do that, we spend a lot less time imagining all the possibilities the future holds.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

The talks in brief:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Safeena Husain, social entrepreneur and executive director of Educate Girls

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

Julia Cordua, social entrepreneur and CEO of Thorn

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

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

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

Stacey Abrams’ State of the Union response and more updates from TED speakers

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

Stacey Abrams responds to the US State of the Union. Politician Stacey Abrams spoke from Atlanta on behalf of the Democratic party following the State of the Union address. In her speech, she focused on the fight against bigotry, bipartisanship in a turbulent America and voter rights. The right to vote is especially important to Abrams — last November, she lost the Georgia gubernatorial election by 55,000 votes, a loss that some pundits have attributed to voter suppression. “The foundation of our moral leadership around the globe is free and fair elections, where voters pick their leaders, not where politicians pick their voters,” she said. “In this time of division and crisis, we must come together and stand for, and with, one another.” Watch the full speech on The New York Times website or read the transcript at USA Today. (Watch Abrams’ TED Talk.)

Remembering Emily Levine. The extraordinary humorist and philosopher Emily Levine has passed away following a battle with lung cancer. Reflecting on life and death, Levine said, “’I am just a collection of particles that is arranged into this pattern, then will decompose and be available, all of its constituent parts, to nature, to reorganize into another pattern. To me, that is so exciting, and it makes me even more grateful to be part of that process.” Read our full tribute to Levine on our blog. (Watch Levin’s TED Talk.)

Could you cut the tech giants from your life? In a new multimedia series from Gizmodo, journalist Kashmir Hill details her six-week experiment quitting Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Google — and shares surprising insights on how entwined these companies are in daily life. With help from technologist Dhruv Mehrotra, Hill blocked access to one company for a week at a time using a custom VPN (virtual private network), culminating with a final week of excluding all five tech companies. In just her first week of cutting out Amazon, Hill’s VPN logged over 300,000 blocked pings to Amazon servers! Check out the whole series on Gizmodo. (Watch Hill’s TED Talk.)

Exploring the historical roots of today’s biggest headlines. Alongside artist Masud Olufani, journalist Celeste Headlee will launch a new series at PBS called Retro Report that will explore current news stories, “revealing their unknown — and often surprising — connections to the past.” Each one-hour episode will trace the history of four news stories, including Colin Kaepernick’s NFL protests, modern-day drug approval laws and the US government’s wild horse care program. Retro Report will launch on PBS this fall. (Watch Headlee’s TED Talk.)

Customizable vegetables now for sale. Grubstreet has a new profile on Row 7, the seed company co-founded by chef Dan Barber that wants to change the way farmers, chefs and breeders collaborate and connect. Alongside breeder Michael Mazourek and seeds dealer Matthew Goldfarb, Barber hopes to design seeds that have the flavors chefs want, along with the qualities (like high yield and disease resistance) that farmers are looking for.  “We’re trying to deepen the context for the seeds, and this conversation between breeders and the chefs,” Barber said. By prioritizing taste and nutrition, Row 7 plans to engineer ever-evolving seed collections that meet the needs of both farmers and chefs. Row 7’s first seed collection is now available for purchase. (Watch Barber’s TED Talk.)

A promising new report on tobacco divestment. The Tobacco-Free Finance Pledge, led by oncologist Bronwyn King, has a new signatory: Genus Capital Investment, a leading Canadian fossil-free investment firm. Genus released a new report — based on a six-year study — about the financial impacts of divesting from tobacco stocks and removing tobacco from its portfolios. They found that over the past 20 years, tobacco divestment did not negatively affect index portfolios, and that in the past five years, portfolios that excluded tobacco actually outperformed the market. In a statement, King said, “This new research adds to a growing body of evidence demonstrating that investors do not need to invest in tobacco to achieve excellent returns.” Spearheaded by Tobacco Free Portfolios and the United Nations Environment Programme, the Tobacco-Free Finance Pledge was launched last year and has over 140 signatories and supporters. (Watch King’s TED Talk.)

An HBO feature on superhuman tech. On Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, bionics designer Hugh Herr presented his team’s latest prosthetics and explained why he thinks bionics will soon revolutionize sports. Herr spoke to Soledad O’Brien about a future of enhanced athletic ability, saying “There’s going to be new sports … power basketball, power swimming, power climbing. It’ll be a reinvention of sports and it’ll be so much fun.” In a teaser clip, O’Brien tried on a pair of lower-leg exoskeletons developed at Herr’s MIT lab; the full episode can be viewed on HBO. (Watch Herr’s TED Talk.)

 

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

Belonging: Talks on family, love and loss from the TED World Theater

What does it mean to belong? For many, belonging provides the foundation of all comfort, a sense of conviction that others have your back, that all will be well. But sometimes belonging can be less tangible, more illusory or fleeting — it can disappear without warning.

At TED Salon: Belonging — an evening of talks curated and co-hosted by TED’s head of curation, Helen Walters, and curation coordinator Lorena Aviles — six speakers explored what belonging is really all about. They shared personal meditations on where they find hope for a more welcoming world and shone a light on the breakthroughs and ideas that might get us there. After an effusive, joyful performance of “Woke Up This Morning (With My Mind Stayed on Freedom)” by the Resistance Revival Chorus, the session kicked off with attorney Mónica Ramírez.

Elevate those who pick, pack and plant the food we eat every day. Marginalized people are not looking for saviors, says attorney Mónica Ramírez: “They’re looking for individuals who will support them, as day by day they get up and do the best they can to save themselves.” As the daughter and granddaughter of migrant farm workers, Ramírez knows firsthand the problem that affect these often-unseen and isolated groups — from wage theft and sexual harassment to dangerous working conditions. She has been an advocate for these communities nearly her entire life, and what she’s learned is both simple and profound: “If we want to solve problems, we need to call on the very best experts who can bring the very best solutions.” The experts she has in mind? The people directly impacted by some of society’s worst problems, who are best suited to share their truths with the world. Advocates like Ramírez, and citizens in solidarity, must make space for the voices not commonly heard.

Build community when you feel isolated. As the executive director of the Sadie Nash Leadership Project, Chitra Aiyar works to help low-income youth of color develop the skills they need to thrive in college. When some of the college students Aiyar works with described feeling alienated on campus, she realized they would need to find real community if they were going to succeed. The research backs this up: only 11 percent of low-income first-generation students graduate from college after six years, and 45 percent drop out after their first year. “If you are spending energy thinking about whether you belong, you can’t concentrate on school … and every challenge, every hardship is a reinforcement [of that],” Aiyar says. To combat this, she encourages her students to cultivate spaces for other marginalized students to connect and help each other grow. She was inspired by the pre-med program at Xavier University — where, instead of pitting students against each other by warning of high dropout rates, professors encourage students to see each other as teammates working toward the same goals. Aiyar details three steps to move toward this new kind of community: first, imagine your goal and broaden it beyond yourself; then, start an activity that connects you to others with similar goals — like offering feedback on a classmate’s paper; and finally, take the opportunity to redefine your relationship to your community. Instead of feeling outcast, Aiyar says, her students could see themselves as actively engaged in a larger community that supports them. “We all have times that we don’t feel like we belong,” she says. “If we take the time to make sure that other people belong, in that process, we’ll find belonging as well.”

Reimagining the US-Mexico border wall. What is a border? It’s a line on a map, a place where cultures, languages and beliefs mix and merge. And it’s a place of beautiful, sometimes violent and occasionally ridiculous complexity, says architectural researcher Ronald Rael. Rael studies the US-Mexico border, where nearly 700 miles of wall divide the two countries — “an arcane, medieval architecture … an overly simplistic response to a complex set of issues,” he says. It’s estimated that the wall approved in 2006 will cost $49 billion to construct and maintain over the next 25 years — not including the additional $70 billion estimated for the walls currently proposed. Beyond that, there’s the human toll: more than 7,000 people have died trying to cross the border. To communicate the financial and human cost of the wall, Rael designs moving, sometimes satirical souvenirs — things like postcards, “bordergames” and snow globes that reimagine the social and economic realities of the border. They nod to activities like “wall y ball,” a borderland version of volleyball played across the wall, or patrol agents purchasing treats from vendors through the divide — activities that question the meaning of a “wall.” “There are not two sides defined by a wall — it is one landscape divided,” he says. “We should be designing a ‘Reunited States,’ not a ‘Divided States.'”

We belong to the living world. What do poetry and astrophysics have in common? More than you would expect, says poet Marie Howe. Howe is a professor of “ecopoetry,” which asks the human ego to step outside the picture — “to let the whole living world move into the poem, instead of the human, I, I, I, I.” Reading her poem “The Singularity,” which is inspired by the physics that created the earth, she plays on a big idea: that more than 13 million years ago everything that existed was incredibly small — tiny, compacted density. Physicist Stephen Hawking called this tiny dense material “the singularity,” giving birth to the title of her poem. Howe reads with passion, the final line reverberating through the room: “No I, no we, no one. No was. No verb. No noun. Only a tiny tiny dot brimming with is is is is is. All. Everything. Home.”

The price of perfection. “The way we’re taught to live has got to change,” says Casey Gerald. By his late 20s, Gerald was on top of the world, or so it seemed: he had earned degrees from Yale and Harvard, worked on Wall Street and in Washington, started a nonprofit, and yes, given a TED Talk. Still, he recalls, “I was real cracked up — not exactly having a nervous breakdown, but not too far off.” While he’d attained success, he had done so while buffing away the raw edges of his life — his homosexuality, his pain, his very human messiness — and reducing it to an uncomplicated, untrue story of a poor kid “from the other side of the river” who made it. Many of us engage in similar acts of revision just so we can be accepted by the right people, schools and jobs, Gerald says — but he’s come to realize this revision is equivalent to self-erasure. He says it’s time for us to show courage, to embody what he calls “the raw strange magic of ourselves,” and to stand with others in their vulnerability.

Let’s get the country singing! A collective of more than 60 women, the Resistance Revival Chorus gathers in sisterhood to sing and show how joy can be an act of resistance. To close out the night, the chorus fills the TED World Theater with the music of the labor movement, performing a rousing performance of “The Rich Man’s House.”

Moving forward: Notes from Session 6 of TEDWomen 2018

After three days of astonishing speakers and bold ideas, you may be asking yourself: Where do we go now? The answer: forward.

The final session of TEDWomen 2018, hosted by TEDWomen curator Pat Mitchell, featured a dynamic lineup of forward thinkers: Ariana Curtis, Galit Ariel, Majd Mashharawi, Soraya Chemaly, Katharine Hayhoe, Cecile Richards, Kakenya Ntaiya, Farida Nabourema and surprise speaker Stacey Abrams. All together, they helped us look at how things are now — and imagine how they could be.

The stories of everyday women are essential, too. Public representations of women are too often enveloped in the language of the extraordinary, says museum curator Ariana Curtis. The stories of extraordinary women are seductive, but they are limited — by definition, to be extraordinary is to be non-representative, atypical. Curtis is dedicated to women’s history that reflects both the remarkable and the quotidian. “If we can collectively apply the radical notion that women are people, it becomes easier to show women as people are — familiar, diverse, present,” she says. As the curator for Latinx Studies at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, she’s empowered to change the current narrative where, she says, “respectability politics and idealized femininity influence how we display women and which women we choose to display.” This in turn leads to the exclusion “of the everyday, the regular, the underrepresented and usually the non-white.” As she says: “I will continue to collect from extraordinary history-makers. Their stories are important. But what drives me to show up today and every day is the simple passion to write our names in history, display them publicly for millions to see, and,” as she quotes poet Sonia Sanchez, to “walk in the ever-present light that is women.”

Exploring new worlds, right here on Earth. Technologist Galit Ariel believes that space is humanity’s final frontier — but she’s not talking about the dark, cold expanse between the planets and stars. She’s talking about the mind-blowing, space-bending technology known as augmented reality or AR. “While similar immersive technologies such as virtual reality aspire to transport you into a completely parallel world, augmented reality adds a digital layer directly onto or within our existing physical environment,” she says. AR can map, understand and react to physical spaces; imagine your entire living room transformed into a lush jungle, for instance, as a jaguar hunts for prey between your sofa and the door. Since our bodies and minds are wired for rich physical interactions, Ariel says, it’s crucial that we create technologies that help us be more present and connected to the world — instead of inside our phones. “Technology will no longer be something that happens elsewhere, but a powerful tool to explore and extend the world, society and ourselves,” she says. In the near future, expect to see more and better platforms — things like wearables and maybe even devices directly embedded into our bodies (Black Mirror, anyone?). “Amazing journeys await us right here on planet Earth,” Ariel says. “Bon voyage.”

Rebuilding Gaza, one brick and one solar cell at a time. “For more than ten years, I and two million people back home have been living in darkness, locked between two borders that are nearly impossible to leave,” says Majd Mashharawi. She lives in Gaza, and she reflects on growing up with “a whole lot of nothing” in the conflict-ridden region — and deciding that she would create something from that nothing. She gravitated toward two urgent needs: for building materials and for electric power, both in short supply in Gaza. After months of research and more than 150 failed experiments, Mashharawi has created a building block that’s made out of the ashes and rubble of demolished houses. The block is light, cheap and strong, and with it, Mashharawi launched the Gaza-based startup GreenCake — which has trained both women and men graduates in manufacturing. “This block is not just a building block,” she says. “It changed the stereotype about women in Gaza, which stated: ‘This type of work is just for men.'” Now Mashharawi has turned her attention to electricity, helping to create a smart solar kit for energy and light. With a business model centered on sharing the solar units among several families, the device is catching on — returning electric power to the hands of people, one solar cell at a time.

Changing the cultural conversation about women and anger. Even though we live in an age where unisex bathrooms and unisex clothing exist, some emotions still get assigned to a single sex. “In culture after culture, anger is reserved as the moral property of boys and men,” says journalist Soraya Chemaly, author of Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger. In contrast, angry women are seen as unhinged, irrational or shrill, and they’re often mocked, penalized or punished if they let out their rage (with women of color facing the most severe consequences). Instructions to use one’s “nice” voice and keep smiling start early on, says Chemaly: “As a girl, I learnt that anger is better left entirely unvoiced.” Instead, it emerges in the form of tears, headaches, stomach-churning discontent or teeth-grinding frustration. Turning anger into a no-go zone for women is not only damaging to psyches and bodies, it also prevents real gender equity, Chemaly says: “Societies that don’t respect women’s anger don’t respect women.” As she notes of anger, “If it’s poison, it is also the antidote. We have an anger of hope.” She calls for people of all genders to accept — and not reject — women’s rage, and for women to turn their rage into a seismic force for compassion, justice, accountability and creativity. (Read an excerpt from her book on TED Ideas.)

Let’s talk about climate change — from the heart. Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe is a professor at Texas Tech University, which is in Lubbock, Texas, a place once named the second most conservative town in America. When it comes to talking about climate change there, people immediately see it as political. And that’s not specific to Texas, Hayhoe says — across the US, climate change is viewed as a partisan issue. But in her mind, “to care about a changing climate, we don’t have to be a liberal or a political activist,” she says. “We just have to be a human who wants this planet to be a safe home for all of us.” So, how can we speak about climate change without making it political? Hayhoe suggests an approach less focused on the science and more focused on the heart — by starting the conversation from a place of agreement and mutual respect, and then connecting the dots to why climate change matters personally to you. For instance, maybe climate change affects the places you live, your grandchildren or your favorite outdoor hobbies. It’s not a good idea to paralyze people with fear, Hayhoe says. After all, solutions aren’t that far out of reach. Even in Hayhoe’s home state of Texas, almost 20 percent of the state’s electricity comes from renewable sources. “Working together, we can fix it,” she says. “We can’t give in to despair. We have to go out and look for the hope we need to inspire us to act — and that hope begins with a conversation, today.”

The next political revolution: women. The former president of Planned Parenthood, Cecile Richards has been fighting for women’s rights her entire life. On the TEDWomen stage, she has an urgent message — if women are not at the table, then they are on the menu. What does this mean? Well, though women have made great strides in the last 100 years, they still lack real political power. She offers another way of looking at things: “If half of Congress could get pregnant, we would finally quit fighting about birth control and Planned Parenthood.” So just how do women go about building this political revolution? Richards says that it’s already started and proven by events like the 2017 Women’s March in DC and the unprecedented amount of women who ran for office and won in the 2018 US elections. Now we need to build a sustained global movement for women’s equality — one that’s intersectional and inter-generational. We can do this without waiting for instructions or permission to make a difference, she says, by being vocal about what we stand for, realizing nobody is free until everybody’s free and voting in every election. “One of us can be ignored, two of us can be dismissed — but together, we’re a movement,” she says. “And we’re unstoppable.”

How one girl’s dream transformed a community. Kakenya Ntaiya dreamed of getting an education. But in her village of Enoosaen, Kenya, Maasai girls were expected to undergo female genital mutilation (FGM) at puberty, get married and give up school. So Ntaiya negotiated with her father: she would undergo FGM, but in return, she would stay in school. Eventually, she left for college in the United States, vowing to return to repay her community for their support. Ntaiya returned, founded the education NGO Kakenya’s Dream, and built the Kakenya Center for Excellence, a school where girls can live and study safely. Believing that empowering a community must extend beyond the girls themselves, Ntaiya works with parents, grandmothers and community leaders to make sure they know how well their girls are doing. And realizing that nothing will truly change if boys grow up “with the same mindset as their fathers before them,” she helped launch a program to teach children about gender equality, health and human rights. Kakenya’s Dream shows that “it truly does take a village to make this kind of a dream come true.”

Everything you know about autocracy is wrong. There’s a certain naiveté in the way the press covers dictatorship, activist Farida Nabourema tells us. During interviews about her struggle against Togolese dictator Faure Gnassingbé, her interviewers often emphasize his abuses, “because they believe that will gain attention and sympathy” for activists. “But in reality, it serves the purpose of dictators — it helps them advertise their cruelty,” and consolidates their grip on power. Instead, why not focus on “the stories of resistance, the stories of defiance, the stories of resilience,” and inspire people to fight back? That naiveté extends to citizens of democratic countries, who often assume that oppressed countries are less “morally advanced,” that the world is moving towards freedom, and that very soon, dictatorships will disappear. The reality is much different, Nabourema warns us. “No country is actually destined to be oppressed, but at the same time, no country or no people are immune to oppression or dictatorship.” Any country with a large concentration of power, a reliance on propaganda, excessive militarization, and a disdain for human rights risks falling into autocracy — and we should all be vigilant.

Be aggressive about your ambition. Stacey Abrams‘s 2018 campaign for governor of Georgia was watched across the world. The first black woman to be nominated by a major party for governor, she lost after a hard-fought race. Now she’s the surprise speaker onstage at TEDWomen 2018, where, in an electrifying talk, she shares the lessons she learned from her campaign, advice on how to move forward through setbacks — and some hints at what her future might be. Read a full recap of her talk here.

Be aggressive about your ambition: Stacey Abrams speaks at TEDWomen 2018

Stacey Abrams’s 2018 campaign for governor of Georgia was watched across the world. The first black woman to be nominated by a major party for governor, she lost after a hard-fought race. Now she’s the surprise speaker onstage at TEDWomen 2018, where, in an electrifying talk, she shares the lessons she learned from her campaign, advice on how to move forward through setbacks — and some hints at what her future might be.

Back when Abrams was 17 and the valedictorian of her high school, she was invited to meet the governor of Georgia with her parents. They took the bus, and as they walked up past the lines of other students’ arriving cars, the guard outside stopped them. Judging them by the bus they’d arrived on, he told her and her parents that they didn’t belong there that day. Abrams doesn’t remember actually meeting the governor or her fellow valedictorians. “The only clear memory I have from that day was a man standing in front of the most powerful place in Georgia, looking at me and telling me I don’t belong,” Abrams says. “And so I decided to be the person who got to open the gates.”

It didn’t work out that way this time, Abrams says, and now she’s tasked with figuring out what to do next. “I’m going to do what I’ve always done,” she says. “I’m going to move forward, because going backwards isn’t an option and standing still is not enough.”

We should ask ourselves three questions about everything we do, Abrams says: What do I want? Why do I want it? And how do I get it?

“I know what I want, and that is justice, because poverty is immoral and a stain on our nation,” Abrams says.

Once you know what you want, you have understand why you want it. Make sure you want it not because it’s something you should do, but because it’s something you must do, she says: “It should be something that doesn’t allow you to sleep at night unless you’re dreaming about it.” (And revenge, she says, is not a good reason.)

Finally, understand how you’re going to do it. For Abrams, that meant turning out 1.2 million African American voters in Georgia — more voters than the entire amount who voted on the Democratic side of the ticket in 2014. And it meant tripling the number of Asian and Hispanic Americans who stood up and said: “This is our state, too.”

The obstacles — the debt, the fear, the fatigue — aren’t insurmountable, Abrams says, but there’s more work to be done.

“I am moving forward knowing what is in my past. I know the obstacles they have for me. I’m fairly certain they’re energizing and creating new obstacles now,” Abrams says. “They’ve got four years to figure it out. Maybe two.”