2021 vs 2019: A Tale of Two TEDs, or “Take Your Daughter to TED Day”
In April 2019 and August 2021, I was lucky to attend the incomparable TED conference for the 7th and 8th years “in a row” (COVID-adjusted). Below is a “best of” tour of the two experiences, comparing a pre- and (nearly?) post-pandemic gathering of humans seeking inspiration and celebrating “ideas worth spreading”. Join me on the ride!
Separated by 27 months that seemed like 27 years, TED 2021 and TED 2019 reflected two VERY different eras of extreme caution and giddy excitement, respectively. TED 2021 was structured as a smaller, shorter and more intimate affair than the traditional conference, designed to allow for social distance, indoor masking and vaccine compliance (see stats below).
Not surprisingly, the atmosphere at the two sessions was markedly different. At TED 2021, the heady exuberance of the late 2010’s had been replaced by a more sobering climate in a new decade that had already seen assaults on our biology, our democracy and our dignity. Despite this weighty backdrop, TED displayed its trademark science-based optimism, celebrating the extraordinary progress we continue to make in technology and along the arc of the moral universe as it bends toward justice.
But TED 2021 and TED 2019 differed for more than the obvious reasons.
In 2019, I had the exhilarating joy of attending TED with my then 18-year old daughter Hailey. In 2021, I returned to TED solo as the conference dipped its proverbial toe back in the waters of immersive personal contact.
WHAT IS TED?
TED is the largest platform on the planet for spreading new ideas. TED talks are viewed over 3 billion times each year in over 100 languages and the audience is growing fast.
More important is the “ripple effect”. Each year, from the TED stage, start-ups are founded/funded, ideas are patented, musical careers are launched, schools and hospitals are built, bills are introduced, laws are changed, charitable funds are raised, and kickstarter projects are kickstarted. Take a passionate and deeply well-informed advocate, combine with an urgent and important issue, stir in an ounce of brilliant oratory, add a pinch of global instant digital distribution and bake for 5 days with some of the most ambitious, committed, wealthy and well-connected people on the planet and you get a change factory. At TED, “ideas worth spreading” don’t stay ideas for very long.
Each year, dedicated, accomplished and rigorously studied people toiling in relative obscurity are given a voice on the TED stage and many experience the exhilaration of their ideas getting endorsed, funded, advertised, sponsored and catapulted into the global village. For the lucky ones chosen to stand on the red circle, a speaking gig at TED is winning the awareness lottery and it often literally changes their life.
Examples of this magic abound, but the latest and most ambitious is The Audacious Project, which houses 8 earth-changing social entrepreneurship projects backed by $280 million of funding from the TED community. TED dedicated an entire session of the conference to these initiatives in 2019.
Oh, and it was from the TED stage that Bill Gates warned us in 2015 to prepare for a coronavirus pandemic…the one idea we forgot to spread.
WHAT IS THE TED CONFERENCE?
The TED conference is designed to facilitate the collision of (typically) 1,500 diverse, bright, accomplished people from (pre-COVID) over 50 countries to exchange ideas, connect intellectual dots, expand each other’s minds and, ultimately convert ideas into impact and action. While TED may conjure images of a room full of people passively absorbing an 18 minute talk, it is an exceptionally immersive, tactile and participatory place: attendees experience these brain-stimulating encounters in bean-bag simulcast rooms, musical workshops, in line at gourmet food trucks, at virtual reality experiences, etc.
Emerging from the intense speaker sessions, TED attendees spill out of the theater into social breaks, interactive exhibits, gourmet food truck lunches and evening parties to debrief, debate and discuss the content and cross-pollinate with the speakers and 1,500 of their closest friends. The ethos is decidedly low-key and overtly anti-networking, yet you can almost feel the neural fireworks going off in the crowd.
A week at TED has always defied easy explanation and is far more than a “conference”.
In fact, “conference” is really not the right word for TED. A typical conference facilitates networking, TED facilitates impact. At a conference, the attendees supplicate to keynote experts; at TED the audience is just as “impressive” as who is on stage. Conferences differentiate themselves through narrow specialization; TED celebrates the dynamism of multi-disciplinary learning and the impact that results from systems thinking.
To make the journey to TED is to enter an idealized version of intellectual life. You rub shoulders with your creative and entrepreneurial idols, join a self-selected group of people obsessed with translating knowledge, curiosity and passion into high-impact action, mainline the pure, undiluted version of expert knowledge and have more high-intensity conversations in an hour than most of us have in a year.
WHY DO YOU GO TO THE TED CONFERENCE?
The short answer: to be inspired on a grand scale.
The long answer: to spend one week a year interacting with hundreds of passionate, engaged, deeply curious people who reflexively and obsessively turn ideas into action. It is my annual “brain spa”, “courage bath”, “aspiration vaccine” and “nerd fantasy camp.” TED contains almost zero direct connection to my day job, but for 5 glorious days I get to visit the future, put my work in a broader context and connect the dots across multiple disciplines of science, art, medicine, philosophy, geopolitics, global development, design and much more.
But here is the real secret: I go to TED to experience a community whose culture, beliefs and values are upside-down from the rest of my life. TED is like visiting another planet, galaxy or universe where the laws of science are different than Earth and the inhabitants are nearly unrecognizable.
What do I mean?
At TED, passion trumps stability, courage wins over tribalism and conformity, persistence is valued over expediency, globalism beats provincialism, mild Asperger’s is better than extroverted and highly socialized, mistakes of commission beat mistakes of omission, fear of missing opportunities replaces fear of being wrong, embracing risk trounces managing risk. In short, the “bizarro world” version of my daily life. Imagine a week where you only hear “I am excited about…”, “I dream of…”, “I am creating…”, “I am discovering…” instead of: “I’m worried about…”, “I’m scared of…”, “The problem is…”. Refreshing!
WHAT DID YOU LEARN AT TED?
Attending TED with my daughter Hailey reminded me how valuable it is to explore this alternate universe. Seeing TED through her 18 year old eyes was pure gold.
In Vancouver, Hailey received a steady stream of valuable (albeit unsolicited) advice from TEDsters: “Here’s what I wish someone had told me when I was 18”. The lessons included…
You are the average of the 5 people you hang out with or “Don’t Settle”
At any moment, the people you associate with are imperceptibly making you better or worse (however you define that). Surround yourself with people you admire and you will move in that direction.
As Hailey wrote after we left Vancouver, “my experience at TED allowed me to envision a future in which I am surrounded by my definition of “better”: a group of passionate, curious, empathetic, informed and engaged people who push me to be my best self.”
When choosing a career, ask yourself “What problems do I want to solve?”, not “What should I major in?”
There are no “floating city” majors in any college course catalogue, yet Bjarke Ingels and Rahul Mehrotra showed us that billions of investment dollars are being spent and thousands of people are being hired to design these miracles of architecture, material science, meteorology, aeroponics, coding, urban planning, etc.
There are extraordinary new careers like that one awaiting our kids and yet we as parents limit their options by thinking narrowly based on what previous generations chose (doctor, lawyer, “business”) instead of broadly. As one TED attendee said, “we just flew a helicopter and made oxygen on Mars(!)…and you still want to be a stockbroker?”
Better to start with activities that excite you, outcomes that are important and where you can contribute: Do you want to help slow climate change, protect our cities from flooding and spread cheap and clean energy? Do you want to find new seeds that could feed all of Africa? Do you want to help prevent the next pandemic? Do you want to enable everyone to become an amateur athlete? Do you want to help build the first industries in space? Do you want to create personalized medicine? Do you want to end disability in our lifetime?
If so, find leaders and companies that are working on this and join them!
For example…
Nabila Saklayen’s work to make stem cell therapy cheaper, faster and create a cell “bank” sits at the intersection of biology, laser physics and machine learning. As cofounder of Cellino Biotech, Nabila is leading a team of people creating our personalized medical future!
The recent achievements of SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin in making space accessible to non-astronauts are stunning, but Peter Beck is working to take this to the next level. As founder of Rocket Lab, Peter is “democratizing space” by revolutionizing how rockets are made, using 3-D printing to reduce the cost of launch by 10x. Peter needs help!
Just as there are multiple kinds of “smart” (cognitive processing speed vs intellectual work ethic vs worldly), there are multiple levels of “engaged”
Level 1: Willfully ignorant/apathetic/intellectually lazy (“I don’t know, don’t care or I am opinionated but not informed”)
Level 2: Sophisticated/knowledgeable/insightful — great at identifying problems and solutions but tend to abdicate action to others (“this is a huge issue, someone should do something about it!”)
Level 3: Passionate/courageous/determined/collaborative — takes the first step, no matter how small, to create change, pursue hard problems or invest their own time, ideas, reputation or money (“I can’t not work on this…I hope others will join me, but I am doing it either way!”)
In a world where all the world’s knowledge is in everyone’s pocket, the “Level 3” people will inherit the earth!
JUST DO IT
At TED 2021, the poster child for “Level 3” was Adrian K. Haugabrook. Adrian is determined to reinvent the deeply broken college system from the inside. At Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), he is leading a successful effort to dramatically lower cost, expand access and prove that students can demonstrate credentials to employers for high-paying jobs without the exorbitantly priced and rigidly structured traditional 4 year degree.
Adrian bounds with passion when he talks about what is possible, informed not by pollyanna-ish optimism, but outcomes and data. Like all great inventors and pioneers, Adrian puts the real “customer” (the student) at the center of a process redesign and is a true systems thinker. By doing so, SNHU builds the institution around the student, rather than the reverse.
Adrian’s vision is both grand (“let’s build a global skills bank”) and specific: “today the cost of a unit of education (a credit hour) is fixed and the quantity of learning is variable…let’s make learning fixed and let cost and time float”.
Adrian has a steep hill to climb, to be sure. Like healthcare, the dysfunction that causes the runaway inflation in US college tuition is structural. The federal government both restricts the supply of a college education and subsidizes demand for it. Universities make the problem worse by artificially limiting access to their content based on physical/geographic enrollment, and the complex “bundle” of the college product is nearly impossible to value. We have conflated skill acquisition, credentialing (signaling device), social maturity, career networking and a dating service into one intransigent package.
To his credit, Adrian is not deterred by these obstacles. Besides the positive early results at SNHU, Adrian has some allies in his mission. Employers (who historically have “outsourced” both IQ and personality tests to colleges) are increasingly dropping college degree requirements and looking for better, more closed loop skills training solutions. The Zoom revolution, accelerated by COVID-19 lockdowns, has helped disaggregate the bundle, broken the artificiality of location-based education and has been a game-changer for some students. Alternatives to pernicious student loan debt and other university presidents who are committed to tuition and cost control are also tailwind at Adrian’s back. Go Adrian!
THE TED ROLLER COASTER
TED 2021 and TED 2019 were dizzying intellectual buffets that packed 20+ speakers each day into multiple 2 hour sessions.
The talks are a firehose of polymaths and multi-disciplinary content across an almost overwhelming emotional range. An expert on cephalopod camouflage had the audience roaring with laughter, followed by a soil biogeochemist and a public health researcher debating whether CO2 in dirt or leaves is worse. A talk where a neuroscientist leads the TED audience in conducting an orchestra interrupted by Cirque du Soleil blowing everyone’s mind was just a typical day at TED. In another session, the CEO of Nasdaq discussed Tae Kwon Do and shared the stage with both the president of Sierra Leone stepping through the cultural and digital revolution in his country and an immersive artist demonstrating the “merger of mediums”.
Just as you are trying to catch your breath, the lights go down and you are hit with: a Harvard professor who has invented a new gene editing technology (because the revolutionary CRISPR isn’t good enough?), a former White House fellow who was elected the youngest city mayor in history at age 26 discussing racial justice and the director of the film “Crazy Rich Asians” talking about the generosity of storytelling. The next day a plant geneticist with Parkinson’s disease who is fighting climate change was followed by the head of the Center for Policing Equity, a computational biologist who wants to build the “Bell Labs of protein design” and an emotionally searing talk on how to use technology to eliminate child sexual abuse images from the internet.
TED is also the kind of place where a hysterically funny talk by a “curiosity scientist” on using the study of surface tension and load mechanics to figure out how insects pee is grouped with a technical primer by a Google engineer on “responsible artificial intelligence” and a talk by a children’s book illustrator on the emotional toll of losing a loved one; the talk was given while he drew a series of stunning sketches. The audience was equally rapt by a talk on carbon sequestration using seagrass clones as they were by the CEO of Virgin Hyperloop teaching about “smart vehicles riding dumb roads” and the leader of a NASA astrobiology research center in molecular paleobiology (what?) sharing her passion for alien planets and ancient life.
WALKING AMONGST THE “ALSO” PEOPLE
When you walk out of those sessions and meet your fellow TEDsters, it’s hard not to feel like you are the least impressive person at TED. You may find yourself standing in line for food trucks, chatting with a random group of attendees that includes: 1) a professor in international law who also co-founded a behavioral economics group at Mexico’s second largest bank, 2) a lifelong Apple employee (whose previous job titles include “Cray Dude”, “Warrior Poet” and “Experience Evangelist”) who was also executive producer of low-budget zombie film, 3) a technology entrepreneur who is also reinventing the production and marketing of Broadway shows, 4) a three-time startup founder who also worked in the Obama administration and is now overhauling the MBA curriculum as a professor at UC Berkeley and 5) a former New York Times journalist who simultaneously leads a non-profit that is revitalizing coastal communities in Latin America and also runs a video game startup designed to spur kids to engage on climate change.
THE BEST TALKS OF TED 2021
The best TED talks are an artful combination of teaching by storytelling, are deeply researched, make complex topics easy to understand, create an urgency of purpose and relevancy and include an emotional, personal connection or vulnerability. Here are my favorites and recommendations:
Alex Smith — An NFL Quarterback on Overcoming Setbacks and Self-Doubt. A dynamic and richly personal story of recovery, rehabilitation and resiliency, this insightful talk by a 16 season pro quarterback struck a chord at TED 2021. A #1 draft pick in 2005, he guided two NFL teams to the playoffs before suffering a gruesome and life-threatening leg injury in 2018. Alex shared his extraordinary 693 day journey from trauma to triumphant return to the playing field (and the playoffs!), after being told multiple times that he might never walk again. Alex inspired the TED audience by drawing strength from wounded war veterans and his family to learn invaluable lessons about character and courage.
Kathryn A. Whitehead — The Tiny Balls of Fat That Could Revolutionize Medicine. An outstanding and inspiring talk on the miracle of the lipid nanoparticles that deliver the COVID mRNA vaccine to our cells. If you are already vaccinated, you might ask “why should I care?”. Kathryn would tell you that these amazing particles will enable breakthroughs in treatment and cure of a range of diseases: cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, sickle cell anemia and a number of cancers. Or as Walter Isaacson says, “there is a great joy in figuring out how something works, especially when that something is ourselves.” This is a companion talk to Walter’s outstanding book The Code Breaker and the BioNTech interview below.
Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci — Meet the Scientist Couple Driving an mRNA Vaccine Revolution. A wonderful interview with the extraordinary BioNTech cofounders, immunologists and married couple whose decades of scientific research is at the heart of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. Along with scientists at Oxford, University of Pennsylvania and companies like Moderna, Uğur and Özlem stand on the shoulders of mRNA/CRISPR pioneers Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, 2020 Nobel Prize winners. The world owes a great debt of gratitude to these heroes of medicine, who converted mRNA technology into a health miracle in record time!
Adam Grant — How to Stop Languishing and Start Finding Flow. The always funny and engaging organizational psychologist, resilience expert, Wharton professor and best-selling author shared how he transcended his emotional journey through “Meh” brought on by pandemic lockdowns and repetitiveness. Adam reminds us that mastery, mindfulness and mattering are powerful tools to combat the inevitable depressive episodes we all find ourselves in. It turns out the secret is Mario Kart!
Lizzo — The Black History of Twerking and How it Taught Me Self-Love. The irrepressible classically-trained flutist (and a few other things 😁) brought down the house at TED 2021 by giving a high energy, passionate and engaging talk that spanned West African Mapouka dance, the transatlantic slave trade, southern American blues, the French resistance, Miley Cyrus and Tik Tok. Lizzo unabashedly challenged the TED audience to be aware of pop culture repeatedly co-opting Black culture. Special treat: watch the author embarrassingly attempt to twerk with Lizzo beginning around 13:00!
Loretta J. Ross — Don’t Call People Out; Call Them In. Sometimes TED just calls a “time out”. No science, no technology, just holds up a mirror to our current times and says out loud what many wish they could. Loretta, a women’s studies professor at Smith College and author of multiple books, exhorts us to resist the dopamine rush that comes from shaming people online and instead chase the more sustainable high that comes from fighting hate. Loretta gives us strategies to come to contentious conversations with curiosity vs abuse: “That’s an interesting viewpoint, tell me more”. Good advice!
Amir Nizar Zuabi — Walk with Little Amal, A Theatrical Journey Celebrating Refugee Experience. Sometimes, overwhelming problems require grand responses. In this talk, we get to join “The Walk”, the journey of a 3.5 meter tall, lifelike puppet named Amal, as she travels across Europe from Syria to the UK. Amal’s walk representing the plight of hundreds of thousands of refugees who have traversed the continent since the crisis in the summer of 2015. Along the way, Amal greets children in the street and recruits a following of fellow travelers. Amal’s creator (Amir Nizar Zuabi) is a Palestinian playwright and theater director, who reminds us that art can be a powerful force for changing perceptions and engendering empathy. This is vintage TED; a geopolitical conference would cover the refugee issue as a policy problem. TED focuses on the human drama.
THE BEST TALKS OF TED 2019
Wajahat Ali — The Case for Having Kids. A poignant mix of humor, public policy and emotionally personal appeal for society to make it easier for people to have children. Wajahat is a New York Times Op-Ed writer who skillfully uses his own painful and funny episodes as a father as a backdrop to share startling data on declining global fertility and population replacement rates. This is, of course, good news in the developing world where vaccines and improved agricultural productivity have reduced child mortality rates, but bad news in the developed world where demographics are challenging the economic base.
Doug Roble — Digital Humans that Look Just Like Us. By far, the most mind-blowing talk of TED 2019. Doug Roble astonished the TED audience using a mix of neural networks, terabytes of data and inertial motion technology to create a breathtakingly real digital replica of himself. The demo he gives will knock you out, but so will the implications of deep fake image swapping that could enable both extraordinary advances and frightening identity fraud. At a more macro level, this talk is another reminder of the magic that happens at the intersection of disciplines: Doug has found great joy and success building a career that combines math, computer science and filmmaking. Post-script: after 28 years at Digital Domain and the USC Vision & Graphics Lab, the legendary Hollywood visual effects company, Doug recently joined Facebook as a “research scientist”. I will let you run with what that might mean!
Bjarke Ingels — Floating Cities, the Lego House and Other Architectural Forms of the Future. A must-watch talk that lit up entirely new parts of my brain! Bjarke, an exceptionally talented Danish architect and four-time TED speaker, will challenge every notion you have about the definitions of: a city, design, career choice, toys, geography, adaptation. He takes us on a whirlwind visual tour of the extraordinary projects he is designing, from a waste to energy plant that doubles as an alpine ski slope to Lego homes to “Dry Line” protective urban parks. This exhilarating and high-energy talk goes far beyond architecture: it reveals new job opportunities, exemplifies how disconnected college curricula are from careers of the future (see “What Did I Learn at TED” section above) and is yet another example of the power of multi-disciplinary collaboration.
Hannah Gadsby — Three Ideas. Three Contradictions. Or Not. This funny, beautiful and poignant talk from the Australian Emmy award winning comedian was a big hit at TED 2019. Hannah opens up about her diagnoses of Autism and PTSD, her struggles to bring cohesion to her scattered thoughts and, ultimately the strength she finds from her work.
Baratunde Thurston — How to Deconstruct Racism, One Headline at a Time. Futurist comedian, Emmy-nominated writer, activist and TED favorite, Baratunde expertly uses humor to pierce through how we talk about race. Given after the raft of news stories reporting on calls to the police complaining of African-Americans engaging in daily activities (“BBQ Becky”, etc), but before the Central Park birdwatcher and George Floyd, this talk is as relevant now as it was in 2019. Baratunde makes us laugh, but also makes us aware of how we are “weaponizing discomfort”.
Suleika Jaouad — What Almost Dying Taught Me About Living. A tour-de-force talk on resilience. Suleika, a bestselling author, Emmy award winning journalist and presidential cancer policy advisor, takes us on her multiple journeys through leukemia, survival, living and thriving. The journeys are physical, mental and geographic and she brilliantly weaves them together to elicit life lessons of reciprocity and meaningfulness. Watch this to hear a compelling and emotional tale of 1,500 days of survival and 15,000 miles road-tripping to visit her supporters.
Yeonmi Park — What I Learned About Freedom After Escaping North Korea. A harrowing story of a journey from repression to liberty. Yeonmi, a human rights activist, gives us a very human view of life under North Korea’s autocratic regime (“if you don’t know you are a slave, how do you fight to be free?”). Her subsequent escape in the face of starvation and the adjustments she had to make in a free society (learning behaviors of compassion and critical thinking) contain lessons of gratitude and the fragility of our system.
Carole Cadwalladr — Facebook’s Role in Brexit and the Threat to Democracy. The most discussed talk at TED 2019 and the centerpiece of a broad theme at at that year’s conference: that social media is structured to sow divisiveness and leaves a gaping hole for state actors, populist leaders and homegrown terrorists to undermine free elections. What Jaron Lanier started in his powerful TED 2018 talk had grown to an all-out assault on Facebook and Twitter by the time we arrived in Vancouver. In addition to Carole’s impactful talk (as a British investigative journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist, she broke the original Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal), Jack Dorsey revealed from the TED 2019 stage that he wished he had not invented the “like” button. With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that these threats have only grown. Given what we have experienced in the 2 years since, however, it’s important to remember that what is the biggest issue of the day can change on a dime.
Brittany Packnett — How to Build Your Confidence, and Spark it in Others. A brilliant and inspiring deconstruction of the virtue of confidence. Brittany illustrates the centrality of this trait and the difficulty of developing and keeping it. In a world where all the world’s knowledge is available, Brittany argues that confidence can be THE difference in translating our dreams to reality. She also helps us understand the components (permission, community and curiosity) and the role we play in rewarding confidence in others. Brittany knows a thing or two about this: she is an activist (founder of Campaign Zero), a policy advisor (Obama White House advisor on 21st century policing) and an educator (former executive director of Teach for America).
America Ferrera — My Identity is a Superpower, not an Obstacle. Speaking of confidence, America (actress, director and producer who is most known as the Emmy-winning star of “Ugly Betty”), exudes it in this talk. Using her own career as a backdrop, she calls for more authentic representation of diverse cultures in media. America reminds us to use what makes us unique to achieve our goals, rather than run from it.
Anthony Veneziale — “Stumbling Towards Intimacy”: An Improvised TED Talk. Anthony, co-founder with Lin-Manuel Miranda of the brilliant Freestyle Love Supreme, had the TED audience falling out of their seats with laughter as he attempted to give the first ever improvised TED talk. He crowdsourced a topic from the audience and had to navigate through a series of slides he had never seen. Awesome!
Derren Brown — Mentalism, Mind Reading and The Art of Getting Inside Your Head. Just Plain Fun!
THE TED FELLOWS
The TED Fellows is the absolute jewel of the TED crown. A group of exceptional young stars is hand-picked by TED each year and given the opportunity of a lifetime. Each fellow gets a 5 minute talking slot, an accomplished mentor, professional coaching, resources and the support of a class of high-potential peers. The result is they are catapulted from obscurity to the radar screen of some of the most accomplished people on the planet in an instant. The TED Fellows now includes more than 500 participants who work across 100+ countries, forming a powerful network of artists, scientists, doctors, activists, entrepreneurs, inventors, journalists and beyond, each channeling their passion to improving the world. These extraordinary people are “Level 3” personified. Watch this space!
My favorite TED Fellows talks at TED 2021 and TED 2019 were:
Arnav Kapur — How AI Could Become an Extension of Your Mind. Arnav demonstrated a mind-bending technology called AlterEgo, a non-invasive, peripheral neural interface that allows people to communicate with machines in natural language without using voice, opening their mouth or making any other movements…simply by articulating words inside their head! Developed at the legendary MIT Media Lab as a tool for people suffering from ALS and MS, AlterEgo leverages the peripheral nervous system, instead of the brain. You could almost feel the entrepreneurial ideas being generated in the TED audience during Arnav’s talk.
Marc Bamuthi Joseph — You Have the Rite. Marc’s day job is running social impact initiatives at the Kennedy Center, his title is “poet”, he has written multiple operas and works with legendary dance choreographer Bill T. Jones. He took the TED stage and gave a powerful spoken word performance on a Black father’s fear as he watches his son enter adulthood.
Danielle N. Lee — How Hip-Hop Helps Us Understand Science. How many behavioral biologists who focus on the ecology of rodents across urban gradients do you know? Ok, now how many of them can connect hip hop to science. Danielle blew the TED audience away in a “remix” on the topics above. She is a classic example of a TED speaker who on the surface seems to be focused on something so obscure that one wonders how they will make money, but her technical depth, ability to communicate and collaborate on complex topics makes her highly sought after in the halls of TED.
Skylar Tibbits — A New Way to “Grow” Islands and Coastlines. Skylar is a classic polymath; equally comfortable designing “4-D printing” as he is reinventing architecture as he is (in this case) “creating a dynamic, adaptable system of underwater structures that uses energy from ocean waves to accumulate sand and restore eroding shorelines.” Said differently, Skylar is using geometry to save the Maldives! He is the founder and co-director of the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT.
Jim Chuchu — Why are Stolen Artifacts Still in Western Museums. Jim gave a powerful talk on how much of Kenya’s cultural heritage has been “borrowed” by the West — his passion for tracking the lineage of these collections and his mission to get them back was infectious. Jim is a visual artist, filmmaker and founder of Nest Collective, a Nairobi-based artist group. He has built an online database of African artifacts because Jim believes that “collective identity requires collective memory”. COVID travel restrictions prevented Jim from traveling to TED 2021 but we are lucky to have his pre-recorded Fellows talk.
Nithya Ramanathan — Keeping Vaccines Safe in the Developing World. Nithya is the co-founder of Nexleaf Analytics, a technology non-profit dedicated to helping developing countries get the data they need to improve health outcomes. Nithya and her team are bringing together sensor design, data analysis, software engineering, and field engagement to ensure there is a robust cold chain for vaccines across 15,000 sites in Africa and Asia.
TITLE PORN
You can’t have this much talent under one roof without encountering some awesome labels on business cards and name tags. Below are some of the best at TED 2019 and 2021:
MUSIC & DANCE @ TED
TED uses these art forms to create mood, expand the power of an idea, expose the audience to emerging artists and as a pallet cleanser between talks. Below are a few examples from TED 2021 and TED 2019.
ONLY AT TED MOMENTS
Chatting with my favorite podcaster Hrishikesh Hirway about two of his exceptional projects: The West Wing Weekly and Song Exploder. Luckily, I was able to talk with Hrishikesh after he gave his outstanding debut TED talk, where he “song exploded” himself!
The great Adam Grant leading phenomenal workshops at TED 2019 (“making group decisions that don’t suck”) and TED 2021 (“the power of generosity”). Adam taught us that the more successful a person is, the less likely they are to ask for help and, paradoxically, the more they want to.
Biking the 17 mile drive with TEDsters and chatting with TED Fellow Rohan Pavuluri about his mission to provide affordable legal protection to low-income families with the Pacific Ocean as our backdrop.
Hailey getting advice from the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League on the current state of anti-semitism on the college she was about to attend while waiting in line for food trucks.
Talking with Alex Smith and his wife about Alex’s recovery and plans for the future wearing flip flops on the sand at a post-TED beach party.
Brainstorming dinners in Vancouver and Monterey on technology as a force for good or evil.
UNTIL NEXT YEAR…
