TED 2017 — “I, Robot” or “Let’s Make Ourselves Great Again”
In April 2017, I was fortunate to attend the TED conference for the 5th year in a row. I take TED’s mission of “Ideas Worth Spreading” seriously and hope you enjoy the tour through this extraordinary annual “courage bath”. For any young readers: TED reminds us that we live in an amazing time to be thinking about “what do I want to be when I grow up?”
I approached my beloved annual trek to TED with some apprehension. The angst started on November 8, 2016. After pulling myself off the floor, one of my first thoughts was to wonder how TED, the poster child for socially liberal, science-based, inherently optimistic thinking, would handle the new administration, the new populism and the new divisiveness. Would 1,200 “liberal elites” fly to Vancouver and cry for 5 days? Would we hermetically seal ourselves in a bubble? Would politics hijack the conference and “Technology, Entertainment & Design” fall by the wayside? Thankfully, none of this happened and TED did exactly what it’s exceptional at: 1) introduce humanity to extraordinarily passionate and deeply knowledgeable people who are changing the world and 2) start/enhance/generate debates and dialogues across a multidisciplinary fabric of topics. Within hours of arriving on Canadian soil, my faith had been restored after I had (foolishly, but temporarily) forgotten that TED is the opposite of an echo chamber…it does not hold up a mirror to society, rather it displays a futurist crystal ball in uncompressed, high-definition video and surround sound.
What is TED?
Despite its global reach (2 billion views of TED talks each year!), a surprising number of people are unfamiliar with TED. For readers new to this space or if you want a refresher, check out my primer on TED here. If you want to dive deep, see my blogs on prior year TED conferences and my top 10 favorite TED talks of all time here.
TED’s success means the spring ritual is accompanied by an annual wave of scrutiny, supplied by everyone from Kool-Aid drinking fans, thoughtful reviewers, skeptics and haters. This year was no exception where TED was alternately labeled: “a smorgasbord of self-improvement”, “the intellectual equivalent of kale” and “like freebasing an Upworthy post”. By far, the highlight of TED pop culture season was Stephen Colbert’s hilarious satire of the Pope’s appearance at TED 2017.
Regardless of your view, the “ripple effect” of putting 100+ amazing speakers and 1,200 influential and highly connected attendees (present company excluded) into a hothouse environment for 5 days is astounding. 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. Just ask Will Potter, who went from a beat reporter at a city daily newspaper to globally recognized civil liberties advocate…or Adam Foss, an assistant district attorney in a tough Boston neighborhood whose TED talk on reforming the criminal justice system landed him an audience with President Obama and the platform to help oust abusive prosecutors across the US…or Deb Roy, formerly a graduate researcher at MIT who became the Chief Scientist at Twitter, all because of a TED talk about his infant son learning how to speak.
If there’s any doubt that TED is firing with live ammo, one need only watch the new CEO of Ford at a recent press conference with employees and investors. He mentioned TED as an influence 3 times in 5 minutes! This techie, California-centric tree-hugger convention infiltrating the conservative industrial Midwest rust belt? TED, you’ve come a long way, baby.
The Big Picture
Attending TED is like visiting a strange and foreign land where the language, the currency, the culture, the nourishment, the customs and most importantly the value systems are literally mirror images of your home “country”. 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!
At its heart, TED asks participants the question: “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” Afraid of being wrong, afraid of being misunderstood, afraid of standing apart from the crowd, afraid of a lack of predictability in your life. As astronaut/Bowie cover artist Chris Hadfield reminded us in his 2014 TED talk, fear ≠ danger, yet we live our lives as if they are one and the same. Halfway through the week, I flashed back to the scene in the Albert Brooks film Defending Your Life where Rip Torn says “…your life has pretty much been devoted to dealing with fear…that’s what little brains do”.
Speaking of brains, TED is also the kind of place where you begin to understand why Aaron Sorkin found the sound of smart people talking like music. It’s also a place that helps you unpack the word “smart” into its component parts: a) cognitive processing speed (are you 5 minutes ahead of or 5 minutes behind the conversation?), b) work ethic (over-preparing for every demonstration of your intellect) and c) worldly (well-traveled and well-read). Three very different attributes that are shared by very few people, yet TED attendees overindex on this hat trick (it’s also a place where you get deluded into thinking Stanford’s admissions acceptance rate is 40%, not the 4% it actually is).
Walking around TED, it’s hard not to feel like you are the least impressive person in the room. Standing in line for artisan chocolate and organic cleansing juice, you might strike up a conversation with: 1) Hillary Clinton’s head speechwriter, 2) the founder of a disaster recovery organization who counseled bereaved parents after the Sandy Hook tragedy and architected the Fukashima cleanup, 3) a billionaire hedge fund manager, 4) the head of Duke University medical center, 5) the inventor of Siri and 6) the Chief Scientist at Disney/Pixar. Even more striking is that the six of you are more likely to be discussing one of two (yes, two) TED talks on pond scum this year than the fact that Steven Spielberg, Meg Ryan and Goldie Hawn are standing behind you.
Speaking of which, a week at TED reminds you of that fundamental insight: You are the average of the 5 people you hang out with. At any moment, they are making you imperceptibly better or worse. Always, always, seek out those who make you better.
The 2017 Conference
On to the big dance: 5 days, 30 hours of talks, 108 speakers, 3 comedians, 2 dancing robots, 1 Rabbi/1 Pontiff, a 22 year old multi-instrumentalist and 1,200 extraordinary attendees who gather on the shores of gorgeous Vancouver Harbor in the shadow of the Pacific Coast Mountain Range for a concentrated vaccine of cross-disciplinary inspiration.
For those with short attention spans, here’s the conference in 96 seconds:
Although TED covers an extraordinarily broad range of disciplines, the conference bobbed and weaved around a few big themes in 2017: 1) the robots are coming to take our jobs and what should we do about it (hint: tell your kids to study artificial intelligence and your grandchildren to expect their “basic income” check), 2) the magical intersection of computer science and biology is changing everything including the human lifespan and careers and 3) screen time and the selfie culture are killing our humanity.
As always, TED sessions are intense intellectual whiplash therapy that leave attendees raw and in desperate need of a “What the hell just happened?” conversation with their neighbors. Immersed in TED’s custom-built erector set theater, one might watch an emotionally wrenching talk on recovering from heartbreak, followed by a genomics researcher (who, naturally, coded a digital ladybug for his college thesis) walking through his plan to create digital doppelgangers for real people. Another session might zig-zag between a computer scientist pioneering a new facial recognition algorithm, a talk on poverty by a historian whose book is titled “Utopia for Realists”, a college freshman who builds a compelling connection between string theory, music and coping strategies who then transitions to a Japanese artificial intelligence expert who is trying to teach robots to get into college. After a short break, TED throws you off your equilibrium with two hours that combine a physicist who fights “superbugs” with a poet who addresses the future and the spirituality of travel, a microbial researcher who is crazy passionate about bacteria and an African artist who paints on naked human bodies.
Whew! Thankfully, cocktails are included in the TED registration fee.
Unlike most conferences of its stature, TED doesn’t seek out the world’s greatest public speakers. Rather, it goes to the ends of the earth to find experts in their fields who are acting on their vision and teaches them how to be storytellers and engaging orators. The difference between these two approaches is fundamental.
So, how do you become TED stage-worthy? It’s easy: spend 10,000 hours practicing/studying/experimenting with a subject about which you cannot contain your passion, be the first to try a risky new approach to a vexing problem, demonstrate an extraordinary capacity to adapt and improve as you learn, display exceptional levels of curiosity and intellectual resiliency, practice activism in the true sense of the word, come to the stage with well-thought out solutions (not shrill complaints) and be world-class at collaborating and networking, both within and across multiple disciplines.
As I described last year, TED showcases people who stand at the intersection of genius, courage and humility. Exhibit A in 2017 was Elizabeth Blackburn.
Elizabeth, like most people you know, is a Nobel-prize winning molecular biologist who is obsessed with the question: “how do we reverse aging?” She adroitly wove a compassionate tale of discovery that combined “guzzling telomeres” (the caps at the end of each strand of DNA that protect our chromosomes), the impact of stress on lifespan, “healthspan” and “diseasespan” and a window into the the searing pain and hopeful progress that dementia caregivers experience. Elizabeth’s expert work demonstrates the power of curiosity to change the world and her renown has only driven her to work harder at her quest, rather than slow down.
TED 2017 Highlights
For us mere mortals, below are my top 10 (ok, 17) main stage talks from TED 2017. Until TED puts them all online, I have linked to TED blog posts or other background. Please check back to this blog as I will update the links as TED makes them available.
Anthony Romero — This is What Democracy Looks Like. An absolute tour-de-force talk by the head of the ACLU that masterfully links 15th century Italian Renaissance paintings with a how-to on good and bad government. Anthony, a Stanford-educated prodigy, another famous son of Puerto Rican immigrants and a lightening rod of adulation and bitter criticism (depending on your political leaning), threads the ideological needle and avoids falling into the trap of becoming a caricature of a liberal political activist, yet leverages his credibility as an expert on first amendment freedoms to send a powerful message to Washington DC.
Luma Mufleh — Don’t Feel Sorry for Refugees, Believe in Them. A gay, Arab, Muslim, Jordanian immigrant and daughter of a Syrian refugee who founded the first accredited private school in America for refugees. Luma humbly introduces herself as “a soccer coach in Georgia”, but quickly brings the complex, political, economic and sociological issues of displaced persons and immigration to an intensely personal level. Beloved by her students and athletes, Luma’s emotional, funny and inspiring talk reminds us that systematic acts of leadership and compassion can bring hope to the darkest of circumstances.
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks — How We Can Face the Future Without Fear, Together. The former head Rabbi of the UK gave a powerhouse talk on how to unite people in a time of extraordinary social division. Not surprisingly it starts with less worship of the “self” and more loyalty to “the other”.
Elon Musk — The Future We’re Building…and Boring. Not a talk, but a fascinating and wide-ranging interview with the most prolific and ambitious entrepreneur of this century. Leading 4 world-changing companies at once (Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity and his latest creation: Boring), Elon covered milestones near (Model 3 starting production in July 2017), medium term (we are 2 years to full autonomy and 4 years to commercial space travel), far (40–50 years until all roofs are solar, a few decades until we have a 40 story skyscraper-sized rocket ship that can travel to Mars) and inconceivable (a full planet-scale network of underground 3-D tunnels that will eliminate surface street traffic).
OK Go — How to Find a Wonderful Idea. Combine live music performance, a passionate talk about creativity and complex videos of Rube Goldberg machines and you have the “E” part of TED in spades. The OK Go guys’ energy is contagious.
Marc Raibert — Meet Spot, the Robot Dog. The CEO of Boston Dynamics demonstrates his humanoid and canine-like robots that combine balance, dexterity and perception into an incredibly life-like form factor that can deliver packages, collaborate with one another on tasks involving dexterity, lift heavy cargo and resist obstacles to open doors, etc. Headlining a session titled “Our Robotic Overlords”, this talk and the technology have implications that are far-reaching and will be replacing and enabling a high-paying job near you.
Tim Ferriss — Conquering Your Fears, the Stoic Way. The self-described “human guinea pig” and author gave an exceptional talk on using stoicism to avoid emotional despair and how to use “fear setting”: visualizing worst case scenarios in detail to avoid having those worries paralyze you from following your dreams.
Anna Rosling Rönnlund — See How the Rest of the World Lives, Organized by Income. The daughter-in-law of the late, and truly great, TED speaker (10 TED talks!) Hans Rosling takes us on a an exceptional wide-angle lens tour of the marked differences and surprising similarities of how people live at multiple socioeconomic levels around the globe. Anna asks us to imagine (as Bill Gates often does) if everyone on the planet lived on the same street. Aside from the obvious benefits (you would never let a neighbor’s child die due to lack of food or basic medicine as we Americans passively do in Africa today), this cross-sectional analysis of data, without regard to physical distance, illustrates that the “person staring back at us from across the world actually looks like you”. Hans would be proud.
Anne Lamott — 12 Things I Know For Sure. The novelist disarms the high-powered TED audience with thought-provoking life lessons in a talk that is by turns funny, achingly earnest and pithy.
Jim Yong Kim — Doesn’t Everyone Deserve a Chance at a Good Life? The president of the World Bank combines a personal story, data and real-life examples in an inspiring and informative talk about global health. More importantly, he comes armed with concrete ideas to reduce “extreme poverty” that leverage drone technology, complex financial instruments and community health workers.
T. Morgan Dixon and Vanessa Garrison — Walking as a Revolutionary Act of Self-Care. Sometimes the simplest ideas are the most powerful. A joint talk by two health activists and co-founders of GirlTrek that overflows with passion and conviction and demonstrates the incredible effectiveness of mobilizing African American women to join neighborhood walking brigades. Inspired by the civil rights movement, GirlTrek is changing lives across hundreds of communities by improving health, reducing blight and crime and empowering underserved women and girls to take control of their lives.
His Holiness Pope Francis — Why the Only Future Worth Building Includes Everyone. Although it was difficult for him to compete with Serena Williams, who appeared in the same session, the Pope displayed his celebrated reputation for “radical authenticity” by beaming into the TED conference via video as a surprise speaker. Like Rabbi Sacks, he delivered a powerful message of unity and being selfless.
Robert Sapolsky — The Biology of our Best and Worst Selves. A TED talk using augmented reality presentation technology to address the dichotomy of humans as an inherently violent species and yet a compassionate and altruistic one at the same time. Sapolsky traces a fascinating battle our brain wages between the amygdala, testosterone levels, stress and childhood/adolescent trauma to fashion our reactions.
Jack Conte — How Artists Can (Finally) Get Paid in the Digital Age. The founder of crowdfunding platform Patreon gave a funny and dynamic talk on the empowerment of direct relationships between creators and their audience. A companion talk to Amanda Palmer’s The Art of Asking, it illustrates how technology and human reciprocity can enable careers in music, especially in the “long tail.”
Ray Dalio — Radical Transparency. Amidst the artists, doctors and aid workers, it’s always a little strange to hear from a hedge fund titan at TED, but the founder of Bridgewater Associates delivered a fascinating talk on how to make your organization an “idea meritocracy”. The most successful hedge fund in history is controversial for its bizarre workplace culture in which every single meeting is video recorded for all employees to see, coworkers rate each other every hour based on how creative their ideas are and new employees must live by a 100 page manifesto authored by Ray.
Raj Panjabi — No One Should Die Because They Live Too Far From a Doctor. The 2017 TED Prize Winner, a doctor at Harvard Medical School specializing in global health equity, paints a vision of creating an army of trained community health workers across Africa. As he describes his journey creating “Last Mile Health”, Raj reminds us that while we question the traditional role of doctors in the developed world, we shouldn’t forget that most people in the developing world can’t access them at all.
David Miliband — The Refugee Crisis is Test of Our Character. The former UK Foreign Secretary and son of Holocaust refugees provides a companion talk to Luma Mufleh’s (above), but provides a cross-border political perspective on the refugee crisis. Like all great TED talks, David combines deep expertise, lessons from taking courageous action (he runs the International Rescue Committee) and an intensely personal take on the issue.
TED Fellows Highlights
The TED Fellows program is one of the absolute jewels of TED. Each year TED picks a class of 20 (chosen from 1,000 applicants!) young, impassioned, and determined people to sponsor in their work and feature in a special session at the conference (5 minute talks each). Think of this as both the “farm team” of future main stage speakers and, more importantly, a group of people you will read about changing the world for years to come. Below are my favorites from 2017.
Karim Abouelnaga — A Summer School Kids Actually Want to Attend. Raised in the inner city, educated in the Ivy League, Karim is changing the face of education for under-served kids by taking an empathetic approach to “coach-teaching”.
Armando Azua-Bustos — The Most Martian Place on Earth. Armando is bringing valuable insights to the search for life on Mars by studying how microbial life survives in the driest, saltiest and highest UV exposure place on Earth — Chile’s Atacama desert. His goal is to find “the dry limit” for life.
Rebecca Brachman — Can a Drug Prevent Depression & PTSD? Neuroscientist, “preventative psychopharmacologist”, entrepreneur and fellow at both TED and the National Institutes of Health (everyone at TED is at least 2 things) Rebecca Brachman discovered the first drugs to block the development of psychiatric disorders. She made a breakthrough in uncovering that immune cells carry “memories” of stress and white blood cells can act as resilience-enhancers. She’s also started a company whose mission to develop an anti-PTSD vaccine. Rebecca did most of this before her 30th birthday.
Damon Davis — Courage is Contagious. Damon is an interdisciplinary filmmaker and musician (there’s always 2 things) from St. Louis. His Sundance awarded film Whose Streets? tells the story of the Ferguson protests from the perspective of those who lived through it. Damon eloquently reminded us that, courage, like fear, can spread like wildfire.
Matilida Ho — Farm to Table in China. To combat rampant food safety violations, Matilda (entrepreneur, investor and “amateur dove magician”) launched China’s first online farmers’ market, a company that delivers organic food directly to customers. It has a zero-tolerance policy towards hormones, antibiotics and pesticides, which limits the number of suppliers. Therefore, she has also established a venture capital fund that invests in sustainable food startups. Matilda says she is determined to meet every local farmer in China in the search for chemical-free food.
Wanuri Kahiu — Changing the Serious Narrative of Africa. A Cannes Film Festival and Sundance award winning filmmaker, Wanuri calls herself “an Afro Bubble Gum Artist”. In a companion talk to last year’s by TED Fellow Nicole Amarteifio (producer of a “Sex and the City” TV show for Africa), Wanuri tells us how she uses science fiction and fantasy genres to tell modern African stories and to replace the tired, serious and policy-driven narrative that fills most movie screens. This Kenyan artist thinks African art needs more frivolous and vibrant stories to bring hope to a continent that is predicted to be home to 1 in 4 people on our planet.
Lauren Sallan — Dead Fish Walking. Biologists that are obsessed with extinct fish are definitely under-represented at TED, but Lauren shared a funny and passionate talk about applying big data analytics to the 500 million year fossil record and 34,000 species of fishes to determine how ecology and extinction drive evolution.
Elizabeth Wayne — Nanotechnology to Treat Cancer. Elizabeth is a postdoctoral fellow in biomedical engineering and (yep, 2 things) co-host of a podcast about women in higher education (“PhDivas”) who is developing technology that can boost immune cells ability to deliver cancer drugs directly to tumor sites. She gave a funny and optimistic talk about the intersection of multiple strains of science and technology.
Jimmy Lin — A Blood Test to Detect Cancer. A young geneticist pioneering early cancer-detection techniques jammed cancer genomics, precision/personalized medicine and immunotherapy into one 6-minute talk. Jimmy got the audience’s attention with an expert command of a topic that touches everyone’s life. He reminded us that ovarian cancer has a 92% survival rate once detected but only 15% of cases are detected early enough to achieve that.
Negin Farsad — Beware of Schmyrants. A perennial TED favorite, Negin is Iranian-American comedian/director who combines hilarious stand-up comedy with thought-provoking satire about Trump, Muslim bans, and intolerance in general.
RIP Darius Weems. An emotional tribute to the late Darius Weems, TED Fellow, rapper and disability rights activist who lost his battle with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (a rare degenerative and fatal childhood disease) in October 2016 at age 27. Darius first gained fame through his cross-country wheelchair road trip at age 15 where he spoke to school kids and raised money to commercialize a drug that would treat his condition. Darius lived just long enough to see the drug receive FDA approval; he continues to inspire kids through the documentary below.
The Real News
TED reserved a session for fireside chats with innovators across technology, education, entertainment and ecology (Sebastian Thrun, Shonda Rhimes and Stewart Brand). The highlight for me was hearing Sebsastian Thrun encouraging us not to fear artificial intelligence and robots, but rather take advantage of the way they empower humans. Aside from his groundbreaking work in self-driving cars, Sebastian is most well-known for trying to re-invent college through nanodegrees (highly specialized certifications that are valued by employers and take 6–9 months to complete). I’m a huge fan of any innovation to the static, rigid, 4-year, one-size-fits-all, devastatingly expensive university model that is quickly proving unsustainable.
Title Porn
TED attendees and speakers are an exceptionally accomplished bunch and tend to be multi-tasking on steroids (everyone I met is at least 2 things: “I’m a biochemist and a semi-pro cricket player”), but they are nothing if not good at naming themselves. A sample of the creative titles I encountered in Vancouver this year are below. Show this list to your kids the next time someone asks them, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Only At TED Moments
Having to choose how to spend your lunch hour between a guy demonstrating his anti-gravity jetpack suit and lunch with Al Gore
Choosing instead to stalk polymath Nathan Myhrvold at the TED food trucks (“he wrote a 2,500 page cookbook, so I’ll have what he’s having”) and hear about his work at patent firm (some say troll) Intellectual Ventures
Joining a “Jeffersonian dinner” on the future of medicine hosted by Jay Walker and being seated across from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen
Late night rooftop party with a hedge fund billionaire and founder of an NYC education startup
Learning about the economics of Broadway plays from a fellow attendee
Talking with Ann Doerr about what Khan Academy is up to these days (democratizing college test prep)
The TED audience being (not so) gently reminded there are more conservative Republicans in the audience than they realize
