TED 2018 — “Embrace the Discomfort” or “Learning About Learning”
In April 2018, I attended the extraordinary TED conference for the 6th year in a row. I was lucky to be joined in Vancouver by 2 friends (Brian Abrams & Mickey Hochstein) and see the event through their “TED virgin” eyes. I hope you enjoy this fly-over of TED, aka the passion capital of the world and a year of science-based liberal arts education in 5 intense days!
WHAT IS TED?
TED’s global reach continues to grow: 100,000 talks have been viewed or heard nearly 11 billion times at a current clip of 3.2 billion per year, 700+ TED-ED animated lessons were viewed 600 million times in 2017, 23,000 TEDx events have been staged, 30,000 people have translated TED talks into 110 languages, $22m in TED Prize money awarded and $250m in “Audacious” prize money to come. For readers new to this space or who want a refresher, see my cavalcade of prior blatherings on TED here.
With success, of course, comes scrutiny. TED continues to elicit a broad-range of reactions: cult-like loyalty, cynicism, good-natured teasing and outright derision. TED has been called “an inspiration assembly line”, “oratorial clickbait” and “like wearing an awareness-raising ribbon.” TED has also been a lightning rod for accusations of liberal elitism for years. While attempts to combat this have helped (radical transparency, offering a tier of reduced admission prices and devoting two valuable conference sessions to audience feedback on controversial subjects), TED’s science/fact-based optimism can seem out of place in our rancorous and polarized world.
THE POINT OF IMPACT
Regardless of your view, TED generates real results. The TED conference has been the birthplace of thousands of new ideas and the number of related inventions, non-profits, laws, research projects, companies and social action campaigns generated at TED that have been funded, launched, expanded, commercialized, broadened and generated powerful consequences is extraordinary. The TED Prize winners alone are an impact hall of fame.
How does this happen?
TED is designed to facilitate the collision of 1,500 diverse, bright, accomplished people from 57 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.
Watching people who are doggedly chasing difficult challenges get discovered by the TED audience is a thrill and the subsequent “chemical reaction” when one (or more) of the highly networked/wealthy attendees corners a new speaker and offers advice, connections, mentorship, funding, media exposure, intellectual property or access to the legislative agenda is a powerful force that changes lives.
Just ask former TED speakers whose careers went into orbit after they stood in the red circle — people like: Skylar Tibbits, a designer and computer scientist who coined the term “4D Printing” during his 2013 talk and went on to have his work exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in NYC, teach at MIT and founded a design consultancy. Or Joshua Roman, a cellist, composer and curator who, after appearing at TED in 2011 (at age 28), became a regular at the Kennedy Center, co-created an acclaimed performance art show with actress Anna Deavere Smith in San Francisco and has played with the Moscow and BBC symphony orchestras (plus 2 more TED appearances). Or social justice activist Bryan Stevenson, whose 2012 TED talk generated $1 million in donations to his campaign to end the incarceration of children in adult prisons and created the awareness for him to start the National Memorial for Peace & Justice, win numerous literary awards for his best-selling book and land on an episode of 60 Minutes.
THE COURAGE BATH
This is the (not-so) “secret” of TED and the single most pronounced difference between the TED community and the one that most of us live and work in every day: Pursuing hard problems with passion is the key to success.
Why is this case? It’s not obvious at first glance. During a visit to TED, one is tempted to ask: why is this person toiling in obscurity studying fish paleobiology for a decade? How will they ever make a living? As it turns out, mentors, coaching, access to networks and investment and philanthropic dollars flow disproportionately to those who: a) demonstrate sustained commitment in the face of daunting obstacles, b) time-arbitrage the contrarian view of currently out of favor subjects (less competition, access to cheaper resources) and c) exhibit resourcefulness, innovation and insatiable curiosity to identify unmet needs, holes in our knowledge and/or spur others to action. Counter-intuitive as it may be, this phenomena can occur independent of the subject you pursue. Therefore, the fish paleobiologist will be recognized as someone who’s intelligence and determination can be harnessed for other things…and the job offers will pour in.
By contrast, parents around the world encourage their children to pursue “safe” college majors and professions (doctor, lawyer, accountant, more recently computer science) and subtly discourage them from pursuing seemingly “obscure” topics and careers out of fear that they will be unemployable. Putting aside that the “stability” is a myth (large chunks of law and accounting are being automated/outsourced to low cost regions and ballooning health care costs are eating away at doctors’ incomes and job satisfaction), this is not doing our kids any favors. We systematically overvalue constancy and we systematically undervalue struggle and challenging life transitions in the name of pursuing one’s passion.
This is why I go to TED: to experience a community whose values seem to be the inverse of the world in which I live. As I wrote in last year’s blog:
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!
THE DORK OLYMPICS
A week at TED has always defied easy explanation and is far more than a “conference”. To make the journey to Vancouver is to enter an idealized version of intellectual life. It’s baseball fantasy camp for nerds: 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 neuron-firing conversations in an hour than most of us have in a year.
It’s hard not to geek out at TED. Spilling out of one of TED’s dizzying 2 hour sessions, you may find yourself in a conversation with a random group of attendees that includes: a) the chief medical officer of the Pentagon, former president of the AMA and who teaches at the National Institutes of Health, b) the co-founder of Ethos Water (sold to Starbucks) who worked in the Obama White House and is the first new head of the Anti-Defamation League in nearly 30 years, c) senior advisor to the Secretary General of NATO and youngest person and only woman to have ever held that position, d) the creator of LTE 4G technology who is now reinventing photography, e) an investment banker and author who published a book challenging the idea that the brain creates consciousness and f) the inventor of the Emoji and a best-selling Japanese author… just to name a few.
Notice all the “and” words above. While it’s easy to feel like you are the least impressive person roaming the halls at TED, all these interactions ultimately leave me inspired to stay deeply curious and “make no little plans.”
TED is world-class at creating an environment that lends itself to this rich collision. Mountains and ocean outside, brain garden and tech playground inside. Around the outside of the theater, the beautiful social spaces are filled with gourmet treats (“have you tried the blueberry mint kombucha and champagne gummy bears?”) along with robots, soundscape immersions, short story dispensers, selfies printed onto cookies, virtual statues and Vitagene genetic analyses.
“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 neural fireworks that result from systems thinking.
TED-UCATION
A week at TED reminds us that more magic happens at the intersection of disciplines than within them: a breakthrough technology that was only invented because its creator studied biochemistry, neuroscience and classical violin or new software that could enable direct democracy that is being developed by a physicist who runs a media arts lab and studies how teams, cities and nations learn. If “number of polymaths per square foot” were an attendance metric, TED would hold a world record!
TED celebrates people who combine genius, courage and humility. This rare combination is fundamental to: a) the novel insight embedded in new solutions to vexing problems, b) the equanimity required to pursue your passion for years in the face of social/economic pressure to deviate to something more “marketable” and ultimately, and c) the active collaboration necessary to capitalize on the amazing progress that happens at the seams of expertise. TED 2018 was chock full of such unicorns, also known as “humble narcissists”.
The poster child for this at TED 2018 was Penny Chisholm. Penny is your run-of-the-mill, dime-a-dozen, microbial oceanographer, children’s book author and MIT professor. Her obsession with phytoplankton led her to discover and sequence the genome of the smallest such microbe on the planet and get awarded the National Medal of Science by President Obama in 2013. Why? Well, it turns out that the cells of these tiny life forms can convert solar energy into chemical energy and, if harnessed, massively reduce greenhouse gases. Penny starts sentences with words like, “When I daydream about prochlorococcus…” and “Let me tell you about my beloved microbes…”. The TED audience pounced and shortly after her talk, Penny’s dance card was full!
By showcasing people like Penny, TED inspired many, many debates among attendees in Vancouver about how we learn and create. Lots of ideas on education were spinning around the air at TED 2018 (and spinning around my brain as TED 2018 followed a week of college visits with my high school junior daughter). A sample of what I “learned about learning” in Vancouver:
- Breakthrough results are more likely to come from people who develop and constantly refine mental models on how the world works than those who took a single academic “vaccine” early in life and then memorized technique. Ultimately, this latticework of multiple models and a deep understanding of the psychology of human misjudgment (cognitive biases) are more valuable than simply knowing facts.
- The paradox of the modern world: jobs are becoming hyper-specialized, yet critical thinking, creativity, passion and curiosity are the only ways to differentiate yourself when all the world’s information is in our pocket.
- Our colleges are still designed around stove-piped majors that have decreasing connection to valued skills, rather than integrated knowledge and continuous learning.
- We learn through doing: we write a blog, we synthesize a protein, we ship a product, we collaborate with diverse teams, we organize a rally. Education is not a product to be packaged and consumed by us, it is the result of our curiosity and connectedness to others. TED celebrates this inversion by putting people on stage who are wired for exploration and absorb knowledge as fuel for their journey, not as an end to itself.
THE 2018 CONFERENCE
TED 2018 by the numbers: 5 days, 132 speakers, 54 workshops and experiences, 22 exhibits/social spaces, 4 high school seniors (including 1 on stage!), 3 international singers, 2 DJs and 1 hologram of an Israeli scientist. All of this consumed in TED’s immersive, custom-built “pop-up” theater.
While incredibly broad in its topical reach, TED 2018 did zero in on a few important themes:
- Despite our desperate and burning desire to think otherwise, the world is getting better by every objective measurement
- However, that progress has had negative unintended consequences: free internet →behavior modification and manipulation, mass production→bland city and suburban design, representative government→cognitive bandwidth shortage, universal literacy→runaway education costs, AI/singularity/quantum computing →???? (stay tuned)
- Gene editing, exoskeletons, regenerative tissue, subcutaneous sensors, etc may mean the end of disability (and redefinition of doctors) in our lifetime
- We are living in a world of over-abundance, yet are starving for empathy. That scarcity is at the root of many societal issues and why movements such as #MeToo are so resonant. More empathy would not only improve our relationships, but also our livelihood. Jobs that require compassion are more likely to be protected from robotics and artificial intelligence.
TED 2018 was, as always, a bewildering event that immerses its attendees in the wonder of the future while conveying the raw emotional angst of the current moment. Structured as sixteen 2+ hour sessions, TED sends attendees on a high-speed emotional and cognitive roller coaster in 5–18 minute loops:
A talk on a mind-blowing new optics technology that detects tumors by allowing us to see deep inside our bodies was followed by an algorithm that can simulate any person’s speech and facial features in computer-generated video, which segued into an eloquent senior from Williams College who discussed listening to those who disagree with you and finally, a powerful but incredibly uncomfortable talk on the truth about unwanted sexual arousal. The TED audience then got intellectual whiplash in one session listening to a government official (and expert on pandemic influenza) talking about “rock snot” and a biomedical engineer who designs “soft robots”. Over another 2 hours, we heard about a “libertarian utopia” for general AI, ending the injustice of the criminal bail system, switched gears to a physicist who has analyzed 75 potential causes of Fermi’s Paradox and rounded out with the CEO of an electric airplane start-up. An exhilarating update on a nonprofit dedicated to reducing obesity in African-American women shared a session with a talk on smart, web-connected sex toys and another on how to avoid “creeping sameness” as we design cities for re-urbanization. In one session, TED turned its oratorial firehose on its attendees as a dying Jewish humorist was followed by a gifted high school senior talking about artificial intelligence and an author posing the question: “Can we escape biology?” (the answer depends on if you are a “Wizard” or a “Prophet”). Another session bounced between a delightful talk on the courage and creativity needed to structurally design more inspiring bridges, an analytical chemist who believes that “molecules are storytellers”, an earth-shattering new technology called “biological teleportation” that allows for personalized therapies to be printed at a patient’s bedside and, lastly, a venture capitalist who was born in Korea, raised in Argentina and now invests in female-led cleantech companies.
Oh…and a Tesla on its way to Mars.
TED 2018 HIGHLIGHTS
Below are my top 10 (ok, 18) main stage talks from this year’s TED. Check back to the blog as I update the links when TED makes talks available online.
Diane Wolk-Rogers — A Parkland Teacher’s Homework for Us All. A powerhouse talk by an extraordinarily brave humanities teacher from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School who led kids to safety during one of the worst mass shootings in American history. Diane brilliantly constructed her talk as a history lesson, methodically walking us through the origins of the 2nd Amendment and the NRA and giving the audience a multiple choice test on gun control. Like all great TED talks, this delivers knowledge, deep emotion and a specific call to action.
Steven Pinker — Is the World Getting Better or Worse? A Look at the Numbers. When Bill Gates announces that an author has written “my new favorite book of all time”, expectations for their TED talk can run a little high. Harvard psychologist Steve Pinker did not disappoint. He distilled 576 dense pages down to 18 engaging, optimistic but controversial minutes. The talk is designed to persuade us that our cognitive biases (availability heuristic) and the nature of news (“if it bleeds, it leads”) have tricked us into thinking that we are living in the most violent, least democratic, most unequal and darkest time in human history. In fact, the data shows the exact opposite.
Criticisms of Pinker’s well-researched book abound and, to TED’s credit, they devoted an additional 90 minutes of TED 2018 to confronting Pinker with counterarguments and allowing him to respond. At the core, the debate isn’t with the data, but rather how to respond. His most vocal critics say, “stop telling everyone the world is getting better…or else they will become complacent and fatalistic!” Pinker (and Gates) argue back, “if you take a science-based approach, this data should only make you work harder/fund more experiments to better the human condition because we’ve proven that our efforts work!” This debate rages on…
Mark Pollock & Simone George — A Love Letter to Realism. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house by the time this extraordinary couple finished their inspiring talk. The next time you hear someone say, “I want to, but it’s too hard”, tell them about Mark Pollock. The first blind person to race to the South Pole and now leading a scientific campaign to cure paralysis (including his own), Mark is the very definition of courage. As we learn during these intense 18 minutes, the source of Mark’s courage is his fiancé, human rights lawyer Simone George, who has been the catalyst of Mark’s healing and the paralysis work. Watch this talk holding hands with someone you love.
Nora Atkinson — Why Art Thrives at Burning Man. Accompanied by stunning photography, this “craft curator” takes us on a creative tour of Burning Man, the renowned city/festival/community event. Set against the backdrop of the Nevada desert, Burning Man (and Nora) encourage us to redefine the value of art by the connection it creates between people, rather than its price. She celebrates the value of large-scale physical construction in the digital age and the benefit of unprecedented collaboration needed to make seemingly “useless” things.
Dylan Marron — How I Turn Negative Online Comments into Positive Offline Conversations. This award-winning writer, performer, video artist and podcast host (“Conversations with People Who Hate Me”) turns the tables on cyber-bullying by humanizing his tormentors. By cutting through the anonymity that enables online expressions of hatred, Dylan exposes there is far more that unites us than divides us. In this funny and poignant talk, he reminds us that we can learn valuable lessons from those with whom we disagree.
Oskar Eustis — Why Theater is Essential to Democracy. An inspiring and high-energy talk by the director of the legendary Public Theater in New York City, Oskar uses the history of the Public to remind us that empathy is at the core of drama and therefore a prerequisite for a democratic society. As one of the early supporters of Hamilton, Oskar has a unique perspective on both the theoretical and commercial aspects of the cultural zeitgeist.
Hugh Herr — How We’ll Become Cyborgs and Extend Human Potential. In a follow-up to his breathtaking 2014 TED talk (which is one of my top 10 favorite TED talks of all time), Hugh updates us on the amazing advances in biohybrid smart prostheses and exoskeletons that perform miracles in rehabilitating people from devastating injuries. Hugh (who lost his own biological legs early in life) runs the biomechatronics group at the MIT Media Lab that is pushing the boundaries on “neuro-embodied design” where we can now extend the human nervous system into the synthetic world.
What does this mean? Prosthetic knees can sense joint position and load bearing and artificial ankle-foot combinations emulate the action of a leg to create a natural gait, allowing amputees to walk with normal levels of speed as if their legs were biological! As he did in 2014, Hugh masterfully personalizes this discovery through the rehabilitation of his friend who lost his legs in a climbing accident. Hugh is yet another example of the magic that occurs at the intersection of disciplines: his group fuses biology, mechanical engineering, microprocessors and software to create enhanced quality of life!
Jason B. Rosenthal — The Journey Through Loss and Grief. In his first public appearance since the heart-wrenching essay “You May Want to Marry My Husband” was published by Jason Rosenthal’s terminally ill wife (the late children’s book author and TEDx organizer/speaker Amy Krouse Rosenthal), this Chicago attorney and father of three was the picture of resiliency on the TED stage. With his daughter sitting in the TED audience listening to her dad’s talk for the first time, Jason bravely let us into his new career of activism as a way of filling the “blank space” left by his wife’s passing.
Frances Frei — How To Build (and Rebuild) Trust. A Harvard Business School professor and former head of leadership and strategy at Uber, Frances had a front row seat for the meltdown and current revival of culture at one of America’s great technology success stories. Her thoughts on how leaders develop trust were instructive and her ability to uniquely connect with an audience was inspiring. A funny, insightful and stimulating lesson on great leadership delivered by my favorite kind of TED speaker: a humble but brilliant expert!
Simone Giertz — Why You Should Make Useless Things. An endearing and funny companion talk to Nora Atkinson’s Burning Man talk above, YouTube star Simone Giertz charmed the TED audience with her nonsensical designs as the manifestation of a wickedly creative mind. Simone’s talk reminds us that: a) there can be expressions of joy and humility even in engineering, b) over-achievers can overcome their performance anxiety by re-defining the stakes of the game they are trying to win and c) while genius can’t be taught, courage can be and the will to choose self-mastery over safety is powerful.
Kai-Fu Lee — How AI Can Save Our Humanity. By all measures, Kai-Fu Lee is at the top of his field. He runs a $2+ billion Chinese venture capital firm, leveraged a successful career at Apple, Microsoft and Google to author 10 patents and 7 best-selling books, has 50 million followers on social media and was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME Magazine. So why is Kai-Fu worried? He fears that in our race to develop the next generation of computing, we may forget that our humanity and compassion is what differentiates us from the artificial intelligence power we seek to harness. By sharing his deeply personal struggles (stage 4 lymphoma, workaholism), he brings the TED audience on a journey to a map of future jobs and how AI will coexist, usurp or be tamed by them. (Note: Kai-Fu told us that China is going to kick the USA’s butt in AI).
Gary Liu — The Chinese Century. The CEO of the South China Morning Post and former head of both Digg and Spotify Labs (another “AND” person) takes us on a fascinating tour of the Chinese economy. While the staggering size, scale and scope of China are well-known, Gary brings this into sharp relief (each year trains transport 390 million Chinese travelers during Chinese New Year) and balances it with the many challenges (censorship, restriction and manipulation of the Chinese internet, demographic shifts leaving behind hollowed out rural communities) and creative experiments being used to solve them (TaoBao villages, Sunshine Classroom, etc).
Emily Levine — How I made Friends With Reality. This philosopher, humorist and long-time TED speaker shares a “goodbye love letter” to TED in this funny and heartfelt talk. Emily’s humorous and heartfelt embrace of life and willingness to accept death was provocative. Emily riffs on science and the human condition in a way that one TED attendee called her “the Jewish Anne Lamott” (Anne’s talk was one of the highlights of TED 2017).
Ingrid Fetell Lee — Where Joy Hides & How to Find It. The best of several talks at TED 2018 on how to design cities/homes/public spaces to maximize happiness, Ingrid weaves architecture, neuroscience, industrial design and visual arts into a compelling narrative about the “aesthetics of joy”. Set against the backdrop of gorgeous photography, the talk reminds us that the quality of one’s environment can influence prosperity, sustainability and social mobility. Vishaan Chakrabarti and Renzo Piano also imbued TED 2018 with the power of joyous design.
Reed Hastings — Binge Watching. A fascinating and wide-ranging fireside chat with the co-founder of Netflix who covered topics such as user ratings (Netflix eliminated them because they discovered people rate aspirationally but watch honestly), binge watching (inspired by how people behaved with DVD box sets long before streaming was feasible), the difference between a curated service (Netflix) and a video platform (Facebook), the Netflix corporate culture (“I can go months without having to make a decision” and “If you dummy-proof a system, eventually only dummies will want to work there”) and his own philanthropy (supporting charter schools such as KIPP).
Jaron Lanier — How We Need to Remake the Internet. This one sneaks up on you. Polymath, computer scientist and “father of virtual reality” Jaron Lanier delivers a mellow, laconic, casual-sounding talk that seems at first like a wistful view of technology’s promise, but after watching it, you realize you have been hit right between the eyes with an extremely controversial call to action. Jaron’s proposal (replace the free, but ad-supported model of internet communication with a paid user model) attacks the very heart of the two largest “behavior modification empires” (Facebook and Google), and many in Vancouver felt that we are at risk of irreparably fracturing our society unless they change their business models.
Alex Honnold — How I Climbed a 3,000 Foot Vertical Cliff — Without Ropes. A companion to Chris Hadfield’s 2014 TED talk where he reminded us that fear ≠ danger, even though we treat them the same in our heads. Most TED attendees believed that world-class outdoor athlete Alex Honnold’s “free” (as in no ropes!) solo climb of El Capitan (the first person in history to do so) is downright dangerous, but Alex argued that achieving mastery through unimaginably intense preparation reduced the risk in his audacious ascent dramatically. One thing is for sure, listening to Alex describe how he memorized every inch of the 3,000 foot high wall and then climbed by rote was inspiring but almost too much to watch!
Robin Steinberg — What if We Ended the Injustice of Bail. An eloquent demonstration of pure activism by a senior fellow at the UCLA Law Criminal Justice Program, this talk educated us that on any given night in the US, half a million people languish in prison without being convicted of a crime simply because they cannot afford or even finance bail. Robin proposes setting up a revolving charitable fund to cover bail for those who have been statistically determined to be good credit and conviction risks. As Mickey Hochstein reminded me, this idea is seemingly lifted whole from the pages of Jewish history, known as the Free-Loan Society, which has existed for centuries in Jewish communities worldwide and are designed to help people cope with sudden financial needs. Robin’s solution, which would enable the lending fund to be repaid once a trial starts, limits the amount of pure donations to be raised as new bails could be financed as old ones are returned.
BONUS CELEBRITY TALK
Tracee Ellis Ross — A Woman’s Fury Holds Lifetimes of Wisdom. This was a controversial choice. This Emmy-nominated star of “Black-ish”, performance artist, motivational speaker (and Diana Ross’s daughter) caused a stir at TED. The debate was launched not because Tracee tackled the endemic trend of sexual abuse/assault and workplace harassment on behalf of the related #MeToo movement, but rather because many audience members felt that she unfairly indicted all males as lacking self-awareness, boundaries and respect.
TED FELLOWS HIGHLIGHTS
The TED Fellows is my favorite part of attending TED. Each year, 20–40 young, exuberant rising stars (out of 1,000 applicants) who are deeply committed to their field are chosen to give 5 minute TED talk, receive support including professional coaching and mentoring, public relations resources and annual retreats with their colleagues. A decade old, the TED Fellows program now has 453 members from 96 countries, many of whom have gone on to achieve great things after being launched from the TED cannon. More than just a feeder system for future TED speakers, the Fellows is pure, unpolished talent and a group of people likely to change the world.
My favorite Fellows talks at TED 2018 were:
Essam Daod — A Mental Health Lifeguard. Essam took everyone’s breath away in his telling of story that played out in 2015 of a 5 year old boy on a beach in Greece. He is a volunteer doctor who founded Humanity Crew to provide psychosocial support to refugees and displaced persons who endure trauma in their harrowing attempts to escape authoritarian regimes. Essam and his team are dedicated to being mental health “first responders” along with the typical medical and humanitarian aid delivered by the Red Cross. They believe that a positive mental health intervention during the “Golden Hour” immediately following a trauma can reframe narratives, stimulating good memories in the amygdala and reducing the incidence of PTSD.
Paul Rucker — Teaching Racist History. Paul gave the TED audience a powerful one-two punch by performing an exceptional cello composition that was a mashup of Bach’s №1 in G Major and hip-hop samples AND a thought-provoking talk on the visual art of the American slavery and post-slavery eras. Paul collects artifacts from America’s darkest hours and designs and manufactures KKK robes in subversive patterns (African kente cloth, camouflage, etc) to both illustrate the racism that still exists in our society and celebrate that these historical instruments of oppression no longer have control over African Americans.
Romain Lacombe — Waze for Air Quality. A French environmental entrepreneur shared the breakthrough technology that his startup (Plume Labs) developed to bring transparency and empowerment to the issue of air quality. Plume helps citizens measure, track, map and forecast the quality of the air they breathe. By crowdsourcing data from wearable sensors, Plume helps people move beyond average readings to micro-geographic changes and take action to reduce pollution where they live.
Faith Osier — A Malaria Vaccine on a Chip. Faith is a Kenyan infectious disease doctor using computer science and her discipline of immunology to find a cure for Malaria, which kills hundreds of thousands of children in Africa each year. She is applying advanced technology to determine which proteins produce antibodies that eliminate malarial infections. Like all great TED speakers, she recognizes that a solution to her cause will only be found via cross-discipline and cross-cultural collaboration. To that end, Faith is working as at a university hospital in Germany AND runs an antigen research partnership that enables scientists across Africa to pool their knowledge.
Mikhail Zygar — Alternative History. Mikhail, a Russian journalist and historian, has created digital documentaries and web tools that use major historical events (the 1917 Russian Revolution, the 1968 US turmoil) to contextualize modern-day events. Project 1917, a brilliantly constructed social media feed of events as they played out during the revolution, asks “What if Twitter had existed 50 or 100 years ago?” Part of the answer yielded by the research is that Russia could have developed into a Democratic system (it was the first country to give women voting rights and abolish the death penalty). Even more striking are the portrayals of 1968 events (Vietnam escalation, MLK assassination, etc) as a barrage of text messages, lock screen notifications, iPhone calls from the White House, etc.
DeAndrea Salvador — Energy Activism. DeAndrea is working to lower energy costs for low-income families via her leadership of a nonprofit that advocates for renewable energy policies that have as much local and socioeconomic parity as solar and wind have cost parity with fossil fuels. She also is a board member of a prominent youth empowerment group, serves on her county’s air quality commission and plans to run for higher political office soon. Oh, by the way…DeAndrea is 27 years old. Watch this space!
Isadora Kosofsky — Tales of a Teenage Photojournalist. What were you doing when you were 14 years old? Isadora started a career as a professional photographer and filmmaker then. By the ripe age of 16, she became the youngest journalist ever to work in a prison (in Romania, no less). Unlike most of her colleagues, Isadora takes an immersive approach to her work, spending weeks and months living with her subjects, becoming embedded in their lives and able to capture intimate moments. In her talk, she displayed arresting photos that were the result of following several elderly people for 4 years, capturing a complex senior love triangle. Now 24 years old, Isadora’s work has appeared in nearly every major periodical in the world, is in the permanent collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and she has received awards too numerous to count, including grants from the Pulitzer and Getty foundations. Isadora reminds us that starting early in life matters.
MUSIC @ TED
TED has always been a showcase for emerging, unorthodox and outstanding musical talent and 2018 was no exception.
Camille A. Brown — Choreographer and educator and TED fellow put on an exceptional New Orleans-based dance routine as a follow up to her 2016 talk.
Bill “Blinky Bill” Sellanga — Kenyan musician, producer and DJ makes experimental, genre-bending music while addressing political themes and giving voice to Kenyan youth. After knocking over the TED Fellows audience, he (naturally) DJ’d the blowout final night of TED farewell party.
The Soul Rebels — The TED audience was treated to a phenomenal melange of New Orleans brass tradition, funk, soul, hip-hop and jazz.
Luke Sital-Singh — This British singer-songwriter mesmerized TEDsters with his soulful voice and even brought TED curator Chris Anderson to tears with an amazing song called “Killing Me”; a gorgeous composition about how his grandmother had to learn to live without her soulmate husband while being joyful about her remaining family.
LADAMA — A high-energy ensemble of Latin American female musicians singing original compositions in Spanish, Portuguese and English.
Elise LeGrow — This deeply soulful Canadian singer re-interprets classic R&B songs from the Chess Records cannon and gave a powerhouse performance at TED 2018. Do yourself a favor and listen to her new album, “Playing Chess”
A Tribe Called Red — This DJ Collective, comprised of native Canadians from the “First Nations” tribes. In a stunning and hypnotic performance, they paid tribute to indigenous North American people.
TITLE PORN
As always, during a week at TED, you come across a fascinating array of labels for how people have chosen to devote their brain power/energy. Below are a sampling of the more intriguing titles I saw walking the halls in Vancouver. Show this list to your kids when you ask them “What do you want to be when you grow up?” By the way, these are all wildly successful people.
ONLY AT TED MOMENTS
…with input from my fellow TED attendees Brian and Mickey…
- Attending a “Jeffersonian Dinner” on the future of college. A group of 20 university deans, experts on student financial aid, heads of corporate training programs, former CEOs, the leader of Stanford’s philanthropy lab, the founder of the world’s largest expert network, an advisor to the Hult Prize (the “Nobel Prize for students”), an executive coach, the former Chief Innovation Officer at Northwestern University…and me…discussed how to fix a system that rivals health care in terms of dysfunctionality, lack of market incentives, runaway inflation and as a cause of future financial peril. While we generated no silver bullets, the consensus was that a solution starts with disaggregating that which our society has conflated. We have commingled four very different needs into a rigid, debilitatingly expensive product that is no longer meeting the needs of its stakeholders: 1) skill acquisition, 2) credentialing (signaling device), 3) social maturity, personal development, coaching and mentorship and 4) a lifetime employability insurance policy. Each of these needs could be separately incented, funded, structured, measured, governed and held accountable. More to come on this topic…
- Brian, sitting on a beanbag having a paper plate dinner with Monica Lewinsky and discussing her status as “Patient Zero for Online Bullying”
- Enthralled by a fireside chat with Ray Kurzweil discussing the coming singularity. Ray put all the amazing technologies at TED in context. Ray reminded us of the lack of emphasis at TED on the implicit dangers. As Mickey eloquently puts it, “We heard that AI will surpass us, and may well render us redundant, and perhaps even see fit to eliminate us. Improving, enhancing, and synthesizing DNA already produces living simple organisms and the path to synthesizing living beings is clearly mapped out. TED made it clear to me that we are not dealing with these threats and probably wouldn’t know how to even if we tried. We are like children playing with fire, mesmerized, hypnotized, by its beauty, blithely disregarding its power and dangers. We live in the contradiction of admiring our success and ignoring the threats.”
- Making music using household objects with the band OK GO. This creative and charitable group of musicians (who brought down the house in their talk at TED 2017) conducted an orchestra of TEDsters in a workshop designed to illustrate their impressive educational work with Sandbox, an online resource for educators.
- More excited to meet the inventor of the Emoji than many of the celebrities at TED
- Late night in the TED Donors Lounge listening to Jaron Lanier hold forth on the history of the Internet and play ancient Laotian musical instruments
- Parkland student and gun control activist Emma Gonzalez skyping in to TED for an interview with her teacher/TED speaker Diane Wolk-Rogers
- Celebrating Shabbat with 100+ fellow TEDsters in a joyous and fascinating dinner that turned into an inspiring discussion on seeing the topics covered at TED through a Jewish lens. Organized by one of Starbucks’ earliest investors and the current head of the Anti-Defamation League, Shabbat @ TED was a phenomenal collision of 2 of my worlds.
- Watching rappelling dancers and custom-ordered fireworks over Vancouver Harbor at the opening night TED party
- The dance floor at the closing TED party packed with speakers from the week, many of whom spoke about deep personal tragedy, reminding us that a community of fellow travelers can help ease pain and to be grateful for the small pleasures in life.
UNTIL NEXT YEAR…
