“I twerk to own my power, to reclaim my Blackness, my culture,” says Lizzo in a powerful, delightful talk at TEDMonterey: The Case for Optimism on August 3, 2021. (Photo: Bret Hartman / TED)

We’re all looking for ways to become better, smarter and wiser versions of ourselves. In a spectacularly eclectic Session 7, six speakers share their hard-won wisdom on educating, listening — and even twerking — their way towards a more inclusive world, where everyone has the opportunity to thrive.

The event: TEDMonterey: Session 7, hosted by TED’s Helen Walters on Tuesday, August 3, 2021

Speakers: Adrian K. Haugabrook, Katherine Maher, Hrishikesh Hirway, Steven Johnson, Pardis Parker, Lizzo

Adrian K. Haugabrook, higher education executive

Big idea: It’s possible to bring down the barriers higher education upholds and create an environment where anyone can earn a degree with intention and accessibility in mind.

How? The majority of higher education functions like a fortress with high walls — like costs, proximity and excess of time — that students are expected to surmount in order to graduate. This often makes the opportunity accessible to the privileged few. Haugabrook has devoted his entire career to breaking down those obstacles and has identified three approaches to reimagine and redesign the process: in time, place and teaching. He suggests institutions offer academic credit for skills and life experience, attained in work or otherwise, assessed by a university evaluator; that we tap into the potential of local communities as a thriving part of the learning ecosystem; and that universities not mess with the magic of teaching, but make it more accessible by embracing and scaling for online learning. By redefining success and dedication in higher learning, Haugabrook calls for universities, companies and governments to invest deeply in a superhighway of education that allows for fluidity and transferability beyond borders and boundaries — where all roads lead to a degree.

“The seeds of our agreement can become the roots of our common purpose,” says Katherine Maher at TEDMonterey: The Case for Optimism on August 3, 2021. (Ryan Lash / TED)

Katherine Maher, strategist, technologist and policy expert

Big Idea: How can we have productive conversation around disagreement and decision-making without making one shared truth our baseline? Use the Wikipedia model.

How? Wikipedia was (and still is) a radical experiment in self-governance, volunteerism and engrained transparency — and that is what uniquely prepares it for the changing world, says Maher. As the internet’s de-facto encyclopedia, it harbors information on everything from light, niche topics (animals with fraudulent degrees) to weightier, more divisive matters (like religion and politics). The secret is that those who write the articles aren’t focused on the truth or even seeing eye-to-eye, but on collective understanding rather than value, identity and what we believe versus what can be known. What gets messy in everyday conversations is that people often merge facts about the world with their own beliefs. Our reverence for the truth — not to be misconstrued, Maher clarifies that truth does exist and is important — might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and taking action on issues like climate change. So, how do we unite minds and disparate views? Instead of seeking one key truth, we must shift to a minimum viable truth. This means getting it right enough, enough of the time to be useful enough to enough people — while setting aside our own belief systems and dropping perfectionism. Only through collaboration, productive friction, consulting widely and inclusively and weighing difficult decisions with candor (and a large helping of humility) can we create systems that endure and build trust to weather uncertainty.

“Every conversation you have with someone has the potential to open up and reveal layers and layers inside, all those rooms within rooms,” says Hrishikesh Hirway at TEDMonterey: The Case for Optimism on August 3, 2021. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Hrishikesh Hirway, musician, podcast creator

Big idea: If you want to go deeper in your conversations, listen to others like you’d listen to a song.

How? ​​Hrishikesh Hirway is interested in what you miss when you listen to a song for the first time. You might notice the bass part or the lyrics or the cello solo, but what you don’t hear, he says, are all the things the musician lived through to get that music to exist. He compares the experience to staring at a house from the outside. Hirway hosts the podcast (and Netflix series) Song Exploder. On his show, he gets musicians like Fleetwood Mac, The Roots, Billie Eilish, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Yo-Yo Ma to talk about their work and guide listeners through the hidden layers and depths in their songs. While having these conversations, Hirway realized that if he listened to people like he listened to songs, he could get “inside the house.” He could explore hidden rooms of thought and experience the richness of another person’s ideas. If you want to try his technique, here’s what he suggests: Be open to learning something new; Quit multitasking; and use non-verbal communication to let the other person know you’re engaged without shifting the focus away from them and onto yourself.

Steven Johnson, author

Big idea: Life expectancy at birth has doubled in the last century, from a global average of 35 years old in 1921 to 70 years today, thanks to scientific advances and policies set in place to protect human health — but these benefits need to be distributed equally.

How? Throughout most of human history, life was short and Steven Johnson explores the policies and advances that have changed that. One of the simplest but most effective advancements being the pasteurization of milk which helped slash childhood mortality (due to contamination) rates in the mid 19th century. But science cannot drive change by itself. It took 50 years for pasteurization to become the standard in the American food supply. Johnson explains that when looking at our track record of life-lengthening advancements, it usually takes them a while to become mainstream. He reminds us that, somewhat counter-intuitively, change is often driven by large bureaucratic regulatory institutions like the FDA requiring proof of safety and efficacy in our new technology. As scientists push the boundaries of longevity, at a rate where the hype sometimes outstrips reality, Johnson wonders how we can ensure the benefits of technology are equally distributed. He calls for regulations of the future to close the gaps that keep the entirety of humanity from enjoying the revolutionary advances in human health.

Pardis Parker dispels the myth of “grinding” to be successful in his comedic set at TEDMontereyv on August 3, 2021. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Comedian Pardis Parker delivers an uproarious standup set centered on a problem he has with a central tenet of modern culture: the “grind”. While our mythologies focus on the shining chimera of endless wealth, little love goes to those for whom life is nasty, brutish and short, who never get to taste the rewards of leisure. In this sardonic but funny talk, Pardis dissects the ugly truths lying beneath the facade of conspicuous consumption (and the assumptions that lie beneath them) — and exposes the absurdity of some of our foundational beliefs.

Lizzo, singer, rapper, songwriter, flutist

Big idea: Twerking is more than just a dance — it’s unique to the Black experience. Understanding its roots helps safeguard Black culture against erasure.

How? “Twerking is good for humanity,” says superstar Lizzo. Tracing its roots to a traditional West African dance called mapouka, she introduces the TED audience to twerking’s long and lesser known history. Women would circle their hips and pop their behinds in a dance of religious worship, joyful celebration — or even to show interest in marriage. Through time and across the transatlantic slave trade, Black women passed twerking down to the next generation, where the moves permeated Black culture from blues and jazz to modern rap and hip-hop. Twerking found its way to the likes of famed blues singers Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith and became a cultural moment when Beyoncé debuted “The Uh Oh” dance for her 2003 single “Crazy in Love.” Nowadays, twerking is everywhere, and it’s at risk of being co-opted, appropriated and misunderstood, Lizzo says. So, if you’re going to partake, it’s important you understand its origins, development and contribution to Black culture before you shake that ass.

Elizabeth Pisani. Photo: Bret Hartman

The future. When it comes down to it, it’s not about flying cars, flashy robots, jetpacks, or awesome sunglasses. It’s about the little things we can do to advance healthcare, better education, create opportunities, improve connections between each other, and make lives just a little bit easier. In this session, we’ve invited some classic speakers back to share what’s happened to their idea since they first shared it with the world.

Below, read a detailed recap of each talk given in this session:

Stanley McChrystal is the military leader who asked us to “Listen, learn … then lead” at TED2011. He’s here today to talk about the massive information leak that took place in the summer of 2010. “One of the first questions we asked was, ‘Why would a young soldier have that much access to sensitive things?’” See, the military has long survived on secrecy, says McChrystal in a lyrical talk. “We bled, we died and we killed to stop Al Qaeda’s violence that they were putting largely against the Iraqi people,” he says. “We relied on our gut and one of the things in our DNA was secrecy. We protected information and only gave it to people who had a demonstrated ‘need to know.’” But then, in Iraq, the decision was made to declassify enemy personnel records. “As we passed that information around, I realized that information is only of value if it’s given to the people with the ability to do something about it.” This experience forever changed McChrystal’s view on secrecy — he now full-heartedly believes in transparency. “It changed my idea of information from ‘knowledge is power’ to ‘sharing is power.’ I am more scared of the bureaucrat who holds information in a desk drawer than the person who leaks.”

Philosopher and cognitive scientist Dan Dennett has a plan. A Plan C, to be specific. Inspired by Danny Hillis’ Plan B for the Internet, Dennett believes that, in the case of a total Internet failure, we’d need more – we’d need someone and something to keep the panic at bay for that tumultuous first 48 hours. In short, we’d need human and structural lifeboats. One in every hundred Americans, he proposed, can serve as a local lifeboat to carry us to safety in the event of this potential disaster.

Susan Cain, the speaker behind “The power of introverts,” starts with an exercise: She asks the audience to split in groups of four and share private childhood experiences. Luckily she’s just kidding. “This is how so many introverts feel about the team-building exercises we’re endlessly asked to participate in,” she says. Cain expected to go back to writing books after her TED Talk, but says that the huge reaction from her talk led her to, instead, form a company dedicated to empowering introverts. She shares how she is partnering with Steelcase to bring private, quiet spaces back to offices; to help train a generation of quiet leaders; and to raise awareness in schools that not every student excels under pressure to participate in class and take part on group projects. (Read much more about Susan Cain’s quiet revolution.)

We’ve been on a global search for low-cost labor, says roboticist Rodney Brooks. We may be able to find what we’ve been looking for in robots, but the trouble is, most robots are incredibly complicated to use. At last year’s TED, Brooks introduced Baxter, the user-friendly robot, who’s been an enormously popular member of his Pennsylvania factory – because he’s willing to take all the horrible tasks no one else wants to do.) In the future, says Brooks, these robots will be the key to our entire economy. They’re far from perfect now, but nor do they need to be: If they could achieve the object recognition of a two-year-old, the speech recognition of a four-year-old, the manual dexterity of a six-year-old and the social understanding of an eight-year-old, robots could truly become our partners in production, and we could reach a very different structure of manufacturing on a massive scale.

Elizabeth Pisani asked us to get rational on “Sex, drugs and HIV” at TED2010. “I don’t think only about sex,” says Pisani. “For the last few years I’ve mainly been telling lies.” Pisani tells the story of doing research in rural Indonesia and how she found herself making up a fictional husband and two children in order to forge a connection with the people she met. The lie eventually ended up in a newspaper photo caption. Pisani tells us this because, she says, the nation of Indonesia itself has been telling a lie. Under the military rule of General Suharto a million Indonesians were slaughtered. “The national lie was that all of the killing was a noble and necessary act of anti-communism,” says Pisani. Indonesia, she believes, is not quite ready to admit that this was a lie. Because, as her fictional family helped her research, the lies worked. “Families of the killers, and the killed, have been able to live perfectly happily for at least 50 years,” she says. “Indonesians are not ready to give up the fiction that there was nothing to apologize for.”

Michael Shermer, professional skeptic, stepped onto the TED stage brimming with good news: We are living in the most moral time in our species’ epic. Slavery is illegal in every country on Earth, and he believes that by 2030 it may be eliminated in practice. Electoral democracy covers the planet as never before, claiming a full 60 percent of countries by this January. Importantly, our sphere of morality has expanded greatly – rights movements for women and minorities have taken hold and aren’t letting go. And science dominates our thinking, despite the persistence of some dogmatic thinking. These days, said Shermer, you have to have reasons for your moral beliefs, you can’t just assert them. And more is coming: “I found biblical support for both gay marriage and pot legalization: ‘If a man lies with another man, he must be stoned,’” he joked. All in all, he’s feeling very optimistic on how science and reason have bent the moral arc of the universe to truth, justice and freedom.

Jimmy Wales. Photo: Bret Hartman

Jimmy Wales is the technologist behind Wikipedia, which today gets 532 million visitors a month. “I thought it was interesting that Stanley McChrystal said that sharing knowledge is power,” says Wales. “Perhaps my army of Wikipedians is the most powerful army in the world.” Wales says we all know that mobile is the next big thing in technology, but he says people in this industry greatly underestimate how quickly this is happening. Smartphone costs are coming down, and within five years, says Wales, hundreds of millions of people in Africa will have smartphones. “They’re going on Google, Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia,” says Wales. And that’s why he is creating Wikipedia Zero. “We’re working with mobile carriers to bring Wikipedia to people free of data charges,” he says to loud applause. (And stay tuned to the TED Blog for more on Wales’ other new project: The People’s Operator.)

The World Peace Game poses 50 of the world’s thorniest problems to a group of state officials gathered in the US Defense Council … as role-played by a group of John Hunter’s nine-year-old students. It may have only been a game, but the students left Pentagon officials totally floored. His students, Hunter shared, studied hard and debated earnestly, even coming to conclusions about action against climate change – plant a billion trees in every country and construct hydrogen fuel cells – impressing US Army General Martin Dempsey. Each student earned a coin of honor and all were invited back to the Pentagon. Education like this, Hunter said, allows children to consider the future truly theirs. Pentagon officials wholeheartedly agreed.

Helen Fisher, the biological anthropologist who gave the talk “Why we love, why we cheat” at TED2006, was recently traveling in New Guinea with a man who had three wives. “I asked him how many wives he would like to have,” says Fisher. “He said ‘none.’” She tells this anecdote because, while many societies allow a man to have more than one wife, human beings for the most part tend toward monogamy, seeking out pair bonds. “Marriage has changed more in the last 100 years than in the last 10,000,” says Fisher. She notes that we’ve returned to a time, like in agricultural and hunter gatherer societies, where women as as socially and economically powerful as men. Not only are we marrying more for love, but in a survey Fisher conducted, 81 percent of people said they’d marry the person they married again. Women are embracing their sexuality and men are showing their romanticism. “Any forecast of the future of relationships must take into account: the indomitable, unquestionable and primordial human drive to love,” she says.

For nearly all of history, astrophysicist Lord Martin Rees begins, threats have come from nature. Now the danger comes from us. Yet we seem to totally misunderstand the nature of that danger: We worry about minor risks like airplane crashes and carcinogens in our food, but we worry far too little about the many catastrophes that could occur on a global scale. Not only nuclear warfare, but robots going rogue, worldwide panic spread through social media, and release of deadly pathogens are all real threats — and someone has to worry about them. “The global village has its village idiots, and they have a global range,” he warned. To be sure, the end of humanity wouldn’t be the end of everything. “As an astronomer,” he said, “I can’t believe that humans are the end of the story.”  But just in case, he and his colleagues at Cambridge University have set up a center specifically to deal with giant problems.

Steven Johnson, who showed us “Where good ideas come from” at TEDGlobal 2010, is here to show us one of the great artifacts of our time. It’s the first audio recording, made in 1860, on a device called the Phonautograph, about 20 years before Edison started on the phonograph. So how have you never heard of its creator, Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville? Because he never created a playback device for his recording. It wasn’t that he never developed it — he simply never thought of it. His idea was for the sound to be stored as etchings, and to become a kind of quick transcription system. “I think there’s an important lesson here,” says Johnson. “When we study the history of innovation, we so often focus on the breakthroughs and successes. But it’s as often defined by blind spots — the things that weren’t in the field of vision.” He encourages us all to think about the question: What are we not thinking about?

Sir Ken Robinson. Photo: Ryan Lash

In a Q&A between session host Helen Walters and “the all-star of all-stars” Sir Ken Robinson, he has the audience in stitches by the first sentence. Through the tears of laughter from the crowd, he manages to mention the progress he has seen in schools all over. School districts, individual teachers, homeschoolers responded to his talk so strongly, says Robinson, that it signals that people really do want a major upheaval to our education paradigms. He tells the story of a slaughterhouse he visited when he was younger, where there was a veterinarian’s office which would perform autopsies every once in a while. “Isn’t it a bit late?” Robinson joked. But the larger point is: If you build a system designed to crush spirits and dreams: Don’t be surprised if it works. What Robinson has learned is that policy makers and administrators do indeed want to change – but through command and control. An organic education system, says Robinson, is nothing like that. You don’t implement a large change and wait for an outcome to measure success; each individual makes a small shift and effects change. And as Robinson says, “if enough people change their world, we change the world.”
The Q&A ends prematurely for a special surprise guest appearance by TED favorite Amanda Palmer, who sings a song about conformity in kids, in a solemn ode to Robinson: “Here’s to you, Sir Ken Robinson, heaven is a place where people play and spray the walls outside.”

Snow was a 19th-century English doctor who’s credited with proving that cholera, a sometimes deadly infection that attacks the small intestine, spreads through contaminated water — and not by “bad air” as was generally believed at the time.

Steven Johnson: How the "ghost map" helped end a killer disease As described in Steven Johnson’s 2006 TED Talk, “The Ghost Map,” a particularly vicious cholera outbreak in 1854 at a popular water pump in London killed an astonishing 10 percent of the people who lived nearby. Snow created a map showing which people had consumed the water from the pump and whether they had gotten sick. His map helped convince local health authorities that his theory was the correct one, and by the next severe outbreak in 1866 they officially recommended that people boil water before drinking or using it, curbing the spread.

March 15 marks the 200th anniversary of Snow’s birth, which the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and affiliates are celebrating in a series of meetings and exhibits. Our present to Snow? We spoke to author Steven Johnson about the impact the doctor has had on the sustainability of modern cities.

When did you first discover the story of John Snow and his cholera map, and what was your first reaction to it?

I first came to it as an information design story in Edward Tufte’s amazingly beautiful design books, and then I kept encountering it in other fields. I’d be reading about a history of epidemiology and I’d stumble across it, or I’d be reading about the history of disease and would stumble across it. I think that is what makes the story and Snow’s role in it so interesting — the way it connects to so many fields.

What were other characteristics of the story that made you decide to write The Ghost Map?

It turned out to fit my expectations or visions of a beautiful story about the interaction between different scales of experience. It’s a story in some ways about the collusion of bacteria and the flow of water: the clean drinking water, contaminated drinking water, and waste in this huge stinking metropolis — the biggest city the world had seen at that point, with two and a half million people. Between those two scales — basically the smallest form that life takes on the planet and in some ways the largest form, the metropolis — you have this individual who’s trying to make sense of patterns that are happening in the city and trying to connect them to patterns and behavior that is happening on a microscopic scale that he can’t even see. That’s crucial to the story — that he cannot see the bacterium. He has to infer its existence from the patterns he’s detecting in the streets of London.

Once I actually sat down to research it, there were a number of things that I found that surprised me and that had not been in the traditional telling of the story. It’s conventionally told as: Snow made the map, he saw the pattern of death pointing to the pump, and he developed the waterborne theory. But in fact, he’d been working on the waterborne theory for a very long time. The map was a marketing vehicle for his idea.

The other thing was the important role, which is very relevant today, of public data. The city had begun releasing more complex mortality reports a decade before the outbreak, and instead of just listing so-and-so died on this date, they would list so-and-so died of this age, this gender, this disease, this exact address. Whatever data they had, they would release in these reports. The whole premise was: You create more data, you release it to the public, and the city is filled with all these interesting amateurs who don’t work for the government who might detect patterns in it. Snow ended up using a lot of that data, in addition to his on-the-ground detective work to build a map, to build his case for the waterborne theory. It’s very much connected to the kind of open data, transparency argument of today. Snow was doing it without computers, but it’s the same idea. So that was a cool surprise.

Finally, Henry Whitehead, Snow’s collaborator. I mean, almost nobody talks about him, and he was crucial to the story. The more I dug in, the more I realized that Whitehead had done all this work Snow really couldn’t have done, because Snow was not a great social connector. A lot of the investigation needed Whitehead’s social intelligence to track down additional data on people who had left the neighborhood. And there’s an argument that without Whitehead’s contributions, the authorities might not have come around to Snow’s theory. I love that because it’s a great example of multidisciplinary collaboration where you have two very different types of intelligence coming together to solve a problem.

In your TED Talk, you mention that modern, massive cities that exist today wouldn’t be possible without Snow’s contributions to epidemiology. Can you elaborate?

This is why the period is so interesting in a sense. There were all these people looking around London in 1854 and saying: This is not sustainable. Human beings are not meant to live in this state, two and a half million people is just too large for a city to work. And they were right on some level — certain things had to be figured out that hadn’t been yet.

One of the biggest was how to deal with all the human waste that is created with two and a half million people so densely populated. [Snow helped make] it clear that the separating of drinking water and waste was an absolute imperative for the city to grow. Making it clear that that could happen — and conquering cholera within 12 years — is just a staggering achievement. And that became a blueprint for every big city in the world. It enabled us to build cities of 10 million and 20 million people without necessarily having to battle these diseases.

Now, developing-world megacities are trying to figure it out with 25 million people. And we haven’t solved all those problems. But one of the things that is so important about Snow’s achievement is that it wasn’t all that long ago. You look back 160 or 170 years and you can point to how awful London was as a city, and compare it to the amount of progress we’ve made since then, and use it as a kind of inspiration for what we need to do now.

That nicely leads to my next question. What are the main challenges these new megacities face?

The root cause is that the growth in these megacities is coming in areas without traditional infrastructure. When you look at the favelas in São Paulo, you have millions and millions and millions of people without a traditional electric grid, without traditional sewage, in improvised communities. It may be that the way to deal this is to just build infrastructure and support them in a traditional way that we pioneered in the 19th century. Or maybe there are new solutions.

Are there mapping tools that are the modern-day, John Snow/cholera equivalent that are helping solve some of these problems?

There are actually. There are a million examples of things like this, precisely because we now have Google Maps where we can drop datasets and anybody can do new dynamic maps of interesting social problems. There were some great improvised maps that were created after the earthquake and cholera epidemic in Haiti.

You just got back from TED2013 in Long Beach, California. What was the most memorable moment for you?

There was a talk by Alastair Parvin about this kind of open-source Creative Commons kit for building small houses, where two people with a 3D printer can assemble one in 48 hours. It was really cool, and his point was about releasing tools so that anyone can build a structure in those developing world megacities that we are talking about. An overwhelming number of the houses are actually built by members of the community cobbled with existing materials. If you have this kind of technology, it helps produce more reliable housing. And I kind of thought, that is a great. That fits perfectly with the Ghost Map.

Additional reading:

Haven’t had enough John Snow? For more, check out the UCLA Department of Epidemiology’s John Snow archive, which has original writing and images, as well as other treats, or try these books:

The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson

The Strange Case of the Broad Street Pump: John Snow and the Mystery of Cholera by Sandra Hempel

Cholera, Chloroform and the Science of Medicine: A Life of John Snow Peter Vinten-Johansen et al.

Initial reviews for this new tome appear very positive. Publishers Weekly writes, “In the future, progress will not arise primarily out of government directives or policies but out of peer networks. A peer network builds tools that lets a network of neighbors identify problems or unmet needs in a community, while other networks propose and fund solutions to those problems … Stimulating and challenging, Johnson’s thought-provoking ideas steer us steadily into the future.”

Brainpickings.org calls the book “an absorbing, provocative, and unapologetically optimistic vision for the society we have the capacity to build if we use the remarkable tools of our age intelligently and wisely.” And Kirkus Reviews describes the book as a “thought-provoking, hope-inspiring manifesto.”

After the jump, watch three TEDTalks from Johnson.

[ted id=961]

Steven Johnson: Where good ideas come from
While great thinkers often say that they had a light bulb-over-the-head moment, Johnson debunks that mythology, showing that innovations happen within a network of knowledge and that there are patterns underlying idea creation.

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Steven Johnson on the Web as a City
The internet is not a completely new structure. It is built by many, controlled by no one, and deeply interconnected while also functioning as independent parts — in other words, the internet has a lot in common with the structure of a city. In this talk, Johnson ruminates on both the power and fear that happen with density, both online and in our cities.

[ted id=61]

Steven Johnson tours the Ghost Map
What is the Ghost Map, you ask? It’s the charting of how sickness traveled during the cholera outbreak of London in 1854. In this talk, Johnson gives an overview of how the outbreak taught the importance of public health and influenced what our cities look like today.

[ted id=961]

Watch Steven Johnson’s talk on TED.com where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 700+ TEDTalks.

Watch Steven Johnson’s 2003 talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 300+ TEDTalks — including more talks on and about cities.

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Steve begs to differ, and he does this so eloquently, you may just decide to toss the book half way through and go switch on the PlayStation.