Kelly Stencil: Good morning y'all. Good morning everybody. Hi, I am Kelly Stencil.

Kelly Shu: And I am Kelly Shu and we are your hosts for this session, World Class Wonder.

Kelly Stencil: And hey, if y'all are watching in the loop or in Simocast, come on in the theater. We got some seats in here and this is the place to be right now. So Kelly leads YouTube for TED and she just celebrated her first workversary here at TED, right? Go Kelly. Um, I'm a bit more of a veteran of this place. Um, and I I haven't been on staff here for a few years, but I've also kind of never really left at the same time. Um, and you know, being here this week to me just really feels like being home. and Kelly and I got to team up recently and we went on this global search that led to the speakers for this session and we're so excited to share some of the people that we met with y'all today. So, Kelly and I went on a bit of a mission to find these speakers. We put out this global call for applicants and we partnered with nine TEDx teams all over the world. Together, we held these special idea search events in each of these countries to hear from finalists. And in the end, we chose one standout speaker from each city to come here to speak at this session.

Kelly Shu: Yeah. I mean, each place we visited was like a portal into another TED universe. We saw these communities gathering around TED and TEDex, each with distinct culture and speakers with different lenses on how ideas can change their part of the world. And you know, we got to work with the most amazing TEDex teams in every single country that we visited. And then today this session is being live streamed on YouTube. Plus there are watch parties happening right now in Japan, Mexico, Portugal, India, Italy, Taiwan and more. And then also our whole big global TED community is all like so many people watching from their homes today.

Kelly Stencil: Our first speaker comes from our very first event at TEDx Chicago. He's a broadcast journalist and through his work, he's learned a thing or two about how to connect with others. Yes, all others, even during challenging times. So, y'all, let's please give a big giant warm welcome to Joshua Johnson.

Joshua Johnson: Idiots are everywhere. Some people drive you right up the wall with their opinions, their attitudes, their politics. I dealt with all kinds of people in my 20 plus years as a broadcast journalist. Eventually, I found moderating tough conversations with whatever kind of difficult people you just thought of kind of simple to do. Not easy, but simple. The trick is to go somewhere I know you'd rather not be: closer.

Distance makes things worse. I came up in public radio trained by old school journalists who taught me the art of neutrality. You neutralize your opinions, dead in your emotions, and you can get through most conversations without rolling your eyes. But when the subject matter felt personal, neutrality felt phony. I used to host a national talk show on NPR called 1A. And in one of our early programs, I interviewed a descendant of Confederate soldiers. He argued that Confederate monuments should be historically preserved. Now, as a black man, I felt enormous pressure to remain neutral, so I decided I was just going to focus on his arguments instead of on him. His logic felt kind of flimsy, and I called him on it. And eventually he just folded and he said, "It really doesn't matter what I say." And the moment he said that, I knew I had failed. I may have had a point, but I missed a huge opportunity to really do my job. See, my neutrality allowed me to interrogate his beliefs, but the distance prevented me from seeing why he believed them.

What if I had asked better questions? Like, who influenced you the most in forming these views? Or suppose we let all of these monuments and statues stand just as they are. What would that mean to you? Getting his story might have shown me him behind his canned arguments.

When you consider someone problematic, there's a better way to deal with them, keep your sanity, and maybe even connect. And it sounds insane. Move closer. Not to embrace them, but to explore them like a doctor studying a sample. You need a microscope, not a telescope.

I had to shift from neutrality to objectivity. And no, they're not the same. Objectivity is just when you park your emotions and learn without judgment. I don't have to like it. I'm just here to learn from it. Neutrality negates your opinions as if you have no judgments. Does anyone here honestly believe I have no opinions on race right now? Notice I said park your opinions. When you park your car, you don't abandon it in the garage. You're coming back for it. That vulnerability is a sign of openness. And a conversation that's not open is pointless.

Here are three tips to get you started. First, get the story, particularly the key decisions and the turning points. What someone believes is not as important as how they chose to believe it. Second, keep your questions short. 10 seconds tops. And third, use that mental microscope. Look as closely as you can. Remember, you don't have to like it, but learn from it. It is time to reconnect, even to the people you can't stand.

Kelly Shu: Our next speaker comes from our very first event at TEDx Sydney, and let me tell you, the crowd went absolutely wild for this one. Jess is non-verbal and she is just a creative Swiss Army knife and she is working extremely hard to make sure all non-verbal people around the globe are heard. Let's please welcome Jessica Irwin.

Jessica Irwin: Hi, I am Jessica Irwin and I have never spoken a single word in my life. Even to say my name, nor the vital word of stop. Through typing on my communication device, I can express about 25% of what I want to say. The other 75% stays trapped inside my head for only me to hear. This is because I have a level of cerebral pausy that means my mouth muscles simply won't allow me to physically talk. The robotic voice outputs what I'm saying, but it doesn't express my quick wit.

Many non-verbal people spend a lot of time in hospitals. We enter a system that is brilliant at some things but untrained in hearing voices like ours. Imagine lying in a hospital bed with an injured hip and nurse comes up to your bed and goes to roll you straight onto your injured hip. You can't say the single word stop. This is misinterpreted by the nurse as the patient is just fussing. This is not hypothetical. It has been my horrifying reality.

This is why I'm bringing communication training into hospitals. This problem is solvable. All it takes is knowing one simple thing. Assume the patient is intelligent. Ask yes and no questions and ask them to look up for yes and look down for no. Let's try it together. If you're with me, look up for yes. Now look down for no. Awesome. Just like that, without a single spoken word, we've had a conversation.

Cerebral pausy is a brain injury. And when people hear the words brain damage, they automatically jump to intellectual impairment. My case affects movement, not intelligence. Being non-verbal doesn't mean we don't have opinions and knowledge to share. We often get loudly spoken down to and patted on the head. So, here's a tip. Speak to us like you would the person sitting next to you right now. Try humor to see if we laugh. You hold the power to give someone back their voice. My name is Jessica Irwin. I am a photographer, artist, author, keynote speaker and a human being. I am just like you.

Sukiti: Our next speaker, Sukiti, seven minutes, seven outfit changes, and the 4,000 year saga of how Indian fashion shaped world history.

Sukiti: Seven minutes, seven outfit changes, and the 4,000 year saga of how Indian fashion shaped world history. 2000 BC, ancient Egypt. An Egyptian pharaoh reaching for his favorite fit from Gujarat, India. Cloudsoft, colorful, beautifully decorated cotton. Excavation into ancient Egyptian tombs keeps throwing up scraps of Gujarati cotton. 77 AD, ancient Rome. Plenny growlingly calls India the world's gold sink because our cotton is so popular. The Romans have nicknamed this "woven wind".

In 15th century Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, only royalty wears our magnificent silk tie-dye. Move to the Caribbean. You might recognize this as a carnival dress, but it is actually Madras checks from the south Indian town of Madras. The American bandana comes from the Hindi word "bandhana". The dungaree is named for the town of Dongari, which first produced this rough and tough cotton weave. Seersucker literally comes from "milk and sugar" (sir sakar).

Our final fabric is chintz (Kalamkari). By 1680, the British East India Company is sailing home a million pieces of chintz every year. British Parliament is horrified. Britain asks: What would it take for Britain to make these Indian fabrics? The first products of the British industrial revolution were not cars, not weapons. Spinning jenny, power loom. What took Indian hands 50,000 hours was made by British machines in 2000.

India teetering on extinction until one dude came along. Gandhi was a legit fashionista. He spun cotton at rallies, championed handmade fabrics like khadi. Today in re-emerging India, our artisans are creating again and creating smarter. I cannot wait to see how we reshape history.

Kelly Shu: Our next speaker comes to us from Singapore and he's worked in the Singaporean government for many years. He is fighting to do something radically different. Let's please welcome Lie Hong Yi.

Li Hongyi: When you think about government, what do you think of? Big, slow, bureaucratic. A few years ago, I started an experimental team in the Singapore government. Instead of the usual top-down decision-making, we build small teams of skilled practitioners and empower them to seek out and solve problems.

Governments traditionally based on a military structure, optimized for command and control. You end up with an intellectual traffic jam. Ideas get stuck as they flow towards the center, waiting for attention from people with not enough time and even less context. This is why government can do billion-dollar construction projects but still has to keep asking you for your birthday.

What if instead of a top-down structure, we design government from the bottom up? Small teams close to the ground getting things done instead of waiting for instruction. One year a team visited a fire station and saw how firefighters spent so much time taking inventory with paper log books. So, we built a simple app. It saves thousands of man hours every month. Another team built a tool for social workers that automatically generates usable case reports. Another team worked with ER doctors, reducing emergency room wait times by 20%.

So far, we've done over 40 different projects. Similar government projects normally take years and cost tens of millions of dollars. We're able to consistently launch new systems in just six months with teams of just five people. Government should be the means by which we empower each other. We can have a society that's driven by the imagination of its people.

Kelly Shu: So earlier in the session, we heard from Joshua from Chicago. Well, guess what? There was another speaker in Chicago whose idea we just could not get out of our heads. He is a chemist and he is pioneering a whole new field that will bring us new tools for the fight against extinction. Let's all please welcome Tim Cernak.

Tim Cernak: Somewhere right now a sea turtle is dying of cancer. Strange thing, isn't it? We're living in the greatest era of medicine in human history, but we're also living through a biodiversity crisis. I'm here today to talk about a new field called conservation chemistry.

I run a drug discovery lab. Using modern protein folding AI, I'm able to look at protein from sea turtle cancer and plug in all the tools of modern drug discovery. Sadly, it doesn't end with sea turtles. We lost 95% of elephant seal pups to avian flu. The greatest pandemic this planet has ever known is a fungal infection driving the extinction of hundreds of frog species.

When I met Pebbles, the Hila monster, she was infected with a parasite. Those weight loss drugs you keep hearing about? The first one came from the saliva of a Hila monster. How is it that we built a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical empire on the biology of this animal, but for Pebbles, there was nothing? My lab built an AI agent that could scour the entire medicinal literature. Pebbles is now stable.

Chemists can be first responders in the fight against extinction. Today's modern tools for precision medicine, they don't care if your patient has two legs, four legs, feathers, or a shell. Conservation chemistry is what happens when you refuse to accept a golden era of medicine and a mass extinction at the same time.

Kelly Stencil: Thank you speakers one more time. Before we say goodbye to the live stream, I do want to tell you about an event that we have coming up on June 13 about the future of democracy.

Kelly Shu: And I am so sad because I think it's time to say goodbye to our live stream friends. Bye live stream friends. And thank you to all the TEDexers who are watching. Bye TEDexers.