[Reggie Watts]: My name is Reggie Watts and my life changed forever when I got the opportunity to speak at TED. Now TED is searching the globe for ideas that could change everything. Nine TED X events around the world. Giving a global voice to the unknown. Six minutes that can inspire, motivate, and change their lives forever. But that's not all. Coached by an expert panel, one lucky speaker will be surprised with the opportunity of a lifetime.

[Narrator]: Athens, the heart of ancient Greece and a place where philosophy, democracy, and debate shaped how the world thinks. Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle once shared their ideas here. Today, that legacy continues. From across Greece, a select group of speakers have been chosen to take to the TEDex stage.

[Fiori]: Hi, I'm Fury. I'm from Athens. I'm a third generation fashion manufacturer. My vision is the transformation of the fashion industry to act on modern slavery and the destruction to the environment caused by how we make our products, how we consume it, and how we dispose them. Fashion is the second industry in risk of modern slavery and one of the biggest poller to the environment. I believe that Athens has many stories to share that could act as an example for changing our world.

[Mel Rosenberg]: Clearly, I want to go to Vancouver. I think everybody here does. I'm Mel Rosenberg and I'm a professor of microbiology. The big idea is that we should talk about bad breath because nobody talks about it. Bad breath combines humanity and science, psychology and microbiology. It's quite easy to diagnose and it's quite easy to treat in most instances.

[Kelly Stoetzel]: I'm Kelly Stzzel. I'm leading the TED panel. My role at TED for the past 20 years has been curation. So, I've worked with thousands of speakers on the TED stage to select them, to help them develop their talks and get them ready to share them with the world. Things that I look for are really the strength of the idea, but you then have to make it land. The delivery is how well they connect with the people in the room.

[Kelly Shu]: My name is Kelly Shu. I run Ted's YouTube channel. I always believe that content is king. And so, if it's a great talk and it's great delivery, it will do well. But selfishly, I'm always looking for a really concise way to like present it to people. You can honestly have an amazing talk in person, but sometimes on the screen, it's like not as intriguing as it was in real life. I'm a sucker for an inspiring TED talk that just makes me feel like there's hope again.

[Dr. Emma Macweeni]: Today, our brains are dying before our bodies. I'm Dr. Emma Maxweeni. My talk is about the fact that our minds are dying before our bodies today. I look after patients every day who die slowly and tragically with degeneration of their brains when they're often still really fit and healthy. I so desperately want to get this information to as wide an audience as possible because it will save some people's lives.

[Kelly Stoetzel]: When you're on the stage, so many things can go wrong. So, it's like having it memorized is kind of the bare minimum. So much of it is like knowing your talk good enough that you can just deliver it flawlessly every single time, no matter what the external factors are.

[Vivian]: My name is Vivian. I am a data scientist. My talk is about what we cannot see. We humans, we are very limited in what we can see with our eyes and what we can process with our brain. I was always fascinated by technology and when I started working with NASA, I could literally see through a new eyes. We can use modern technologies such as this brain scan device that I am going to be wearing that allows us to see beyond the invisible.

[Zoe Fragu]: I am Zoe Fragu. I am an organizational psychologist and a business coach. Tomorrow I will be talking to the world about pettiness. I've seen so many good and talented people contaminating their whole lives with meaningless acts of being passive aggressive or being revengeful without really understanding what this causes to them, what this causes to societies and what this causes to systems in general. First of all, when you're petty, what you do is you don't build a network. Building a network is a reciprocity game.

[Vivian]: The truth is that we can see only about 0.00004% of reality. That is my brain activity live streamed real life and if I start jumping you can see that my brain is exploding. When I really boiled down what the idea is, it's that we all perceive things differently. But that is okay as long as we understand that each of us sees reality differently and so we can understand and improve reality for all us.

[Zoe Fragu]: Pettiness is contagious. Pettiness contaminates people's lives, synergies, everything. In Greece, for example, we have a very petty saying that roughly translates to the neighbor's goat should die. That means that if I can have a goat, then my neighbor shouldn't either. What's important to remember is that pettiness is contagious but so is generosity. And a candle loses nothing by lighting other candles.

[Dr. Emma Macweeni]: Our bodies will outlast our brains and we will die slowly with dementia. Now we have two historic breakthroughs. Two new medications proven to slow Alzheimer's disease. And we have biomarkers which can detect abnormal toxic protein very early when symptoms are mild. Finally, we are on the brink of a whole new future where true longevity is possible when our brains will not die before our bodies.

[Mel Rosenberg]: Bad breath is bad in every language, in every culture. If you don't believe me now, you will in a minute. Do the wrist lick test. Take out your tongues. Lick your wrist. Most of the odor is coming from way back in your tongue where there's billions of bacteria in a mucous layer. It's not only about how or whether the breath smells, but where it's coming from. If the odor is coming just from your mouth, that means it's coming from your tongue. If it's coming from your nose and mouth together, you need a physician. If there's somebody that you love, you tell that person.

[Fiori]: What if the factory of the future is ethical, regenerative, and beautiful for our cities, for our eyes, for our souls? 40 million people live as modern slaves today. One out of four is a child. Our clothes are the number one source of primary microplastics in the oceans. So my idea is simple. Relocalize how we make. Turn our cities into circular hubs. Entangle networks of recyclers, designers, microactories, citizens and policy. AI is the loom, community is the weaver.

[Kelly Stoetzel]: Mel struggled to connect with the audience today. Er, in terms of content, in terms of data, she was there. I guess my question is, was this talk too early? Zoe connected well with the room. I guess the question is, is it big enough? Fiori, our underdog today. Yesterday, she didn't have anything memorized. And today, like the most confident speaker. Vivian, she did a beautiful job. I kind of felt today that the example with the technology didn't quite really put the dramatic effect.

[Kelly Stoetzel]: But we have to choose just one of you, and that speaker is... Fiori!

[Fiori]: I feel very blessed. We don't talk as much about manufacturing. At TED, the idea applies globally and it can make global impact to all industries. I'm very blessed that I can represent our movement that's a global movement in Vancouver.