[Reggie Watts]: The big red dot, the dream come true. Give the talk of your lives. This is the real deal. I'm feeling excited.

[Narrator]: 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 TEDx 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. A chance to speak on the TED Main stage and have their voices heard by millions. This is the TED idea search.

[Narrator]: Chicago, a place where industry, creativity, and innovation meet. Now we're in the Windy City to see what great ideas have blown in as a crop of fresh new speakers arrive to take the TEDex stage.

[Tim Cernac]: TED is an incredible platform to reach a very diverse audience of thinkers. My name is Tim Cernac. I'm a professor of medicinal chemistry at the University of Michigan. I'm here to talk about making medicine for endangered species. It's a new field called conservation chemistry. We imagine that we could use chemistry as a conservation tool. The cool thing is that you can make medicines today really, really quickly. I've worked in the pharmaceutical industry for a lot of my career and now I work in a pharmacy school and I just can't look around at this biodiversity crisis that we're in right now looking at all the diseases that are wiping out uh endangered animals and and we're trying to make medicines to make the situation better.

[Joshua Johnson]: It is time for us to reconnect, even to the people we despise. All you really need are a generous heart and a curious mind. My name is Joshua Johnson. I live in Chicago. I am here to try to help people talk to one another without strangling one another. That's basically helping to moderate conversations and meet people and depict people in ways that helps us see one another more clearly and deal with whatever it is that we see. We can't have a democracy if people can't talk. We can't be free people if people can't talk. As simple as that is, it's really not simple at all. But nowadays, a little civic CPR could save someone's life.

[Sammy Ramsey]: Honeybees are dying rapidly and at the center of this problem is veroa. My name is Sammy Ramsey. I'm from Boulder, Colorado. My big idea that I want to share with the world today is that empathy is a skill. It typically isn't thought of that way, but it's something that can serve the scientific community really well. I've been employing empathy even before I knew the word and before I knew it was a skill to understand how insects function and how to keep them alive. I have seen how empathy can lead us to some really great solutions in science. And I've also seen how it's often ignored and thought of as something that's foreign to being a real researcher. That doesn't serve us well in the long run.

[Job Barbosa]: My name is Job and I am originally from Brazil and now I live here in Chicago. My big idea for this talk is basically going to be me talking about my experiences of running all the streets of Chicago. People kind of have this idea that Chicago or just any big city, they have this idea that the news portrays that it's very dangerous. I want to change how people view cities like Chicago. Not dangerous places that people shouldn't go to, but places full of ordinary life, ordinary people. So, this is the idea that I want to share with the world.

[Darlene Jackson]: When you make room for others, your path to self-discovery is lit. I'm Darling Jackson, also known as DJ Lady D, and I'm from Chicago. I'm here to share a way for people to feel comfortable with themselves and to live a life that's free of judgment and full of grace. People are really caught up in the criticism of themselves and other people. And what I've learned from my many years and thousands of dance floors that I've been on is that real house music dance floors, nobody cares about all of that stuff. And it's the first way to liberate yourself and to really release yourself from the shackles that say you have to confine yourself to a certain way of being. So I think people should just chill out.

[Job Barbosa]: I'm just an ordinary bloke, but I'm attempting something extraordinary. I want to become the first person in history to officially run every single street in the city of Chicago. Every corner, every block, every neighborhood. And this is how I run. Now, here's the thing. This journey didn't start because I love running. In March of 2024, I climbed Mount Washington in New Hampshire, home to the world's worst weather. And as it turns out, this world's worst weather slogan isn't just clever marketing. Because on the way down, hurricane force winds threw me onto a rock. I was knocked unconscious. Hypothermia set in frostbite began eating at my skin. Even though I made national headlines for all the wrong reasons, I survived. But recovery wasn't simple. My first lap in the marathon of healing began when doctors told me I need to get my blood flowing again. So, I started running. At first, it was just rehab. But then I discovered the truth. I hate running. But then it hit me. What if running didn't have to be boring? What if I gave it a little bit of purpose? What if I ran the entire city of Chicago? But what I found has surprised me because if you listen to the news, Chicago's chaos, violence, crime, division, danger, that's the narrative. But the reality, the one I see on foot is something different. It's ordinary life. Exploration, the act of stepping outside, of seeing for yourself, shows us reality is far more beautiful and far more ordinary than what fear wants us to believe. So my invitation to you is simple. despite what you're told. Explore the streets of life in every sense. Thank you very much.

[Sammy Ramsey]: Hi, I'm Dr. Sammy, your friendly neighborhood entomologist. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was solving scientific problems via empathy, something that I had no idea was a skill. A lack of empathy is a failure of imagination. Curiosity co-mingled with empathy. See, our bees are dying rapidly. And at the center of the problem is veroa, this tiny tick-like might that's apparently eating their blood. Why did I spend all that time trying to make this decoy bee look like a bee when these little doofuses can't even see? When I imagined myself as one of these mites, I realized that my world was only smell, taste, and touch. So, I had cracked the case. All these years, these parasites were killing our bees with liver disease. And now that we know that, we can give our bees a fighting chance. So let's embed in the pursuit of knowledge ethical intelligence as we train the next generation of researchers because curiosity without empathy is observation without understanding. And as I can tell you, fear and lack of imagination are lousy guiding principles in science.

[Joshua Johnson]: When you have to deal with someone whose views you despise, what principles guide you through that? I asked the questions everybody would have asked to interrogate his beliefs. What I failed to do was find out why he believed them. No one is objective, but we can all be skilled at objectivity. In other words, objectivity is an ability, not an identity. Here are three tips for your next unbearable conversation. Tip one, keep your questions short. 10 seconds or less. Tip two, find the narrative. Get the story behind the belief. And third, don't agree, just acknowledge. All you really need are a generous heart and a curious mind. Because believe it or not, just a little civic CPR could save someone's life.

[Tim Cernac]: Sadly, we lost 98% of elephant seals in Argentina last year to aven flu. I'm a chemist who has dedicated my life to improving health and I cannot look away from these diseases. 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 hunt through the entire medicinal literature trying to find a molecule that might be relevant. And the one that popped out was called peromy. Following the treatment, she tested negative for the disease. Chemists can be first responders in the fight against extinction. Let us now turn our attention to those who need it most.

[Darlene Jackson]: In Chicago's basement, warehouses, and gymnasiums, house music was forged with resistance, resilience, and ingenuity. Imagine a place for yourself where you feel fully actualized, free. And so if you have a place where you have ever felt the safest and most trusted, that's your dance floor. It was the feeling of seeing my name on that first flyer that I knew that I had inherited real power and responsibility. Long live your dance floors.

[Panel]: Joshua Johnson. He is up there. You could hear viscerally how I think important what he was saying was and how badly people needed someone to articulate what his message was. It's a talk for now. [Announcement]: The speaker who will be coming to TED in Vancouver is Joshua Johnson. [Joshua Johnson]: I am lost for words. It's humbling. I'm going to go play Hell Divers 2, order a big pizza, and go to the gym, and try to act like nothing happened today. I'm grateful.