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Ted at TED — TED 2026 Vancouver
Ted Shelton's personal dispatches from TED 2026 in Vancouver — ideas, talks, and reflections from the world's leading ideas conference.
James Robinson
Session 6James Robinson reflects on the life and death of his son Nadav, who was born with a severe heart defect and died at the age of five.
Yiyun Kang
Session 6Turning invisible problems into physical and emotional experiences.
Dhruv Khullar
Session 6Drugs such as Ozempic and other GLP-1 medications may help treat addiction, not just obesity and diabetes.
Michael Snyder
Session 6The tools now exist to monitor health much more intelligently, and that doing so could help people live longer and healthier lives.
Kizzmekia Corbett
Session 6The future of vaccination depends not only on scientific breakthroughs, but also on how scientists listen and communicate.
Candice Odgers
Session 6Candice Odgers challenges one of the most familiar narratives in modern culture: that teenagers are being ruined by smartphones and social media. Drawing on decades of research as a developmental psychologist, she argues that this story is far too simple and, in important ways, wrong.
Keith Diaz
Session 6The hidden health crises of modern life is not simply that people fail to exercise enough, but that they spend too much of the day sitting still.
John Lloyd
Session 5A witty but serious case for the importance of listening. John Lloyd begins with the old idea that human beings should listen more than they speak, then builds on it with a broader argument: we learn far more from listening than from talking, yet sound is one of the most overlooked parts of human experience.
Susan Burton
Session 5A deeply personal story about loss, addiction, incarceration, recovery, and purpose. The central message is simple but powerful: being listened to with compassion can save a life, and that same act of listening can become the foundation for rebuilding families and communities.
Michael Chorost
Session 5Listening is not the same as hearing. A person can have perfect ears and still be a poor listener, just as someone with severe hearing loss can learn to listen deeply and well. Using his own life as the example, Chorost shows that listening is less about raw sensory ability than about attention, humility, and human connection.
Harville Hendrix
Session 5Deep listening is the foundation of love, healing, and even social change.
Emily Kasriel
Session 5Listening is an act of respecting another person's dignity and humanity, which can be done without betraying one's own values.
Mark Whittle
Session 5Mark Whittle describes the sound that emerged from the early universe and suggests that we are the "sentient part of the universe" capable of witnessing and understanding its ancient, symphonic ancestry.
Becoming a better villager
Dine AroundMany of us long for the support of a village.
Reed Hastings
Session 4Sal Khan discusses education with Reed Hastings who explains why, despite his skepticism about ed tech's track record, he remains committed to AI as potentially the first intervention that attacks the right problem.
Noor Siddiqui
Session 4Could embryo genome sequencing be one of the most consequential inflection points in the entire history of human reproduction by eliminating genetic diseases through embryo selection.
George Civeris
Session 4A satirical but earnest diagnosis of our societal fragmentation
Scott Phoenix
Session 4How do we consciously complete an integration between humans and machines that is already happening?
Tekedra Mawakana
Session 4Our tolerance for road deaths is a form of collective numbness and Waymo's safety data represents an ethical imperative to scale as fast as responsibly possible.
Joojin Kim
Session 4Joojin Kim draws attention to shipping as a neglected emissions problem in order to highlight that it is a high-leverage intervention point, and explains why identifying the right system matters as much as having the right technology.
Jonathan Haidt
Session 4Jonathan Haidt outlines a critique of social media, ed tech, and AI companions that leads him to argue that young people should have zero access to smart phones, tablets, and computers
Khan TED Institute
TED Conference NewsSal Khan announces the creation of a higher education initiative that is a partnership between Khan Academy and TED
Bill McKibben
Session 3Speed matters more than direction, and the battle isn't over whether clean energy wins, but whether it wins in time.
Leopoldo López
Session 3Technology can be a key to unlock political freedom
Vjosa Osmani Sadriu
Session 3A warning about AI-driven disinformation that carries unique moral weight precisely because it comes from someone who has lived through what happens when truth is systematically destroyed by a regime willing to use violence to enforce its version of reality.
Drew McCartor
Session 3The overwhelming scale of the problem of lead poisoning is reframed not as cause for despair but as an urgent, tractable opportunity, distinguishing lead poisoning from the category of global crises that feel impossible to address.
Rapelang Rabana
Session 3The pedagogical breakthrough is adaptive personalization delivered at a scale and cost that no human teacher-to-student ratio could ever achieve.
Saloni Dattani
Session 3Reframe the conversation about medical progress shifting from the drama of scientific discovery to the quieter, more consequential failures of the economic and institutional systems that determine whether discoveries actually reach people.
Felix Brooks-church
Session 3Malnutrition is not as food access problem but a food quality problem, Felix Brooks-church explains the importance of fortification.
Amy Bowers Cordalis
Session 3Decades of legal struggle, coalition building, and indigenous knowledge converge into a single image of ecological memory and renewal that makes the abstract case for nature's resilience viscerally real.
Robbie Schingler
Session 2Technological capability without institutional capacity is insufficient
Carissa Véliz
Session 2Carissa Véliz reframes prediction from a neutral epistemological tool into an instrument of social control, and the foundation for everything that follows about manipulation, injustice, and the politics of AI forecasting.
Maya Higa
Session 2Maya Higa has built a model that intercepts ordinary internet users in their natural habitat and quietly turns them into the next generation of conservationists.
Keith Coleman and Jay Baxter
Session 2Community Notes produces something neither human editorial teams nor simple majority-vote systems can: corrections that people across the political divide actually trust.
Sam Wickert
Session 2Sam Wickert believes that the filmmaker's creative judgment and human collaboration remain irreplaceable, and AI's proper role is as an amplifier of craft rather than a substitute for it.
Gina Raimondo
Session 2Gina Raimondo makes a counterintuitive claim that worker displacement isn't just a humanitarian concern but a direct strategic threat to American technological leadership, reframing the labor transition problem as inseparable from the AI competitiveness problem.
Vitalik Buterin
Session 2Creator of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, makes the argument that the goal isn't to choose between human judgment and artificial intelligence, but to deliberately design systems that keep humans meaningfully in the loop — extending agency rather than quietly erasing it.
Mark Rober
Session 1Mark Rober explains his pedagogical thesis, the insight that drives both his YouTube channel and the science curriculum he's announcing, and the clearest statement of why spectacle and emotion aren't distractions from learning but the very conditions that make it stick.
Silvana Konermann in Conversation with Chris Anderson
Session 1Silvana Konerman explains that by treating RNA as the cell's language and applying the same logic that made large language models work, science may finally have a tool powerful enough to take on diseases that have defeated every previous approach.
Jacob Collier
Session 1Jacob Collier brings a musical framework into focus as a life philosophy — the talk's three technical concepts (melody, rhythm, harmony) are revealed as a extended metaphor for how to move through uncertainty with resilience rather than resistance.
Hiba Qasas
Session 1Hiba Qasas makes a deliberate inversion of the conventional peacebuilding playbook, and the clearest statement of why she believes empathy-first approaches so often collapse when participants return to the reality of the conflict.
Garrett Langley
Session 1Garrett Langley founder of Flock, makes the argument that the Flock technology isn't just about catching criminals faster, but about fundamentally changing how policing decisions get made — replacing gut instinct and implicit bias with verifiable, data-driven triggers.
Adam Bry
Session 1Adam Bry describes repositioning drones from niche or controversial tools into foundational public infrastructure, as routine and essential as the power grid or the telephone network.
Malala Yousafzai
Session 1Malala asked us to reframe hope from a passive emotion into an active, collective practice, earned through persistence rather than optimism alone.
Legally Recognizing and governing the global commons
BraindateThe US is not a global policeman. The UN is about to go broke. We do not have functional world law, but need it to thwart the impunity of bad actors who spoil the global commons: oceans, climate, etc.
The AI Just Created a "Truth." Do You Believe it?
BraindateSteven Rosenbaum (with a new book out "The Future of Truth") led an engaging conversation on the different ways we use the word truth and what it means an the post-AI world
Post Capitalism
Session 1Robin Chase led an engaging conversation on Post capitalism: what should it be? How do we get there?
Starlings Murmuration 1
TED ExhibitsTerrific new company exhibiting at TED which plans adventure learning tours starting in San Francisco this year...
The Future of TED
TED Conference NewsArrival notes - news on where the TED conference is heading!