TED talk

On March 13, 2019, I received the following email. I thought it was a prank, but it turned out to be REAL (apparently this is a common response to these emails).

Dear Nicola,

together with my colleagues at TED we’ve been reading your writings for a while. 

I was particularly interested on your story about climate change shifting lines on maps (this one).

Climate zones have been shifting for a few decades, sadly, and there are additional phenomena that you don’t cover in your article (such as the tree lines moving uphill in the Alps). But I found your article a really interesting way to frame climate change in a visible way.

And it’s a way that we haven’t tried as a TEDTalk yet. 

So I’ve been wondering whether you would be interested in discussing and exploring the possibility of turning this article into a TEDTalk.

I’m the Global Curator of TED (www.ted.com) and we are currently planning our 2019 international conference, TEDSummit, which will take place in Edinburgh, Scotland, 21-25 July. 1100 attendees (which we expect to come from over 60 countries), 45 speakers, a number of past TED speakers coming back as attendees, etc

I don’t want to fill your in-box with unnecessary details at this stage - and, forgive me the immodesty, I hope you know about TED, what we do, and the talk format that we mostly use (short, well-prepared, etc). 

Would you be interested in considering this possibility? If so, can we maybe have a phone/skype call soon? I’m based in Switzerland.

I thank you for your consideration.

Warm regards,

Bruno Giussani

-

 

Me: "!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

 

After some sober thought, and after confirming that this invitation was real, I decided this wasn't quite the right topic for me. It had been a great story, but a) it wasn't my idea (and I didn't want to take it over) and b) I hadn't visited any of the places I was talking about, or indeed interviewed anyone affected. This was a story about real people facing real threats, and while a more academic approach seemed fine for Yale, it didn't seem to strike the right tone for TED.

 

However, I did manage to convince TED to let me talk about something else: noise pollution in the ocean.

 

I first heard about this topic from Rob Williams, co-founder of the cetacean-conservation group Oceans Initiative in Seattle, Washington. He spoke in poetic terms about being an 'acoustic prospector' in search of spots of silence in the ocean, which I thought was so lovely. I had the pleasure of meeting him at a Pew Charitable Trust meeting, where I had been invited to come give a talk on science communication. 

 

That coincidental meeting spun into a feature piece for Nature (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01098-6), which won an award from the Acoustical Society of America. And then I managed to convince TED to let me turn that into a talk.

 

 

 I gave the talk in Edinburgh in the summer of 2019, at a TEDSummit -- a smaller gathering than the main meal deal held in Vancouver each spring, but still a mainstage event. It was a bizarre experience. Tickets to these events cost 'regular people' tens of thousands of dollars. At one point I was in a green room with a monk and a prominent politician, trying to convince a make-up artist to not paint my face (I'm not a big fan of make-up). Writing the TED talk was easy, but memorizing it was virtually impossible for me. When I did my dress rehearsal, I completely mucked it up because the clock that was timing me was going UP (and I was used to a clock counting DOWN). I garbled my sentences and flubbed the whole thing. Thankfully the live performance went better (they do let you start over, if needs be! Thankfully I made it through the first time). My editor, the fantastic David Biello, met me offstage with a shot of whisky at the end to soothe my nerves. 

 

The TED talks are a remarkable institution. I met a lot of fascinating people through them, and was exposed to a host of ideas that have kept coming up again and again over the years (from deepfake technologies to crafting social media for the good, from happiness research to stories of courage and endurance). I got to meet, and dance with, influential journalist Carole Cadwalladr who broke the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal and unpeeled the influences of social media on elections. And I heard KT Tunstall play live. 

 

I am grateful to have been part of it. The proliferation of YouTube channels now doing 'in a nutshell' summaries of inspiring, interesting people, science and stories is amazing to behold. TED was one of the first good ones to lead that charge. Thanks, TED, for all you do!

 

UPDATE: I finally watched my own talk about 5 years after I gave it. I know, that sounds crazy. But who wants to watch themselves?!? I think I tried to cram too many facts in. But hopefully it got the message across!