A parent's guide to raising kids after loss | Andy Laats (Kelly Corrigan takeover)

0:06You are listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm Kelly Corrigan. I'm a writer. I'm a podcaster. I'm a TED Talker. And I am taking over for Elise Hu this week for a special series on AI and family life. I guest curated a session about this topic at TED 2025. And I'm here now to share these very special talks with you, along with a lot of behind the scenes recordings and personal insights to shed some light on the process of how these talks came to life.

0:48When I sat down to map out this six-part discussion about AI and parenting, I kept coming back in my mind to one of my very best friends. His name is Andy Lotz, and he's like a brother to me. He is my husband's best friend from business school. He's been a CEO. He founded a watch company called Nixon. We've known each other for 25 years. We've spent every Thanksgiving with him and his wife, his whole family. We've gone on family vacations. And over the course of that, his wife became a very important friend of mine. And then she died. I was a part of Liz's memorial. So her sister gave a talk. I gave a eulogy.

1:30And then Andy spoke. And in the process of that, I started to see that he was learning things that other people needed to know. In the years since she's died, Andy and I have had conversations, the likes of which I have never had with anyone. And one of the things he said that always struck me, and I think it's relevant to this conversation about AI and parenting, is that he used to be a dad, but then he became a mom. And he was finding out every day all the things that he didn't know as a dad and that he didn't know he didn't know. And it made me think about who is behind all of this AI development and whether those people, that handful really of people, know what they need to know in order to be involved in these tender, consequential relationships between parents and children.

2:25And to be completely transparent, I am afraid, and maybe for very good reasons, that most moms are invisible. I don't think that we are taken seriously as a group of people that are contributing in a very meaningful way to society. I think we get used to buy things that are developed without any input from us. And so watching Andy grow into this new life as a mom and a dad instead of just a dad, it made me wonder, what would he say AI is possible of doing in the context of these profound relationships between parents and children. What was his point of view about what we or AI could offer to strengthen this fundamental building block of society?

3:10So I reached out to Andy and I said, I have this super weird idea and just let me explain. I'm doing this session at TED about what a mother's for in an AI world. And it's quickly evolving into what is a parent for in an AI world. And I wondered if you had thoughts about that. And so we started talking. The thing about Andy that's striking to me is his intellectual and emotional humility. He's a lifetime learner. He does the research. Whether it's figuring out how to crack into the surf and snowboard market with these watches that he makes or trying to find a clinical trial that might be a match for his wife's ovarian cancer, he's a guy who knows how to study.

3:47So I knew if he said yes to the talk that he would not stop working on it until it was an A. He is not a person who wants to get an A minus. and so the work began and I have to say the very best version he ever gave was the one he delivered on stage and even that day our session was at five o 'clock but at two o 'clock he was like hey do you want to go to one of the practice rooms and just do it one more time and I was like of course if you want to do it one more time I'm all yours and so they have these little rooms with the red circle rug and they have a countdown timer just like you're going to have on stage and even from two o 'clock to five o 'clock that day, his talk got a little bit tighter and a little bit better.

4:31Andy Lotz is the co-founder and CEO of a watch company called Nixon, which has absolutely nothing to do with Richard Nixon. Although the tagline is no other watch comes closer to the truth. I was so nervous when he was on stage that my leg was shaking and my husband, who's his best friend was sitting next to me and he was like pinching my wrist. I mean, we were like the crazy parents at the Olympics who are like emoting so insanely while their gymnast is on stage doing her routine. But all that is neither here nor there when it comes to his talk. Andy is here as a lifetime learner and a model of intellectual and emotional humility.

5:14And then as soon as Andy started, we were like, oh my God, he's got it. So here is Andy Lotz on the TED stage.

5:31One of the first things I did when I started my company was make a business card. I didn't really know what to put underneath my name. There were only two of us doing everything. But I figured I went to a legitimate business school, so damn it, I'm a legitimate businessman. And as a legitimate businessman, a CEO, people tended to ask me questions about all sorts of things, even parenting. I'd respond quickly, firmly, so they would believe me. I thought I had answers. But then my wife got real sick, and I learned a whole bunch more. But let me back up. I'd come from a pretty traditional family, and I used that as a blueprint when it was time to start my own.

6:14My wife Liz and I got married in 2001, and we had three healthy kids in rapid succession, with me in the office and her at home. I know not all families look like this, but ours did. And for about eight years, it was a dream. Shortly after she turned 40, the kids were 2, 4, and 6. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Suddenly, our focus was split between the kids and the cancer. Unstructured playtime. Surgery. Healthy snacks. Chemo. Somebody's got to book the bounce house for the birthday party. Clinical trial research. For about four years, it felt like we had the upper hand. But then a bad scan.

7:04I quit my job to help, which was not a hard decision. Recurrent metastasized ovarian cancer has a very, very, very low survival rate. But we fully believed that if we tried hard enough, we could be the outlier. We weren't. Liz died just over nine years ago. Margo was 12, Gwen was 10, and Drew was 8. at this point my business card would have said single parent before Liz died I thought of all the things that parents did as a complete alphabet A to Z and the way it worked in our family was I did A through M kind of the blunt stuff the job paycheck the tire pressure in the minivan Liz did N through Z more nuanced making sure the kids the dog and me were looked after and happy.

8:02After she died, I figured my job would simply be the sum of the two, you know, the full A to Z. Well, first of all, I completely underestimated how hard Liz's end of the alphabet was, that N through Z. I mean, six days after she died, all three kids got sent home from school with headlights. We'd been sleeping in the same room together, so it was a total mess. Things got more routine, but they didn't get easier. Three kids, two schools, five after-school activities, just getting everybody to where they needed to be. Permission slip, sunscreen, water bottle, both shoes. I don't know how people did it.

8:44But past the literal nitpicking and the logistics was the emotional dimension. I mean, I knew my kids, but I didn't know them like Liz knew them. I mean, how do you get to know a kid when they're changing so quickly? You know, I tried to keep current. I knew that Margo liked long sleeves. Gwen does not like surprises. And Drew doesn't always understand why underwear is necessary. But they kept evolving. They kept evolving. And so I finally just threw that away and adopted a new shoe, new kid program. Oh, I see you've grown out of your shoes. Nice to meet you. Tell me everything I need to know about you.

9:28So we got there, mostly, enough, only to realize this. It's not just A to Z. There's a whole world beyond Z, a world I didn't know existed. Doing the routines, keeping up with the emotional evolutions, only gets me into a position to discover this world beyond language. And I got there with all my kids. I'll give you an example. 10.30 at night, middle of nowhere, Vermont, drugstore. Margo and I are staring at the wall of feminine products the first time she needed them. Dumbfounded. Completely confused. And then we decided just to buy one of everything and cracked up laughing at the number of sizes and shapes and approaches.

10:17Or the time with Gwen. It looked like she was about to break down. So I jump into mama bear mode, thinking something went terribly wrong. But then she burst into these tears of joy and told me about something that went unbelievably right. Or the after-school pickup with Drew. I'd done after-school pickups close to 3 ,000 times. So he hops in the minivan, grabs his pretzels. I notice that his lips are getting chapped, So I hand him the chapstick, the stuff that doesn't sting him, and he puts it on. He's comforted. He's home. After a few minutes of quiet driving, we come to a red light. Drew goes, Dad, what's your deepest desire?

11:04Yeah, they weren't doing poems on deepest desire at school. He just came up with it. I lock eyes with him. my brain racing. Quick, quick, quick, quick. What's my deepest desire? What a great learning moment. Something I can say to change this kid's life. I punted. I don't know, Drew. What's yours? And at a red light on El Camino Real, he said, I want to feel love my entire life.

11:38we stared at each other in silence until the light turned green my job was to pick up my kid from school my role on earth was to prove myself worthy for an invitation into that inner life not the life I saw snowboarding or talking pokemon and know that kid well enough to say the right enough thing you know I wonder if I didn't do pickups all those times if he wasn't convinced that I would be there if I knew him and his needs? Would he have asked me that? Who would have he asked? All these times my kids were in this space, like nervous system to nervous system, it was beyond language. We laughed or we cried.

12:21We stared at each other in silence, not needing words to be together. It was like fused in a neurological sense, experiencing, thinking, feeling. One thing is two people. Now, maybe some of you have experienced this. I hadn't, and I was trying. But I learned a bunch, and maybe there's some lessons there too, for others. For current A through M parents, if you find yourself tempted to daydream past, or maybe outsource some seemingly mindless task with your kid, remember, the routine can be the ticket to the transcendent. for CEOs and technologists or anybody that's going to ask me now, how can you support parenting?

13:07I'll let you know. It's not about an easier path for logistics or some quicker path through the emotional evolutions. You want to solve a hard problem? Figure out how to enable more people to spend time in this world beyond letters and language. You need some help? ask those N through Z people, the people who have felt it. They'll be your guide. They'll let you know when you get it right. So involve them in your process. For me, the times that my kids and I spent in this empathy-rich space, you know, cemented the idea for our family that bad things happen. Pain, suffering, life's unfairnesses will happen, but we are not alone.

13:59In space, time in this space, the connection feels so good, so whole. I would do anything to be in the heart of it with my kids. And I hope in time, my kids will do anything to be in the heart of it with their kids. Because once you know, you know. In other words, I'll remember, I'm looking forward to the birthdays and graduations, but what will I treasure in my final days? A locked-in stare at a red light, tears of good news, and buying$150 worth of feminine products in the East Cow Path, Vermont.

14:42Liz suspected I didn't understand all this when she died. And she was right. Her fear was I'd never find it. And the kids would forever lose access to these sublime interactions that she had with them. Those interactions, the last thing she could bear to give up in her final days. It was her greatest sadness. But also a giant gift for me, paid for at the highest price that I will not squander. This shared world beyond Z that I can now experience with my kids, it's real. It's pure. And I know when we're there, they continue to feel their mother's love. Thank you.

15:27That was Andy Lotz speaking on the TED 2025 stage. Stick around for a deep dive into what went into making this talk with Andy, the questions that are still lingering for me, and why I think we should all work with our friends more. Coming up after a quick break.

15:47When I was watching on stage, I felt like Liz Lotz, my friend, his wife, was coming alive a little bit. Towards the end, they showed this picture of Liz and the kids. It's like one of the best pictures I've ever seen of motherhood. So the kids are jumping up and down on a sofa, and she is both delighted at their joy and also terrified that one of them is going to fall and break their ankle. and it's just one of the best photos of Liz that's ever been taken. And then Andy came off stage to this enormous standing ovation and we just lost it. Our interactions around Andy's talk were so emotional.

16:27I mean, we both cried every time we talked. But Andy's so good at crying. He's just gotten so good at it that he just takes off his glasses and pats his eyes dry and you can tell that he's having a little moment but he just keeps moving. and so we've learned how to talk through our tears over the last nine years. It is a gift to have this opportunity to connect like this with my kids. A gift given to me by Liz at an incredibly high price. I do not want to squander and I know if I can achieve it, I know that my kids too will continue to feel their mother's love if I can pass this gift to them. But I want to tell you, when he was giving that talk, I thought two things.

17:13One, she was so robbed. And two, I am so happy to put her name into circulation. And when he got off that stage, we hugged so hard. We were both crying into each other's chests. And it was like this incredible swirl of relief and adrenaline and missing this person who was so good. She was so good. It's such a sin to have lost her and so satisfying to see him honor her on that stage. And I do have a whole vignette written about the pickup from after school, but I just I chopped it because I was I wrote too much. Yeah, that's OK. That's a natural starting place. Yeah. So good. That's that's encouraging.

17:56I was kind of more timeline worried. And you don't think it's like to the to the death and dying stuff isn't too dark? No. No. Okay. I don't. But, you know, I think this is the most important conversation anybody could ever be having. So you're asking the wrong person if I think it's too much. I think the whole world talks about this stuff too little. So no, I really don't. At one point during the process, Andy said this very vulnerable thing to me. He said, do you think I would be giving this talk if I wasn't your friend? And I said, no, you wouldn't. But not because you're not worthy of the TED stage, but because they never would have found you.

18:35They don't know what I know about you, which is that you learned some really hard, really useful lessons that could be to the benefit of a much larger audience. Yeah, so the idea of talking about it, and Liz did write sort of detailed operating instructions like you would to a babysitter for the first time. And, you know, she recruited the aloe moms, right, to not just help me, but to be there for the kids. But I think there was a lot left unsaid, right, unsettled and unknown when she left about, wait a minute, you know, this is my core identity and now it's not. Like this was a critical piece to my kids' life and now they're not going to have it.

19:17Like what happens next? And what I wrote was like, okay, I'm supported, I'm prepared, and I'm shocked. Right. And I'm like, hold on, this is hard. And what happens if I screw up? And, and maybe that was hugely helpful to you because you were, you know, head to toe bathed in fear and, you know, knowing that she wasn't really any less fearful and yet had done the job in a way that you could tag in. yeah that's nice to know it's nice to know that people are afraid and still doing it yes well and it was also sort of posthumously like oh wow was liz facing similar questions about her ability to do this gigantic task so you know obviously i like everyone else am reading about ai almost every day an article or two comes up in any number of my feeds or newsletters about some application or advancement or fundraising round.

20:22And I must say, at the risk of getting myself into a little trouble here, I am not always convinced that the people who are running these AI development companies are great at what I think is the most important thing, which is human connection. I think they might be great at engineering, and they might be great at raising money, and they might be great at using very complicated tools to create products that could be incredibly profitable. But that does not mean they understand what connects people to other people in meaningful ways. And if you don't understand that and you are making the thing that's going to define the world, I am scared.

21:00I would much rather have people who are super good at relationships and love be in charge of some of this stuff. If you want to make rockets, sure. If you want to get involved in the parent child relationship and the development of another generation, I want you to be a proven expert in human relationships, not engineering. And that's what I was thinking about as Andy finished his talk on stage. Oh, and the other thing about the shortcomings of maybe the AI model, as far as I understand it too, is sort of like if, and what I wanted to convey in this to a certain degree was like the gift that liz gave me and then the idea that if the kids could feel that then they would be able to pass that on and if they learn the lessons just from di or ai they're going to pass that on right it's like how they're creating artificial data now to feed the models so it's sort of like the danger of if it actually works sort of okay that's what we're going to perpetuate That's what the species is going to perpetuate.

22:06Like we have this possibility of just plateauing at the current understanding, right? You know what I mean? The question that's still hanging around for me after Andy's talk has been released is, will they listen? Will they make sure that the N through Z parents, the people like Liz, who knew the things that Liz knew, will the designers and the developers and the profiteers listen? Will they integrate that point of view? That softest point of view, that softest, most well-earned point of view about what families need. All these deep and distinguishing characteristics of humans from other species all kind of happen in a single instant.

22:46And that's the connection where it's like, I am not alone. I am understood. The world is an okay place, even if bad things happen. This sort of catalyst of empathy. And it's such a whole feeling. It's such a joyful feeling. I call it the prize. Right. This is the prize of doing the logistical things and then doing them in a way that the kids feel connected and understood. But then then getting the prize where they they give you permission to connect to them and they trust you to a level that they are really vulnerable and exposed and open. And if you are there to receive that, I think that that's where the empathy train starts.

23:24That was my experience. You know, I went happily along the parenting route for 12 years, thinking that I understood the full spectrum and I felt good in my role and I was proud of what I was doing. And then I had no idea. And when my, you know, when my wife died, I think her biggest sadness was the idea that I might not have the idea. I might not understand. And it was one of those things where, you know, you can't really know it without experiencing it. And so you wonder, can technology or can the modern world help us alleviate some of the burdens of parenting at the cost of not getting to this deeper level of connection with your family.

24:00I suspected in picking Andy and imagining him on stage that certain people would listen to what he was saying because they were coming from a guy like Andy. I'm not a technologist. I'm not a scientist. I'm not a clinician. I don't have a PhD or two. And normally when I talk to people, it's about business. and so I was surprised at how people were surprised like thanks for talking about your personal story I'm like I'm happy to do that that's something I know a lot more about than business but one of the surprising things that happened to me during the rehearsal you know Tim the mic guy was just chatting me up and we're joking about this and that and might have used the word testicles and just kind of keeping it fresh and he put the mic on and I went out and did my rehearsal and I was like, wow, I was getting nervous and I came back and he was taking the mic off and he was crying.

24:59And he's like, that story about the new shoes, new kids? Like, I wish I'd known that. And you know, it's so funny. We've been dearest, dearest friends for, I don't know, almost 30 years now. But we've never worked on a project together. And I loved collaborating with him. You know, we just never interacted on that level before and it was fun to try to help him make his point and make his mark. He's a worker, so it was a joy to shepherd him through this super intimate project. And I feel closer to him than ever. Andy, you did it. I knew you would. I saw your folder of all 40 versions of your talk that's like 9 inches thick.

25:43So thanks for never stopping. I mean, you were rehearsing at 2 p.m. yesterday for a 5 p.m. talk, like, for never saying good enough, I'm wrapped, but like seeing if you can squeeze just the right next word out. I thought of something this morning I wanted to say to my species. I killed mates. Just to give Liz some credit, and it's not about the spill. It's how you clean up. But thank you for your help in guiding me. You've been a help for me in this process. You've been a help from my family, and you've been a help from thousands, if not millions, of other families. So thank you for what you do.

26:30That's it for today. Tomorrow, we'll be with a woman who is a new friend. She's started a company that is making AI tools for parents. Her name is Avni Patel Thompson. Ted Talks Daily is a part of the Ted Audio Collective. This episode was produced and mixed by Lucy Little, edited by Alejandra Salazar, and fact-checked by the Ted Research Team. The Ted Talks Daily team includes Martha Estafanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, and Tansika Sungmar Nivang. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Belarezo. I'm Kelly Corrigan, guest host of TED Talks Daily, here for a special week where we're taking a deep dive into the topic of AI and family life.

27:18Also, please join me at my podcast, Kelly Corrigan Wonders, wherever you listen to podcasts. I'll be back tomorrow. Thanks for listening.