Why you should give away your most valuable assets with TED Chairman Chris Anderson

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3:14Also, with Amazon Music Unlimited, you can now listen to your favorite music, podcasts, and audiobooks, all in the Amazon Music app. Humans are really weird. We are wired to be generous. But a lot of us don't even know that. It is a psychological fact that people who give away something end up being surprised at how happy that makes them.

3:47So 13 years ago, I published this article called Give Away Your Legos. And the point of the article was to help people that were experiencing rapid change in scale at work, what I had experienced during my time at Facebook and Google, understand what it felt like to go through that kind of change. And the whole point of the metaphor, give away your Legos, is that in order to keep up with the change, in order to stay on top of that constantly changing thing, you need to give things away. You need to let go of the thing that you have been great at, the thing that you've built your whole identity around, and move on to something new.

4:30The interesting thing that happened was that I thought I was writing that article for people in the technology industry, people going through the kind of scale that I saw at Google and Facebook. But once it was published, I started getting emails from all over the world. I got emails from people in huge companies. I got emails from entrepreneurs in Africa, from teachers and doctors, people that I didn't write it for, people taking big career risks and talking to me about how hard it was to let go of something that they had built their whole career around in order to try something new. And it made me realize that letting go isn't a startup problem.

5:13It's a work problem and a human problem. The more I've spent time on it and thought about it, both for myself and in my work with leaders, the more I've realized that our instinct is to hold on. Our instinct is to try to control. Whatever made us successful, whatever we think is important, we want to hang on to it. Our gut says, don't let go of that because that's the thing that's worked for me. But what if that instinct is exactly backwards? What if letting go of what made you successful is the fastest path to more success? What if the most successful people, the ones who create the things that actually last, are the ones who've learned to let go on purpose?

6:02To give things away, loosen their grip, and trust that something better is on the other side.

6:14I'm Molly Graham, and this is Work Life, where we untangle the messy human side of work. My guest today has spent 25 years proving that letting go is one of the best ways to build a giant global brand. Chris Anderson became the steward of TED in 2001. At the time, TED was a single annual conference, intimate, exclusive, beloved by a small community of people who felt lucky to be in the room. In other words, not very many people knew about TED at the time. But now, everyone knows about the TED Talk. One person, one idea, succinct and powerful. That format has now been watched billions of times in every country on earth.

7:02and the reason it exists the way it does, free, open, global, is because Chris made a series of bets that went against every instinct that most people would have. Every one of those decisions made people nervous, and every one of them made TED more successful than it had been before. At the most recent TED conference, I sat down with Chris in front of a live audience to ask, what does it actually take to let go of the things that made you successful?

7:42So, Chris Anderson, welcome to WorkLife. It's great to be here, Molly. Thank you. So, Chris, I'm curious. I want you to take us back because you had already sold a media company when you decided to buy TED, and TED obviously wasn't what it is today. Will you tell us what you thought you were buying? I first went to TED in 1998, and it was this much-loved conference by a small group of people. TED was Technology, Entertainment, Design. Those three industries came together, and they all thought it was a little bit weird, but amazing that they had so much to talk to each other about. I fell in love with it.

8:25I thought I'd come home. I thought these are my people because people were excited to dream together. That was in 98. It was a couple of years later that the conference became available to buy, and I was in a race with some of the other big media companies to buy it. I didn't know how it was going to turn out. It felt like there was something special there because people who came absolutely loved it. And if you see something that people are really passionate about, that's your clue that there's something there that can grow. So it felt like something was going to happen. I had no idea what. Do you remember like your first moment or one of your earliest moments where you were like, oh, this is what I'm doing here?

9:15I mean, I even think in the first conference, for all its faults. Just seeing a speaker come on stage and nail it and just teach you something so profound. One of the guests at TED who I'd met earlier on, it urged me to invite this weird futurist called Juan Enriquez, and he actually became my first speaker at the very first conference. The first one I ran myself fully was TED 2003, and he just walked on stage and looked around and had the audience laughing and showed these insights about what was coming in the world of biology. And I just sat back and thought, these people are incredible. And you could see the excitement about this gift that he was giving everyone being absorbed.

10:04And a talk isn't just a talk. A talk is a moment when something passes from one mind into hundreds of other minds, that little vibration through the air that changes the sparks in their brain, that can change that person's life forever. Two decades later, I still think about biological possibility differently because of that talk that Juan gave back then. And so this is the thing. When you see that happening, you know that some percentage of people are hooked and will come back. I love that. So one of the other themes that I really see when I look back over some of the sort of big moments that you led through at TED is a theme of letting go.

10:52And this is something that like I've spent a lot of time writing and talking about because I think it's something that so many people and leaders are not very good at. But you seem very good at it. So I'd be curious to hear, do you think that that was a part of your leadership of TED? And if so, why was it important? So it was, and here's how it happened. I wish I could tell it as if it was a hero's journey, but these were the facts. I'd brought TED with a nonprofit, like I'd said, which meant that the whole point of what we were doing was supposed to be for the public good. How do you turn a gathering of people who are mostly quite rich and successful, how do you turn that into a public good?

11:36Well, it was a constant question we were asking ourselves. And early on, we tried a few experiments, like trying to raise money for different causes or starting a fellows program and so forth. But the real thing about TED was that the content was inspirational. And how could you let that inspiration out in the world? And we couldn't crack it. We tried to sell TED content to TV companies and say, no, no, you don't understand. People will actually like these. And they go, talking heads? Are you serious? This is so boring. And then online video. It felt risky, but we did an experiment where we put six talks.

12:12We filmed them with great care, put them out and tried to make them as dramatic as possible, put them out into the internet. At a time on the internet where online video was, you could have it like that big in the corner of your screen and it still was a little shaky. Small and shaky. Yeah, but the audio was there. And to our amazement, people responded to these talks. I said, wait a sec, here is a note from someone telling me that they are watching a shaky video on their screen and crying because they've been inspired by that person. And it suddenly became just obvious that what we had to do was to give away the content because it could reach so many more people.

12:52And yeah, there was a debate about it. and a few people thought it was stupid because it would destroy the conference. But there was a lot of idealism around the internet at the time as well. It was like information wants to be free. And we thought that people would let us do it. And sure enough, demand for the conference rocketed instead of declining. And so from that moment, we said, okay, wait a sec. It can seem crazy, but it can be the smartest thing you can do to give away something really valuable and be amazed what happens next. I mean, the biggest instance where that was really put to the test was our actual brand, our actual format.

13:32We were being approached by lots of people around the world to, you know, come and bring Ted here. And we said, well, you know, we're 15 people and that's going to be really hard. So no, we can't. But wait a sec, you could. And so we tried to dream about what would it look like to give people permission to do TED Talks locally and to empower them to do it. And TEDx was a crazy idea. Harvard Business Review wrote an article saying how TED lost control of its crowd. It was the wisest thing we ever could have done, and it changed TED from being one event once a year into being now 4 ,000 events a year around the world.

14:15And they are amazing. And we get the videos back from it. And so we gave it away, but we gave it away carefully and strategically. And so I think there is a case in the connected age for every organization and every company to have a day-long brainstorm about what is the most radical thing that you could give away. But then to do so carefully. In the case of TEDx, there were rules and there were tools. The rules, you know, you couldn't just do any, put up any old thing and call it TED locally. And there were tools which trained people. The motivation of people to get it right was really high. If they had a bad event one year, the next year it was better.

14:56And so this whole system itself improved, and we ended up learning so much from TEDx organizers. Are there any TEDx organizers in the room here right now? Yeah. You've got a bunch. You guys are heroes. Seriously. Lots of hands. So I want to go through this a little bit methodically because I genuinely, this is such an uncomfortable thing for so many organizations. But what I hear you saying is that part of the reason why TED has been successful is because you were good at and you taught the organization to be good at letting go and believing that giving things away would benefit the organization, but also the world.

15:37So first, tell us a little bit about resistance to that. So I imagine that the conference attendees were like, you're taking this exclusive conference and putting it online. I imagine that when you first came to the team and said, what if we let other people use our brand and throw conferences that were not attending, that people struggled with that. How did you sort of like help the team and the folks around you through that resistance? Some people did struggle. And it's true that every organization has this sort of inbuilt institutional resistance to letting go. And some of our efforts at letting go actually failed.

16:18Every time you can show a success story, though, it makes it easier to persuade people. I mean, right at the time when we first gave away content, the success of the open source software movement, for example, was an inspiration. People who had been willing to open up their software and let other people contribute to it created this massive amount of value. And there were stories like this that were out there. The creation of Wikipedia was an inspiration of just let the world write your encyclopedia for you. What could go wrong? Well, lots of things could go wrong, but something absolutely amazing could go right.

16:53And so, you know, you point to the success stories and then people come along and then every time something worked at Ted, it made it easier to make the case the next time around. What do you think was the difference between the things that failed, like the things that you didn't let go of and things where you're like, you convinced the organization or got it through and managed to let go? Yeah, that's a good question. I definitely know. In the case of TEDx, even though that was in many ways the hardest thing to do, to let go and let other people do the work, the fact that there were teams of people out there who were hungry and eager to do it made that easier because you could say, okay, you do it.

17:33But I think any act of doing this does require a level of determination that you have to try and get as far down the organization as you can and know that the upside is potentially amazing.

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21:17You were the CEO of TED for many years. and then at some point you decided to let go of that. You decided that that was no longer the right role for you. Talk about making that decision and what that felt like. I think every time I've built a company, round about the time it got more than 150 people, which anthropologists will tell you is some sort of natural human community size or whatever. Our brains can very comfortably relate to 150 people. Beyond that, you have to put in systems, and I think I've been less effective as an organizational leader. And Ted got bigger than that. After a few years of that, it was like, I will do better if someone else can run the actual organization itself, and I'll be a curator, I'll do a bit of dreaming, or do some money raising and stuff like that.

22:16Happily, I had the right person in the company who was ready to step up and take on that role at the time, a guy called Jay Harati. And so that made it, that for me turned my relationship with Ted, which was getting quite stressful, back into super thrilling again and fun. And he did the hard work and I got to pontificate, which is just perfect. It sounds like for you that moment of letting go, you knew something wasn't right for you. Yeah. I don't like managing large numbers of people. But I love the process of putting on this event, this conference, and working with speakers to try and help them express their ideas.

23:03That part I loved and was good at with the team that had come together. so yeah so I basically carved out a weird job that wasn't it wasn't just oversight it was oversight but then back in this curation role it was a quite rich level of engagement yeah so that was five years ago you you I think gave away uh the CEO role and then last year you decided to to do the ultimate giveaway of giving away TED it's such a rare thing for leaders to step out and to say it's time for me to move on, also in such a public way. Will you talk a little bit about what led you to know that this was the right moment?

23:48Well, part of the trouble was that I published this book, Infectious Generosity, which was trying to make the case for strategic generosity in organizations. In general, the principle of, in the connected age, take a risk, give away the biggest thing you can imagine, and be amazed at what happens next. And I was going, wait a sec, how does that apply to me? What else could I give away? So there was that in the back of my head. But also just the fact that the world of media is changing so fast. You know, back in 2006, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and so forth, often TED Talks would explode in virality and go, God has been much harder to do that since social media algorithms basically ate a lot of people's attention.

24:29And so I'm looking at these amazing communicators on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and so forth, communicating in a spectacular way and knowing that at some point it's better to bet on the next generation and let them see what they can come through with. It's just putting all the pieces together. It felt like this was a moment to have a lot of fun. The rebel in me likes taking a risk. And it was a little crazy to put a note out there saying, okay, I've had my run with Ted. Who wants it? The person with the best idea can have it. And that process has worked spectacularly better than I could have hoped.

25:12It's so interesting because, like I said, I think lots of leaders struggle with this. But part of what I hear you saying is there was just the sense that I might not be the best person for this anymore. I might not be the person that can steward this through this next phase. Yeah, I think that's right. I think I felt I still had a role to play behind the scenes. I'm still staying on as chairman of TED, of the TED Foundation. And already just in the few months since the torch has been passed, I've seen so much evidence that the next chapter of TED is going to blow away anything that's happened in the last few years.

25:51It's really, really, really exciting to see. I want to talk about feelings for a second, just because one of my experiences with giving things away and letting go of control is that it's often not easy. You may feel that it's the right thing, but that still can make you scared or territorial or have those moments where, like, oh, no, I made a mistake. and just looking back at both these organizational moments of giving things away, the videos and TEDx, but obviously also your own moments of giving things away and this moment that you're in of watching this organization that you've built to be stewarded by someone else.

26:33Will you talk a little bit about sort of like what that feels like? Humans are really weird. We are wired to be generous, but a lot of us don't even know that. like it is a psychological fact that people who give away something end up being surprised at how happy that makes them. You would think evolution, wanting to nurture generosity, would make it obvious to people that they were going to be happy so that it was easier to be generous. It's not easy. We have loss aversion. We're frightened to give things away. And there's lots of things stop you doing it. And it's kind of amazing that if you actually go ahead and do it, it feels great.

27:18It's a habit. Like any habit, the more you do it, the more you get to know that part of yourself, that even though this is hard in the moment, afterwards, you're probably going to be celebrating. And so I think the feelings have been, in the past, harder than this time. Will you talk a little bit about some of those hard moments, just what it was like when you're learning to be good at this? Well, with TEDx, things play in your mind. Like, what if someone screws it up? What if there's some organizer on the other side of the world you can't control who does something really awful and ruins our reputation, et cetera?

27:59All those sort of what-if things are there. And so you start by doing little experiments, and you say, oh my god, that event that they did was actually amazing. And that encourages you. And so you learn to find the right way to do it. But I think it's a really important thing of discovery of anyone to know that you kind of sometimes have to trick yourself or persuade yourself or use whatever you can to just do it. And then afterwards, you look back in delight and say, that's great. I feel better about myself. This is the self I want to be. I want to be this more generous self. And so one thing leads to another, you know, and so as with anything else, you know, if you want to build muscle, you have to work out, you have to try it, and you have to build a habit.

28:46And so that's interesting, because part of what we're talking about is like big decisions, like it sounds like these monolithic moments. There's this concept of like a one-way door and a two-way door. It's a Amazon decision-making framework, I think, where a one-way door is a decision you can't take back, and a two-way door is the decision you can take back. So, you know, obviously much lower consequence. And when I hear you talk about these decisions, they sound like one-way doors, like giving away your brand sounds like you have very hard to like rein it back in. But then you're actually talking about almost seeing it as experiments.

29:19So did it feel like you tested these things before you did them? Yes, we actually did in both cases. In the case of TED Talks, we initially put out six talks. It was just here is just six talks out of the whole conference. So no one went to the conference. It wasn't everything. No, it wasn't everything. But the trouble was the reaction to those talks made it impossible for us not to give away the rest. And so, but it was still, it was an experiment. Impossible because people were like, I love this, give us more. Yeah. And it sort of immediately became clear. It became clear that it was the right thing to do.

29:53With TEDx, we entrusted a few early organizers to put on an event and went to them and thought, wow, other people can do it just as well as we can. Imagine the amplification that's possible. I like it. So the experimentation was part of it. You're right. So you're correct that the experiments themselves were one day, once you've given something away, you can't get it back. It's a one-way door, but you don't have to give everything away at once. You can learn the right way to give things away and gain the courage. And you can test. And that sounds like that maybe is you said use the word like trick yourself into doing something that's uncomfortable or something that your team is skeptical of and it sounds like one way to do that is to to find the sort of smallest experiment you could run to see yes yeah yeah put a toe in the water put a toe in the water

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34:30Okay, so we're going to go ahead and go to audience questions. Go ahead. Hi, Pankaj. Chris, you have passed the torch. But what is your vision for TED 2036? What would you like the future to be at TED? I mean, I passed the torch, so it really doesn't matter.

35:01I mean, look, what was so exciting about discovering that Sal Khan was willing to be the vision steward going forward is that we share so many values. He spent his whole professional life building free knowledge for the world in a way that taps more neatly into the educational curriculum than Ted's type of knowledge does. But it's the same values. The internet was made to share knowledge freely. So from that start point, I trust him to do what he wants to do. Yeah. Will you, this is a moderator's privilege, Will you just talk for one second? You had a lot of choices, sounds like, last summer between different organizations that were interested in taking over TED.

35:45Will you talk a little bit about some of the hardest parts of that decision and just what made you know that Sal was right? When we put out the open call for who would be the next steward of TED, it was like we need someone who can, you know, carry forward the values that TED really cares about, invest in growth, not give in to commercial interests, etc., etc. We were deluged. More than 100 companies and organizations put themselves forward, and it was really, it was kind of, what? I had no idea. So many people cared. And it was very tempting to go where the big checks were being waived. You know, there were people willing to put nine-figure sort of sums into TED and to really grow it.

36:29And, oh, you could be this even much bigger global influence and so forth. Ultimately, what won the day was a desire to hold to the core values, like the risk of a conflict between shareholder interest and the ideas that matter most at this moment, it was just very hard to wriggle ourselves away from that and to believe that someone with the big check wouldn't end up themselves in a kind of conflict of, you know, someone's going to need payback at some point. And so we decided that the non-profit route was the right way to go. And of the non-profit options on the table, Sal was by far the most compelling.

37:14So we've talked about so many of your radical experiments, but I'd love it if you could do a deep dive on Audacious, because at$1 million, Ted's sort of becoming one of the largest philanthropies in the world. And I'd love to get your sense of where Ted is uniquely suited, what ideas you take on and which you don't, because you're in plastics, ocean, abortion, health. and do you see synergies across the global TED community audacious TEDx do those all hook up at some point so just some context in the early days of TED we introduced a TED prize that gave what eventually became like a million dollar prize to one recipient for their wish to change the world and that was beautiful and worked, but there's a limit to what you can do.

38:07Even an incredible social entrepreneur, there's a limit to what they could do with a million dollars and Ted was gaining scale and there were people in the community with much deeper resources and so the time came when we thought, you know, we could convene a group of donors and put projects in front of them but how? The problem with philanthropy for a lot of donors, if you really get the truth out of them, is that it often comes across as boring. It's sort of worthy, boring, but please don't, I don't have the time and emotional energy to listen to this. From the point of view of the social entrepreneurs, their life is hell.

38:51These are heroic people who've devoted their lives to trying to make change in the world. And we expect them to spend 70 % of their time raising money, one bloody, frustrating meeting after another where they get rejected. So it's a terribly broken system. So really, the Audacious Project was, well, what would it take to make philanthropic projects sound really exciting and actually raise a lot of money in one go so that they don't have to lead these miserable lives of just raising money instead of actually changing the world, which is what they're meant to be doing. And so the Audacious Project was, okay, let's try and do this.

39:32Ask the social entrepreneurs, what is the biggest thing your team could actually achieve if money was no object? Dream your biggest dream. Make the hair stand up at the back of my neck. And then to the donors to say, boy, do we have something exciting to show you. We're not going to give you anything bad. we're going to give you carefully selected out of hundreds of projects ten that are mind-blowingly bold and have been tested for credibility and so forth. And it turns out that when you do that, magic happens. And so once a year now in the Audacious Project, we select down to ten projects that are asking for a lot of money.

40:13It's typically of the order$100 million,$50 to$100 or sometimes more over several years. And we bring together 30 or 40 families, and they spend two and a half days working extremely hard, looking through these projects, watching mini TED Talks of the founders in action, and asking questions, et cetera, et cetera. And at the end of it, clock's ticking. it's okay, before anyone goes, are we going to support these or not? And this process has broken the sort of logjam. And so the last few times we've done it, huge amounts have been raised. This last one, just over a billion dollars was committed into basically in the last hour and a half of a two and a half day process.

41:01It's mind blowing to see. And it's so inspiring to see. It's like I understand the resentment out there and the anger against billionaires and how evil they are and all the rest of it. If you could see these billionaires in action, they are passionate about getting this right. They are determined to give back. And they are generous and they give away more money than they've given away in the rest of the year often. And then they shed tears of joy because it was inspiring. And so there's something going very right here. And I think there's so much more that this can do, because as the amount of private capital builds up in the world, and as the needs in the world build up, we can think much more imaginatively about how to change the future and how to apply that capital in a really important way.

41:52It's actually one of the things I'll be spending more time on in my next chapter is on the Audacious Project.

42:05Since this is your retrospective moment, what are two or three of the most surprising or incredible things that you did not see coming when you showed up the first day at a TED in the last 25 years that really still leave an impression with you? Goodness. I mean, I didn't see online video coming for one thing. That was, you know, and that's changed everything that we can do.

42:34And I guess just in the sort of world of, well, I didn't see the crushing disappointment of technology that happened, I would say around about, you know, the sort of rise of social media and some of the things that followed from that. My own, I've always been, I'm optimistic by nature. I've been a techno-optivist. I really believe that the internet fundamentally could bring the world closer together. You can see everyone in the world, you know, like surely everyone's circle of empathy is going to expand. Our sense of we will get bigger. And to see something like the opposite of that happen over the last 10 years has been, did not see that coming, horrible.

43:21And yet an even bigger sock to the face has been AI. I just, you know, like all of you, had a ChatGPG moment. And then since then, the pace of change in technology has dwarfed by an order of magnitude what we got used to with the March of Moore's Law, to the point that it just, I can hardly breathe. I'm incredibly excited by it, and it's really hard to navigate. so that's I suppose the case in sort of general landscape terms in people terms I mean they're just every year there are people who it's like how are we so lucky to share the planet with this person you know whether it's a 14 year old Kenyan who flies to California on a plane for the first time in his life speaks just after Sergei Brin that shows his invention of a device that flashes lights to scare away the predators, has the crowd on its feet.

44:30It's like, how does this happen? It's just an amazing time to be alive that we get exposure to amazing people. I feel like the world that I hate is the world where people are locked in zero-sum, pointless battles with each other, where the goal is to grind each other down and score points. And I can't bear that world. The world here that we celebrate is a world of possibility where people come and say, no, no, you know, let's talk about the past for a minute. Let's imagine what could be and then what could we build. And every time someone does that and you see what is possible, You see how a problem can actually be solved and that this is what humans do.

45:27That just brings such exhilaration and delight and just reaffirmation of how lucky we are to be humans alive at this moment. Chris, it seems your genius is to identify and build force for good lovers. so in your own words what are you lit up about that you think is most important that you can share that we need to hear I think at this moment the dynamic that's most important is humanity's relationship with artificial intelligence you can't underestimate the power of what we're building now and there are so many ways that this could go. The hopeful scenario is that AI empowers us to be our better selves.

46:24I try to make that happen in my own life and when it does you can certainly get more done, you can learn more about yourself. A really interesting prompt to type into an AI is based on all you know about me? How could I better use my time next week? Like, try it, if you dare. Love those questions. If we get this right, the future can be really, really, really incredible. So I don't know, I think that's the most important thing. I would say figure out how to let AI make you your better self. Love that. I asked it what it was worried about for me this year and it was really intense. Well Chris we have two minutes left and I just want to give you those two minutes to see if there's anything else you want to say to this room of people.

47:23I mean I'm amazed that anyone's still here. No one's asleep just so you know. My parents were missionaries. They had a very strict view of religion, that the only duty in life was to spread the gospel, whatever. I ended up no longer sharing their religious beliefs. But what has stuck with me from them is that they were selfless people who didn't spend much on their own needs and yet were deeply joyful. This is the human paradox. We know a lot about the things that make us happy, the things we can buy. We know that relationships really matter. We know that nature really matters. We know all these things.

48:19The thing that a lot of us don't fully know is that if you can work for something that's bigger than you are, if you're so lucky to be able to do that, there is deep joy that comes from that. I inherited that from them. My great fortune in life has been to move to a place where I got to do that. I used to do a media company. We were making computer magazines. That really wasn't a purpose that much bigger than myself, is making money from magazines. To get to move sideways and to try to join this community and to get to work on ideas. Most people have to work for a paycheck and they don't like their work.

48:58They go home and they get meaning from their families and other things. And that is how things are for most people. If you are not one of those people and you actually love what you do and it is in a sense bigger than what you are, you are one of the lucky ones. And it's just, it's easy to forget that. And, you know, don't forget that. That is the most beautiful thing. Well, Chris.

49:27I just want to say I'm in lots of ways very new to Ted, but I feel like I'm part of a family now and on behalf of everyone in this room. And I think everyone that has been touched by TED in a variety of ways over the last 25 years, I think we feel like the lucky ones that you took your vision and invested it into this community, your time and your energy and your stewardship. And we're so grateful. Thank you, Molly. You're kind. Thank you.

50:13Work Life is a production of Ted and Pushkin Industries. This episode was produced by Isaac Carter. Banban Chang is our story editor. Mixing by Hansdale Shi. Ted's executive producer is Daniela Balarezzo. Constanza Gallardo is the executive producer for Pushkin. Special thanks to Roxanne Hilash, Valentina Bohanini, Laini Lott, Tansika Sungmanivong, and Ashley Murphy. If you like the show and want more, come join the discussion on my Substack lessons. I'm Molly Graham. Thanks for listening.

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52:45Hard to catch, but that first robin call is actually a deepfake created by an artist using AI. New technological advancements and scientific breakthroughs are transforming the way we understand non-human generated sounds. What if AI could help us understand the first thing an elephant mother said to its baby when it was born? Or even make it so that an orca could give a TED Talk? The possibilities are world-bending to think about, but this kind of interspecies communication needs strong ethical guardrails. scientist Karen Bacher dives into it all on one of five featured episodes on sea creatures only on TED Talks Daily.