Pod Insights TED Radio Hour How taking a second look can change your everything About this episode A second glance can change everything. This hour, TED speakers will make you think twice about robots, history lessons and even wine bottles.
Guests include artists Agnieszka Pilat and Tavares Strachan, chemical engineer Franziska Trautmann and musician Mike Posner.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This message comes from Planet Visionaries. Host Alex Honnold sits down this season with extraordinary doers creating real climate solutions. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.
0:11 Manoush Zomorodi? This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks.
0:18 Speaker 02 Our job now is to dream big.
0:19 Manoush Zomorodi? Delivered at TED conferences.
0:21 Speaker 03 To bring about the future we want to see.
0:23 Manoush Zomorodi? Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.
0:31 Speaker 04 You just don't know what you're gonna find.
0:33 Manoush Zomorodi? Challenge you.
0:34 Speaker 05 We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy?
0:36 Manoush Zomorodi? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person.
0:39 Speaker 06 Yes. Do you feel that way?
0:42 Manoush Zomorodi? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, double takes. Ideas that dare us to take a second look. The other day, I went for a walk in my neighborhood with a new friend and her dog.
1:05 Speaker 07 Her name is Basa. You can call her Basa. Hi, Basa. So sometimes little kids at first gonna have a moment of hesitation, but then curiosity wins and they're always gonna see it.
1:15 Manoush Zomorodi? This is artist Agnieszka Pilat. And as we strolled with her dog, Basa, we turned a lot of heads.
1:24 Speaker 07 What the hell is that? Oh, my God. This is Basa. She's hanging out with us.
1:30 Manoush Zomorodi? Because Basa is not just any dog. She's a robot dog who came from the company Boston Dynamics and cost around $200,000.
1:41 Speaker 07 Yeah, you can touch her. Just don't put your fingers in the joints. Oh, yeah, no.
1:47 Manoush Zomorodi? Do people ever get scared?
1:49 Speaker 07 Small kids sometimes are a little uneasy for a second. People will ask questions, how fast can it run?
1:56 Manoush Zomorodi? OK.
1:58 Manoush Zomorodi? What's the answer?
1:59 Speaker 07 I don't know, because it's like, it's not a running dog for me.
2:03 Manoush Zomorodi? Okay, right. The factory name for these four-legged robots is Spot. They can run up to 11 miles per hour and were built to enter dangerous places like collapsed buildings and to help patrol areas. Maybe you've seen the video of one monitoring President Trump's Mar-a-Lago residents, or the reports of them assisting New York City police with a raid. Critics say they are simply tools of a burgeoning surveillance state. But as an artist, Agnieszka says people's response to Basha shows it's more complicated than that.
2:38 Speaker 07 It's a Rorschach test. You saw this a little bit, right? How different people react differently. It tells you a lot about the person, how they react towards Basha, which I think is kind of cool.
2:49 Manoush Zomorodi? So this is literally the route that I take my dog on every single day, and she doesn't listen to me like Basha listens.
2:55 Speaker 07 Like Basha?
2:56 Manoush Zomorodi? Yeah.
2:56 Speaker 07 There you go. Another advantage of a robot dog. What is that? Basha?
3:01 Manoush Zomorodi? Robot dog.
3:04 Manoush Zomorodi? Basha can be trained to move autonomously. But today, engineer Glenn Gartner and his son Devin were operating Basha with a remote control. During our walk, she confused many humans and real dogs, too.
3:19 Speaker 07 Well, she doesn't have a smell, so dogs really are very confused about the smell, because it kind of looks like a dog, walks like a dog, but doesn't smell like a dog, which is a big problem.
3:30 Manoush Zomorodi? I'm a tech reporter, and I've been reporting on digital privacy for over a decade. And yet, I found Basha strangely cute, despite knowing what she could be capable of. Yeah, okay, good girl. You wait. Why am I talking like this to her? I sound ridiculous. Agnieszka was trained as a classical portrait artist. But in 2013, she moved to San Francisco and began painting portraits of technology, which eventually led her to Basa.
4:01 Speaker 07 I wanted to paint a portrait of a celebrity of today. And so 2018, I met Basa. And I thought, OK, if Andy Warhol were alive, his Marilyn Monroe would be robot Basa. So that's how I first encountered the robot.
4:18 Manoush Zomorodi? After seeing her portraits of Basa, the engineers at Boston Dynamics came up with another idea.
4:24 Speaker 07 They're like, well, you can't just paint a portrait. You have to play with the robot. You have to teach the robot how to paint. So it was actually initiated by engineers at Boston Dynamics.
4:33 Manoush Zomorodi? Today, Basa helps Agnieszka explore that tension between humans and technology. The two do exhibits together, even paint together. But she's a tool to you. She is not a sentient being or not a substitute for a real mammal in your house. She's something completely different.
4:56 Speaker 07 She is. She's a different species on her own. But she's not a vacuum cleaner.
5:01 Speaker 07 So she's more than that. But, yes, but I mean, I understand technology. She's not self-aware. She doesn't have self-awareness. And, yeah, she doesn't have some weird emerging behaviors.
5:14 Manoush Zomorodi? And yet you feel like you're nurturing her in some way, too.
5:18 Speaker 07 Yes, yes. But in a sense, it's like if you had a doll, you know, we get attached to. And you were talking to Basa. I mean, everyone speaks to her.
5:26 Manoush Zomorodi? I couldn't help it. But I think part of it is the way that she moves is so fluid and smooth and animalistic that you want to be respectful to her in some ways or to show compassion.
5:40 Speaker 07 So this is interesting. So it goes to the core of robotics. We start assigning to them abilities and maybe even feelings. Actually, it's really, a lot of it is just really engineering. It's going to be interesting to see if actually AI will enable robotics to come out of its cage, so to speak.
6:05 Manoush Zomorodi? By taking Basha out in public, Agnieszka hopes the spectacle of this robot dog sparks people's curiosity, not just their fear.
6:15 Speaker 07 As an artist, we are obligated to ask questions and to highlight the big changes that's coming.
6:22 Manoush Zomorodi? What can we learn from those who manage to provoke us to look and then look again? Why should we reconsider something we think we already understand? Today on the show, Double Takes, ideas from speakers who want us to go beyond a cursory glance, how they're pushing people to look at technology, history, and even recycling with fresh eyes. As an artist, Agnieszka Pilat knows that some might assume she fears AI and its potential threat to her livelihood. So she loves surprising them with the story behind her techno-optimism.
7:03 Speaker 07 Growing up in communist Poland, I was subjected to Soviet propaganda most of my life.
7:10 Manoush Zomorodi? Here she is on the TED stage.
7:12 Speaker 07 So this might be kind of strange to say, but today I am a propaganda artist and I work for the machine. How did this happen? Well, let me take you back to my childhood in communist Poland, where crumbling factories were my playground. I didn't have access to modern technology. We didn't have a car, a telephone. We had a radio that played the music of Chopin day and night.
7:43 Speaker 07 But some stations my parents didn't like me to hear.
7:49 Speaker 07 I remember one evening, my brother and I could hear a strange broadcast from behind a closed door.
7:59 Speaker 07 of radio waves would pass overhead. It was only many years later when I realized that was an illegal station, Radio Free Europe. But back then, as a little girl, I could see my parents come out of that room, changed, with a sentiment in their eyes then was unknown to me till then. It was hope.
8:25 Speaker 07 That old crackly radio was my first encounter with the miracle of technology. And while this story might seem sad, to me it's really beautiful.
8:36 Speaker 07 Portraiters always tell stories of the privileged class. In Middle Ages, the subjects were kings and queens. With the birth of capitalism, Dutch merchants commissioned portraits to indicate their growing influence. World-class celebrity portraits were a brilliant commentary on the growing power of pop icons in 20th century America. So likewise, as a portrait painter, I decided to paint the power brokers of our time: intelligent machines. So when I first came to Silicon Valley from Poland, my grand idea was I want to work for the machine. I want to be the court painter for the machine, for technology.
9:21 Speaker 07 And I started painting portraits of old machines, kind of thinking of them as their royal portraits, because this is the royalty of America. The first thing I consider when painting as a portrait painter is the age of my subject. So when looking at Basia, I asked myself, in robot years, how old is she? Basia was different from all my previous machine subjects like vintage airplane parts or lunar space models painted in my studio on a World War II aircraft carrier. They had history, they had personality. Basia's personality wasn't formed yet. Nah, she was like a child,
10:06 Speaker 07 teenager maybe at most, still growing up, receiving frequent firmware upgrades.
10:13 Speaker 07 You see, every time I take Basa for a walk, we meet people in person who are curious. They stop us, they take videos, they ask questions. There is a genuine sense of excitement. But as soon as these videos are posted online, mean comments appear accusing us of surveillance, robots taking over. People actually threaten to smash Basa into pieces, throw her into a river. In person, if someone doesn't like us, they just cross the street. But on the internet, these fears grow into threats and insults, spreading across social media and the search engines.
10:57 Speaker 07 I think the main beauty of robotics is that it forces people to interact with technology in real life. And we're much better in real life as human beings. As soon as someone will post a video online, mean comments are gonna pour in.
11:17 Manoush Zomorodi? Part of me is proud of people for saying, "Watch out for surveillance." Like, there was a point where I think people were very naive about technology and didn't think about these things. So part of me thinks, "Good, I'm glad that they're asking questions." Do you think there's something dangerous about it?
11:33 Speaker 07 I think technology has been unfairly targeted. I think it's even more urgent to engage with technology because there is not gonna be in a moratorium, no robots, no AI. We have to engage actively. That's the only thing we can do. Like with children. So I think about my work as kindergarten. We are parenting these new technologies. We are parenting AI. It's a kindergarten. And we have to be almost helicopter parenting and teaching and passing on these positive values because otherwise, we are in big trouble. In current form, AI is like a young child watching, mimicking the world for the first time in its own unique way.
12:18 Speaker 07 Basia has a physical body to put her in place and in time. But many AI models, they live in the cloud, desembodied, that universal. They don't have just one teacher or one parent. Such an AI is a global child with the whole of human civilization parenting it. We have to nurture this young prodigy, artificial intelligence. That's what technology is to me. It's hope for a better future. That's why I am a propaganda artist and I work for the machine. Thank you.
12:57 Manoush Zomorodi? That was artist Agnieszka Pilat. You can see her full talk at ted.com. And check out the video of my day with Basia at npr.org. On the show today, double takes. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.
13:25 Speaker 00 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.
13:29 Speaker 02 This message comes from TED Talks Daily, the podcast that brings you a new idea every day. Learn what's transforming humanity, from balancing AI in your critical thinking to surpassing discoveries about the adolescent brain. Find TED Talks Daily wherever you listen. This message comes from Rula. The holidays come with an expectation that you're supposed to feel happy. But what if it's not true for you? Rula makes accessing quality mental health care affordable and easy, with sessions costing an average of $15 with insurance. If you've been telling yourself you'll deal with it after the holidays, you don't have to wait. Head to rula.com, that's R-U-L-A dot com, and take the first step.
14:11 Manoush Zomorodi? This message comes from REI Co-op. At REI, they don't just sell outdoor gifts. They use them, test them, trust them. REI knows what to give this season, from joyrides, campfire cheers, or peak views. REI knows what to give the people you love who love to get out there, because they're out there, too. Just stop in and ask a green vest. For the best gifts out there, shop in-store or at REI.com.
14:40 Manoush Zomorodi? It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, double takes, inspiring ideas that come from taking a second look at something, sometimes something very small. For Franciska Troutman, it was a glass of wine.
14:57 Speaker 06 We were actually sharing a bottle of wine, admittedly.
15:03 Manoush Zomorodi? Fair.
15:03 Speaker 06 It was a two-buck chuck from Trader Joe's.
15:06 Manoush Zomorodi? Those were college days. Back in 2020, Franciska and her boyfriend were students at Tulane University in New Orleans.
15:13 Speaker 06 And after we finished that bottle, you know, we often had nights like this where we were, you know, having a little drink, talking about life and what we wanted to do. And we were like, hold on, this bottle is going to end up in a landfill, because Louisiana had virtually no glass recycling.
15:33 Manoush Zomorodi? Oh, really? Even in the places where they do recycle?
15:35 Speaker 06 Right, yeah. So like, for example, New Orleans has curbside recycling, but you cannot put glass in your curbside bin.
15:43 Manoush Zomorodi? Louisiana also does not have a bottled deposit program, so no getting nickels or dimes back for returns. In theory, glass is infinitely recyclable, but many recyclers there consider glass a nuisance.
15:58 Speaker 06 Glass is super heavy. It breaks. And so in those cases, it's hard to separate from other recyclables. And we thought that was a shame. We thought that there had to be a better way, something to do about the glass recycling issue in Louisiana. And so we kind of started Googling.
16:18 Manoush Zomorodi? Like, where to recycle glass? Or how, like, what did you want to know?
16:23 Speaker 06 Yeah, all of the above. We really wanted to know anything and everything about recycling, about glass. I think the first thing we found online was that it wouldn't be viable for us to collect the glass and send it to someone else to process or recycle. Texas was the closest option, which is like five to six hours away, depending on where in Texas it is. And so we did some back-of-the-napkin math on that and realized that that would never work economically. So yeah, then we knew the next step was like, okay, we have to do something. We have to process the glass into something that can be used locally.
17:05 Manoush Zomorodi? As a kid growing up in southern Louisiana, recycling wasn't much on Franciska's mind, but the joys of nature were.
17:13 Speaker 06 Yeah, I actually grew up on a bayou, you know? When it rains, you run outside to play in the mud. When it's hot in the summer, you jump in said bayou and have no care in the world about gators.
17:29 Manoush Zomorodi? In Louisiana, though, there is always a sense that nature is in jeopardy.
17:34 Speaker 06 You're always, unfortunately, familiar with the coastal erosion crisis. It feels like one day we'll just be washed away or flooded and, you know, never see our homes again. Like, it's that kind of scary and big.
17:48 Manoush Zomorodi? Louisiana loses up to 35 square miles of land every year, an area larger than Manhattan. And so when she got to college and had that moment looking at the bottle, she wondered, instead of the landfill, could this glass go to the shore? Could it help restore the land?
18:08 Speaker 06 Now, you might be thinking to yourself, how in the world would two college kids ever be able to make a dent in these problems?
18:16 Manoush Zomorodi? Franciska Troutman picks up the story from the TED stage.
18:19 Speaker 06 And that would be valid. Plenty of people told us the exact same thing, but we didn't listen because we knew that no matter how small of an impact we made, it would be worth it. It felt like we could alleviate two problems with one solution: convert the otherwise landfill glass back into sand and use it in restoration projects across the state. Easy, right? But we didn't listen to the haters, which is actually why we named our company Glass Half Full.
18:51 Speaker 06 But that glass half empty mindset might actually be one of the biggest threats we face today. Dread, doom, and gloom tend to get us nowhere. Whereas, hope, combined with action, can be one of the most powerful tools to enact change.
19:08 Manoush Zomorodi? So instead of being like, okay, we're gonna find a way to recycle glass to be more glass. You were like, let's find a way to use glass that is productive in a very different way. Remind us of the relationship, if you would, between glass and sand.
19:26 Speaker 06 Yeah, so glass comes from sand. And we found this machine that could turn glass back into sand. And sand is something we use, you know, every day in various materials. And it has to be mined to be used in glass bottle manufacturing, but also in concrete and buildings and also our phones and things like toothpaste. And so when we realized we could turn glass back into sand, then we knew that we could use the sand for something locally, even if it wasn't coastal restoration, because I knew that it would take some research to figure that out. We could use it in construction. We could use it in landscaping. You know, things that sand are used for. It felt like, why don't we do that?
20:13 Manoush Zomorodi? So still, college students, Franciska and her friends, jumped into action. They set up shop in a fraternity house and raised money to buy their first glass-crushing machine.
20:24 Speaker 06 It was like the size of a tween, like a 12-year-old. And it has this long, skinny neck on it. So you put the bottle in the top. It falls down that chute. And then it meets the hammer mill. And then at the bottom, there's a bucket. And that's where the sand comes out.
20:41 Manoush Zomorodi? Then they set up collection bins all around town and found out that people were hugely excited to recycle their glass.
20:49 Speaker 06 So we would swap out the full ones for empty ones and then bring all the glass to the back of the frat house.
20:55 Manoush Zomorodi? That was where it all got turned back into sand.
20:58 Speaker 06 It's just like 10 people in this backyard. We have some music bumping. And like, some people are sorting through the glass. Some people are taking caps off. There's one person crushing. And the rest of us are like hand sifting the material. It's ridiculous. It's absolutely ridiculous. We're like trying to make it fun. You know, we're begging our friends to come help us crush glass. And basically, we did that until nighttime and even past that and then went home, went to bed and did it again.
21:27 Manoush Zomorodi? And again, and again. And when they weren't crushing glass, they were scheming about what to do with the sand they were left with.
21:34 Speaker 06 The goal was to figure out if we could use it for coastal restoration. But we also knew that we couldn't just go dump it on beaches and be like, done. You know, there had to be some research involved. So I brought that to a lot of my professors and we ended up applying for a National Science Foundation grant to do that research.
21:53 Manoush Zomorodi? What they found is they could use biodegradable sandbags and plant native grasses to build back the marshes, to restore the land. That convinced many Louisianans to pay a bit to join their recycling program. Now, Franciska has a business and does it full-time.
22:11 Speaker 06 We outgrew the smaller places pretty quickly. So by August of 2020, we had moved into a 40,000-square-foot facility. Just the hopper itself is like two stories tall.
22:24 Manoush Zomorodi? Wow.
22:25 Speaker 06 Last year, we did about 4 million pounds of glass and we are aiming to triple that this year, at least.
22:31 Manoush Zomorodi? I mean, how many beer bottles are we talking?
22:34 Speaker 06 So a beer bottle is half a pound. So 4 million pounds would be 8 million beer bottles.
22:41 Manoush Zomorodi? Wow.
22:46 Speaker 06 The loud part is definitely the bottles, like the bottles being dumped from a dump truck. That's really loud and then scooping the bottles from like the ground into the hopper. And we create three main products. One is the sand for coastal restoration, but we also now create flint and amber cullet. So cullet is the raw material to make new bottles.
23:12 Manoush Zomorodi? And what's been the reaction? Like, to me, I'm like, this is amazing. This makes total sense, but I know that's never as simple as it sounds. Who are the people who have take issue with you? Like, what are some of your challenges?
23:28 Speaker 06 I will say, overall, people are extremely supportive and really do love our idea and love what we're trying to do. Some of the main complaints I get, at least in Louisiana, are people who think I'm trying to solve all of coastal erosion in Louisiana. I get comments like, "We don't have nearly enough glass bottles to solve our coastal erosion issue." And I'm like, "Duh. I'm not trying to solve our entire coastal erosion issue. I don't think that's possible for, you know, one solution or one person. I think it's going to take so many different solutions and so many different people getting involved to solve this huge issue."
24:13 Manoush Zomorodi? And let's say someone's like, "All right, but I don't know. How do I get into that mindset that you were in, where you looked at something and thought, you know what, we can do something with this instead of just throwing it away? How do you sort of coach people to have that creative approach?"
24:34 Speaker 06 I think I'm still learning how to truly get people to think that way. But the best method that I think I've found showing people is like, show by doing. We were always sharing our struggles, what we needed help with and what was going wrong. And I think people saw that and felt more compelled to help. The key was that we simply started and we kept going. Somewhere, the belief that we, as individuals, could enact change trumped our doubts. And for us, finding a way to help with a problem much, much bigger than us meant taking that first step.
25:19 Speaker 06 And in our case, it was a step in the sand in an eroding, but once magnificent swamp. Thank you all.
25:27 Manoush Zomorodi? That's Francesca Troutman. She is the CEO and co-founder of Glass Half Full. You can see her full talk at ted.com.
25:38 Manoush Zomorodi? On the show today, double takes. People compelling us to take a look at something we think we understand.
25:48 Speaker 02 Ralph Ellison, who wrote The Invisible Man, sums it up quite nicely. I think he says, "Sometimes invisibility is a refusal to see. It's not that the information is not there. It's more about training ourselves to be conscious of the things that we're not necessarily paying attention to."
26:03 Manoush Zomorodi? This is artist Tavaris Strawn, and he was first introduced to this idea when he was a child, growing up in the Bahamas.
26:11 Speaker 02 We have a big family. There's over 60-plus grandkids.
26:16 Manoush Zomorodi? 60-plus?
26:17 Speaker 02 Yep. My grandmother and grandfather had 13 kids, so when we were all together, it was a big group of people.
26:25 Manoush Zomorodi? When he was around 10 years old, his grandfather came home with a set of encyclopedias.
26:31 Speaker 02 And it was a, it was a big deal, as you would imagine, because all of a sudden, all these little kids had access to all this knowledge. So imagine the pomp and circumstance of having these encyclopedias arrive at the house. And I remember first looking at them, thinking, how absurd is this process of collecting this much information and trying to share it with the general population?
26:54 Manoush Zomorodi? That's what went through your mind as a, as a kid?
26:57 Speaker 02 I thought it was very odd. I thought there was a certain level of hubris in the process, and I realized that immediately there weren't the kind of stories that reflected the environment that we were in. So I know more about Napoleon and Christopher Columbus than I do about, for example, you know, the River Nile, or Marcus Garvey, or any kind of African origin. And at the time, I think the population of the Bahamas was probably 90% black. And so all we were being fed was material that was being scripted for a primarily European audience. And so I think the question always was, where are we? Who are the people who are in this community? Are we located anywhere else and represented anywhere else?
27:44 Manoush Zomorodi? Incredibly astute for a young kid. I think I probably would have thought like, whoa, I can hold the world's knowledge between my two hands, but that is not what you thought.
27:56 Speaker 02 You know, I feel like that level of skepticism, healthy skepticism, that is, was what pushed me towards the arts in the first place.
28:05 Manoush Zomorodi? As an adult, Tavoris took that skepticism to art school in the US. He also started traveling the globe, searching for lost stories.
28:15 Speaker 02 And trying to understand what a society does with all the information that is not recorded in not a part of the zeitgeist, if you will.
28:25 Manoush Zomorodi? And as a grad student, he came across a name he'd never heard before, Matthew Henson.
28:31 Speaker 02 Matthew Henson was one of, or if not the first, to make it to the North Pole. And he traveled in 1909 with Robert Perry.
28:40 Manoush Zomorodi? I had never heard of Matthew Henson, and I'm guessing that most people listening also have not heard of Matthew Henson. Can you tell us about him?
28:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, Matthew Henson, he worked as a dekan with Admiral Perry for many, many years. As a teenager, traveled throughout Central and South America. Admiral Robert Perry was an explorer himself in his own right. And they just spent so many years together. And then the race to the poles began. And for context, this race was like going to space, making it to the North Pole back in 1909. So this was a big deal, if you know what I mean. And I think, I think one of the things that really turned the tide was Henson became one of the more trusted explorers on the team, if you will. His mushing skills, his navigational skills, his ability to withstand the freezing temperatures, all those things mixed together.
29:34 Speaker 02 And also, his kind of social prowess, his ability to navigate the indigenous folks that he was interacting with. And in 1909, they made a trek to the pole and successfully arrived at the pole. And this was a big deal. And for the most part, Henson's story was more or less left as a kind of shadow to the main story of Perry.
30:00 Speaker 02 Now, this son of a sharecropper had managed over seven Arctic expeditions. Yet his massive, massive contributions became lost to history. And I ain't really cool with that.
30:14 Manoush Zomorodi? Here's Tavora Stron on the TED stage.
30:17 Speaker 02 So years later, I decided to make my own encyclopedia. It's called Encyclopedia of Invisibility. This is a 3,000-page leather-bound book that has over 17,000 entries. Now, the first entry that I wrote was on, you guys may have guessed it, the explorer Matthew Henson. From there, I thought, who and what else should be included in these pages? I would make list after list of things that were excluded from history and research them. At first, it was just me alone.
31:01 Speaker 02 Then I needed an assistant, and then I needed an entire team. And together, we would comb the globe looking for people, places, and things that were mostly untold. So let's look at this entry on Robert Smalls. Now, the great Robert Smalls freed himself from slavery, overtook a bunch of Confederate ships, freed a whole bunch of slaves from those ships, and then majestically marched on to become one of the first black congressmen in the United States. Then there's an entry on rhinoceros. Did any of you know there was a woolly rhinoceros? No? Then there's an entry on Sister Rosetta Tharp. Sister Rosetta Tharp is the mother of all rock and roll.
31:45 Speaker 02 Then there's an entry on the great John Edmundston, the man that taught a very young Charles Darwin the art of taxidermy and a whole lot more. Now, after 12 years, a limited edition of this encyclopedia was published as an artwork, occupying these territories between sculpture, book, and installation. And this experience truly convinced me that there are an infinite amount of lost stories to be told. The encyclopedia is a very large, it's black to blue leather with gold accoutrement and gilding.
32:23 Speaker 02 It's very much channeling this like 17th century notion of the book. And I'm really playing with that, using that language of authority, of knowledge. And these entries kind of feel very similar to what you would visually look at in a traditional encyclopedia, except they include the kinds of things that you might not learn at school.
32:45 Manoush Zomorodi? When we come back, the missing story that Tavora Strawn found while training as a cosmonaut in Russia. On the show today, double takes. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.
33:13 Speaker 02 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Rula. The holidays come with an expectation that you're supposed to feel happy. But what if it's not true for you? Rula makes accessing quality mental health care affordable and easy, with sessions costing an average of $15 with insurance. If you've been telling yourself you'll deal with it after the holidays, you don't have to wait. Head to rula.com, that's R-U-L-A dot com, and take the first step.
33:43 Manoush Zomorodi? This message comes from REI Co-op. At REI, they don't just sell outdoor gifts. They use them, test them, trust them. REI knows what to give this season, from joy rides, campfire cheers, or peak views. REI knows what to give the people you love who love to get out there, because they're out there, too. Just stop in and ask a green vest. For the best gifts out there, shop in-store or at REI dot com.
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34:39 Manoush Zomorodi? It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, double takes. What happens when we take a second look? We were just talking to artist Tavaris Strawn, creator of the 3,000-page encyclopedia of invisibility. This is a book full of forgotten stories that he believes deserve their place in the history books. There's another entry that I would love you to tell us about, Robert Henry Lawrence. How did you find out about him?
35:13 Speaker 02 I think I'd just come back from space training in Star City, Russia.
35:19 Manoush Zomorodi? Wait, I'm sorry. You can't just start a sentence like that. Can--what? Rewind.
35:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, so when I'd come back from the Arctic, on one of my first expeditions, I started to think about space. And in a parallel way, I wanted to get the kids in my neighborhood to think about exploration. And so one of the things that I was thinking about was, how do I do that? And one of the ways to do it is to go train to be an astronaut or depending on where you are on cosmonaut. And so I spent many, many months over a couple of years doing this training.
35:53 Manoush Zomorodi? Wow.
35:54 Speaker 02 Back and forth to Russia. And then the story of Robert Henry Lawrence started to emerge as the first kind of black astronaut who was supposed to go to space and then didn't--wasn't able to make it because he had died in a training exercise when the plane that he was on exploded.
36:13 Manoush Zomorodi? Had you heard that story previously?
36:15 Speaker 02 I hadn't, no. I think I learned about Robert Lawrence from one of the astronauts, actually, that I was working with in Russia.
36:23 Manoush Zomorodi? So you added Robert Lawrence to the encyclopedia, but you also created an unusual piece of art?
36:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think the question--the big question in my head was, seriously, is there a way to get this guy who died so tragically into space? So step one was to find someone with a rocket. And who has rockets? The head of SpaceX, Gwen Shawwell. And then I had to figure out who was going to be as interested in these lost stories as I was.
37:01 Speaker 07 The head of SpaceX, Glenn Shaltwell. We were introduced by the LA County Museum. And after four years of rigorous testing, planning, and sculpting, a satellite was produced in honor of Robert. Now, this satellite was made of gold, and it was important for me to have this satellite follow an ancient Egyptian tradition of storytelling by imbuing the essence of a person into a container. Now, this satellite was called Enoch after a story of a mythological character whose walk with the gods was so close that he never, ever died. On November 30, 2018, Enoch blasted into space in the
37:42 Speaker 07 belly of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket into orbit. Almost 50 years after his passing, the legacy of Robert Henry Lawrence is celebrated amongst the stars.
38:01 Manoush Zomorodi? So SpaceX is, of course, owned by Elon Musk, who was working with the Trump administration to roll back numerous DEI initiatives. And, for example, the Pentagon also is removing names of Black, gay, and Native American veterans from various places. And I guess, you know, it's confusing. We finally got to a point where, as a society, we've started to acknowledge that there are many stories that had not been told, and we are taking another look and bringing them to light in some places, obviously not all. And now it feels, though, at least in the United States, that we're not going to be adding to those stories. In fact, we might be taking them away.
38:45 Manoush Zomorodi? What are your thoughts on that?
38:47 Speaker 02 I, where I go with that immediately is I, I think about what, what's the purpose of art and artist? And I think what artists are really, really good at is they're really good at systems and thinking about systems. You know, if you think about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you know, once we've achieved food, water, and shelter, I think there's art, right? And I think it is the thing that will save us. Obviously, I'm biased, but I think it's the thing that will save us. And so where I go, where I'm going with all of this is, there has been a long, long history of artists interrogating systems. I'm a Part of that tradition and that tradition will never stop.
39:29 Speaker 02 So I feel very much empowered as an artist more today than I was yesterday. Because if the question is, what do we do next? I think the answer is we continue to support artists in the work that they're doing to interrogate these systems to bring about change.
39:46 Manoush Zomorodi? What are you working on next? I'm I'm a little trepidatious to ask, really. Are you launching yourself somewhere or tell me what's you're thinking about?
39:57 Speaker 02 The the thing that I'm working on now is an exhibition entitled The Day Tomorrow Began. It's an immersive work that features a kind of several several dialogues regarding the idea of the hero, how societies create heroes and and the monument that we leave behind.
40:16 Manoush Zomorodi? It it seems like you are someone who is a believer in heroes, maybe unsung heroes as they're called.
40:22 Speaker 02 I, you know, I think that there's a there's a deep level of complexity with the idea of a hero. Because I think the hero, a hero denotes a certain level of expectation of perfection. And I think what we're learning is what happens when our heroes are not perfect. What do we do? How do we think about that? Right, and I'm really interested in that.
40:43 Manoush Zomorodi? I'm trying to square that with the idea of Henson and Lawrence and turning them into famous figures as they should have been to kids. And is that not part of what you're doing? Is raising these people up who who were left behind, whose stories weren't told? Giving them sort of heroic status for kids so that they have something to aspire to?
41:11 Speaker 02 One of the most powerful things about criticism is the critic has to be careful not to become the thing that they're criticizing. And I think being an artist is always a little bit of a dangerous game of understanding the balance of the the kind of. The curiosity or the the the problem that you're trying to solve. And kind of reconciling that with the with the reality, right?
41:36 Manoush Zomorodi? Yeah.
41:37 Speaker 02 So, a good example of that is is the first successful and only slave revolution in this hemisphere was the one in Haiti. And King Henry Kristoff, who I love in particular, was a part of the movement that basically eradicated France from Haiti. But one of the things that he did as a convention of of his scenario as an ex-slave who became a leader was he he became king, right? So this guy who's a hero of mine in a way recreated the problem to some degree that he was eradicating. And I'm interested in that. I think that's fascinating. And I I accept that as a part of the story also. And I think
42:21 Speaker 02 there's a certain colonial quality to the way that we've told stories over the past hundred years that I think
42:27 Manoush Zomorodi? Yeah.
42:28 Speaker 02 doesn't allow for that layer of complexity. We want to tell the black and white story, and most stories are just not that way. And so how do we how do we captivate an audience with a story by still being reflective of the future of of storytelling? Which I think is about being able to make space for the complexity of this person who got rid of Napoleon's army in Haiti and made this place free. And actually, not just that, inspired the freedom of the folks in the the Americas, like this is a big deal. So to have someone who is this central figure, you look at him close and you're like, wait a minute, why would you want to be a king? When we just got rid of the king? Is something that I think we all should take a look at.
43:14 Manoush Zomorodi? So this episode that we're um including our conversation in, we're calling it double takes. Thinking that you know something and then realizing when you look again that you you know nothing. Am I accurate in thinking that that's what you're doing? You're you're you're asking people to look again, reconsider their preconceived ideas?
43:38 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, I think it's oftentimes shocking that these stories that are sitting in plain sight just elude so many of us. And I think the notion of being an artist is synonymous with critical thinking. You couldn't be an artist without being able to think critically. The most important skill as we move into the future with technology and AI is for humans to be able to process critically what they're seeing, how they're seeing it, and why they're seeing it. So the level of skepticism that I expressed to you at the beginning of this conversation when I was a kid, I still have today. But I now just call it critical thinking.
44:22 Speaker 02 Artists are trained to investigate things at a very, very high level, and I think that is a very important skill to the future of human survival.
44:32 Manoush Zomorodi? That's artist Tavoris Strawn. You can see his full talk at ted.com. We want to end our show about double takes with a story from a man who decided to take a second look at what success was bringing him. This is musician Mike Posner.
44:54 Speaker 07 Some of you may recognize me from that song, "I Took a Pill in Ibiza." But I'm not the same person I was when I wrote that.
45:03 Manoush Zomorodi? For Mike, everything changed when he decided to take a step back by ironically taking a very, very long walk.
45:14 Speaker 07 I want to tell you about the time that I tried to walk 3,000 miles all the way across the United States of America and the five life lessons that I learned.
45:24 Manoush Zomorodi? Mike Posner continues from the TED stage in 2024.
45:28 Speaker 07 But way before I tried to walk across America, my story begins with my father. My dad used to always tell me when I was little, "Mike, there's two things that are most important to me. I want you to be healthy. I want you to be happy." Now, the healthy part, that came easy to me. But the happiness, I struggled with that. I was kind of a shy and depressed kid, and I thought if I could get everyone to like me, you know, maybe I would be happier. And so I set about trying to get everyone to like me, and I'll let you guys in on a little secret. I was very effective at getting people to like me. In fact, by the time I was 22, I had become famous.
46:11 Speaker 07 I would walk on the stages and people, forget about like, they would scream for me. I would take my shirt off at the concerts. They'd scream even louder. I'd go backstage and tell me how great I was. But I'd get to the hotel and I'd be alone. And the happiness that Dad wanted for me, it just wasn't there. I tried everything, therapy, meditation, self-help books, and retreats. Nothing worked. And so, out of options, I decided to chase after the happiness that Dad wanted for me. And one last way, in a way that had been stuck in my head for many years, I decided to walk across America. Now, very quickly, the people I worked with in the music industry
46:54 Speaker 07 gave me the feedback that this is a career-ending decision. That's when I learned life lesson number one. Not all crazy ideas are great, but all great ideas are crazy.
47:11 Speaker 07 And so, I made the decision, but still, these negative thoughts kept coming up in my head. Thoughts like, what if I really hurt myself permanently from doing this walk? What if I fail? What if I don't make it across? And like, I fail in front of everyone. But on April 15th, 2019, I stood off the coast of New Jersey and I took a step. And when I took that step, all the fears and doubts about what might happen if I chose to do this, they disappeared because I was doing it. And that's when I learned the second lesson. Step one, is take one step. I walked across New Jersey and Pennsylvania. I walked across Ohio, where I developed blistering foot pain.
47:55 Speaker 07 It was worse than I thought it would be, but I kept going. Before I knew it, I'd been walking for over three months. I could just see the Rocky Mountains on the horizon. Went, ow! Pain shot up my left leg. And then I heard a sound that I didn't want to hear.
48:14 Speaker 07 A poisonous rattlesnake had just sunk its fangs into my left leg. I called 911 and I asked dispatch, "Am I going to die?" And the voice on the other end of the phone said, "I don't know, sir." I spent three nights in the ICU. My legs swelled to the size of an elephant trunk. I went from walking 24 miles every day to not being able to walk to the bathroom. But after a lot of PT and great medical care, I got better. It's now I had a decision to make. I could either A, return to my life of fame and luxury and Uber Eats
48:59 Speaker 07 and unhappiness, or I could B, go back to the sweltering heat, go back to the blistering foot pain, go back to the sides of the roads where the cars almost hit me every single day. This path sucked and it hurt a lot, but it taught me lesson number three. When it comes to things I care about, my reasons to quit are always excuses in disguise. And so I went back to the exact spot that that darn snake bit me, and I took a step. And I kept taking steps until I walked up and over the Rocky Mountains. I kept taking steps until I walked across Navajo Nation. I kept taking steps until I walked across Arizona. I kept taking steps
49:43 Speaker 07 until I walked across Nevada. I kept taking steps until I walked across the Mojave Desert. I kept taking steps until the Hollywood sign was on my right. And after six months and three days, 2,851 miles, 5.7 million steps, I dove face-first into the Pacific Ocean.
50:09 Speaker 07 And while I was in that water, an unfamiliar emotion washed over me. And that was happiness. And that's when I learned lesson number four. True happiness comes from growth. And so now, I had the health, I had the happiness, but I ain't not my dad. Two years before I started walking across America, my dad was diagnosed with glioblastoma as a form of brain cancer. And on January 11, 2017, my dad passed away.
50:53 Speaker 07 And I want to be real with you today. I had the idea and the inspiration to walk across America way before my dad got sick. But every time spring rolled around, I would say, "Next year, next year." And as a result of me saying, "Next year," my dad never got to see me achieve my biggest dream, my biggest accomplishment. And he never got to see me truly happy. Lesson number five, don't wait. Thank you.
51:34 Manoush Zomorodi? That was musician Mike Posner. You can watch his full talk and performance at ted.com.
51:41 Speaker 07 This song's for Dad.
51:42 Manoush Zomorodi? Thank you so much for listening to the show. This episode was produced by Rachel Faulkner White, Katie Monteleone, Kai McNamee, Matthew Cloutier, and Fiona Giron. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkempur and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes James Delahoussie and Harsha Nahada. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Our audio engineers were Simon Jensen, Jimmy Keely, and Tiffany Vera Castro. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Roxane Hylash, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Balarezo. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.
52:27 Speaker 02 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.
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