TED Radio Hour - How taking a second look can change your everything

Episode Date: June 27, 2025

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. TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at plus.npr.org/ted. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading.

From TED and NPR. I'm Manus Shumerodi. 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. Her name is Basha. You could call her Basha.

Hi, Basha. So sometimes little kids at first going to have her, I have a moment of a hesitation, but then curiosity wins, and they're always going to see it. This is artist Agnishka Pilate. And as we strolled with her dog, Basha, we turned a lot of heads. What the hell is that? Oh, my God. This Basha. She's hanging out with us. Because Basha is not just any dog.

She's a robot dog who came from the company Boston Dynamics and cost around 200,000. Yeah, you can touch her. Just don't put your fingers in the joint. Oh, yeah, no. Do people ever get scared? Small kids sometimes are a little uneasy for a second. People will ask questions, how fast can it run. Okay. What's the answer?

I don't know, because it's not a running dog for me. 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, Agnizhka says people's response to Basha shows it's more complicated than that. It's a Roshak 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. This is literally the route that I take my dog on every single day,

and she doesn't listen to me like Basha. Like Basha? Yeah. There you go. Another advantage of a robot dog. Oh, what is that? Basha. Robot dog. Do you want to...

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. She doesn't have a smell, so dogs really are very confused about the no 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. 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. Agnishka 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 Basha. I wanted to paint a portrait of a celebrity of today. And so, 2018, I met Basha. And I thought, okay, if Andy Warhol were alive, his Marilyn Monroe would be robot Basha. So that's how I first encountered the robot. After seeing her portraits of Basha, the engineers at Boston Dynamics came up with another idea. They're like, well, you can't just paint a portrait.

You have to play with the robot. You have to teach the robot to paint. So it was actually initiated by engineers at Boston Dynamics. Today, Basha helps Agnizhka explore that tension between humans and technologists. The two do exhibits together, even paint together. But she's a tool to you. She is not a sentient being and not a substitute for a real mammal in your house. She's something completely different. She is a different species on her own.

But she's not a vacuum cleaner. 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. And yet you feel like you're nurturing her in some way too. 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 Basha. I mean, everyone speaks to her. 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 she, show compassion. So this is interesting. So it goes to the core of robotics.

We start assigning to them abilities and maybe even feelings. Yeah. Actually, 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. By taking Basha out in public, Agnishka hopes that. the spectacle of this robot dog sparks people's curiosity, not just their fear. As an artist, we are obligated to ask questions and to highlight the big changes that's coming.

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 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, Agnizhka Pilate 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. Growing up in communist Poland, I was subjected to Soviet propaganda.

most of my life. Here she is on the TED stage. 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

or crumbling factories were my playground. I didn't have access to modern technology. We didn't have a car, a telephone. We had the radio that played the music of Chopin, day and night. But some stations my parents didn't like me to hear. I remember one evening, my brother and I

could hear a strange broadcast from behind the closed door. But an iron curtain cannot stop the transmission of radio waves which 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.

That old Crackley radio was my first encounter with the miracle of technology, and while this story might seem sad, to me it's really beautiful. Portraiture always tells stories of the privileged class. In Middle Ages, the subject were kings and queens. With the birth of capitalism, Dutch merchants commissioned portraits to indicate their growing influence. Warhol's 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 machine. 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. And I started painting portrait of old machines, kind of thinking of them as their royal portrait, 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 Basha, I ask myself,

In robot years, how old is she? Basha 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 career. They had history, they had personality. Basha's personality wasn't formed yet. Now, she was like a child, teenager maybe at most, still growing up, receiving frequent firmware upgrades.

You see, every time I take Basha 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 threatened to smash Basha 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. 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 the video online, mean comments are going to pour in. 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? I think technology has been unfairly targeted. I think it's even more urgent to engage with technology because there's not going to be 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. Basha has a physical body to put her in place and in time. But many AI models, they live in the cloud, that's embodied at 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. That was artist Agnisha Pilate. You can see her full talk at TED.com. And check out the video of My Day with Basha.

at NPR.org. On the show today, double takes. I'm Manusse Zamorodi and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anoush Zamoroti. On the show today, double takes.

Inspiring ideas that come from taking a second look at something. Sometimes something very small. For Francisco Troutman, it was a glass of wine. We were actually sharing a bottle of wine, admittedly. Fair. It was a two-buck chuck from Trader Joe's. Those were college days.

Back in 2020, Francisco and her boyfriend were students at Tulane University in New Orleans. 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. Oh, really? Even in the places where they do recycle? Right, yeah. So, like, for example, New Orleans has curbside recycling,

but you cannot put glass in your curbside bin. 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. 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. Like, where to recycle glass or how, like, what did you want to know? Yeah, all of the above. We really wanted to know anything and everything about recycling, about glass. 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 was 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. As a kid growing up in southern Louisiana, recycling wasn't much on Francisco's mind, but the joys of nature were. 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.

In Louisiana, though, there is always a sense that nature is in jeopardy. You're always unfortunately familiar with the coastal erosion crisis. It feels like one day we'll just be washed away or flooded and never see our homes again. Like, it's that kind of scary and big. 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? 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? Francisco Troutman picks up the story from the TED stage. 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. But that glass half empty, my mind, 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. So instead of being like, okay, we're going to 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. 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 all 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? So still college students, Francesca, and her friends jumped into action. They set up shop in a fraternity house and raised money to buy their first glass-crushing machine. 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. Then they set up collection bins all around town and found out that people were hugely excited to recycle their glass. So we would swap out the full ones for empty ones and then bring all the glass to the back of the frat house. That was where it all got turned back into sand. It's just like 10 people in this backyard. We have some music bump in and like some people are sorting through the glass.

Some people are taking calves 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.

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. 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.

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 Louisianaans to pay a bit to join their recycling program. Now, Francisco has a business and does it full time. We outgrew the smaller spaces 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. Wow. Last year we did about four million pounds of glass and we're aiming to triple that this year at least. I mean, how many beer bottles are we talking? So a beer bottle is half a pound. So four million pounds would be eight million

beer bottles. 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. 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?

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.

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? 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 shown 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. And in our case, it was a step in the sand in an eroding but once magnificent swamp. Thank you all. That's Francesca Troutman. She is the CEO and co-founder of Glass Half Full. You can see her full talk at ted.com. On the show today, double takes. People compelling us to take a look at something we think we understand.

Ralph Ellison, who wrote The Invisible Man, sums it up quite nicely. I think he says, sometimes invisible 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. This is artist Tavares Strawn, and he was first introduced to this idea when he was a child growing up in the Bahamas. We have a big family.

There's over 60-plus grandkids. 60-plus? Yep. My grandmother and grandfather had 13 kids. So when we were all together, it was a big group of people. When he was around 10 years old, his grandfather came home with a set of encyclopedias. And it was a big deal, as you would imagine, because all of a sudden, all these little kids had access to all his knowledge. So imagine the pomp and circumstance of having these encyclopedias arrived.

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? That's what went through your mind as a kid? 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. and I do about, for example, you know, the River Nile or Marcus Gavio, 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? I mean, that's 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. You know, I feel like that level of skepticism, healthy skepticism, that is, was what pushed me towards the arts in the first place.

As an adult, Tavares took that skepticism to art school in the U.S. He also started traveling the globe, searching for lost stories. And trying to understand what a society does with all the information that is not recorded in not a part of his eyeguice, if you will. And as a grad student, he came across a name he'd never heard before. Matthew Henson. 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. 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? Yeah, Matthew Henson, he worked as a decon 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 had just spent so many years together. And then the race to the polls 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 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. 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, Hansen's story was more or less left as a kind of shadow to the main story of Perry. Now, this son of a sharecropper had managed over seven Arctic expeditions, yet has massive, massive, massive, contributions became lost to history. And I ain't really cool with that.

Here's Tavares Strawn on the TED stage. So years later, I decided to make my own encyclopedia. It's called the Encyclopedia of Invisibility. This is a 3,000-page leather-bound book that has over 17,000 entries. Now, the first entry that I... I wrote was on, you guys may have guessed it, the explorer of 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 researched them. At first, it was just me alone. Then I needed an assistant, and then I needed an entire team. And together we would comb the 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 really rhinoceros? No? Then there's an entry on Sister Rosetta Tharp. Sister Rosetta Tharp is the mother of all rock and roll. Then there's an entry on the great John Edmonston, 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 they're 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. And 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. When we come back, the missing story that Tvaristran found while training as a cosmonaut in Russia. On the show today, double takes. I'm Manus Shumeroody, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manus Zomerode.

On the show today, Double Taked. What happens when we take a second look? We were just talking to artist Tavares 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? I think I'd just come back from space training in Star City, Russia. Wait, I'm sorry, you can't just start a sentence like that. What? Rewind. 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 in Cosmonaut. And so I spent many, many months over a couple of years doing this training. Wow. 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 wasn't able to make it because he had died in a training exercise when the plane that he was on exploded. Had you heard that story previously? I hadn't, no. I think I learned about Robert Lawrence from one of the astronauts, actually, that I was working with in Russia.

So you added Robert Lawrence to the encyclopedia, but you also created an unusual piece of art. Yeah, I think 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 Chalwell. And then I had to figure out who was going to be as interested in these lost stories as I was. The head of SpaceX, Gwen Chaltwell.

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 goal, 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 belly of a cellarer. SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket into orbit. Almost 50 years after his passing, the legacy of Robert Henry Lawrence is celebrated amongst the stars.

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. What are your thoughts on that? I where I go with that immediately is 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 artist interrogating systems. I'm a part of that tradition, and that tradition will never stop.

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. What are you working on next? I'm a little trepidacious to ask, really. Are you launching yourself somewhere or tell me what you're thinking about? 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 dialogues regarding the idea of the hero, how societies create heroes, and the monument that we leave. behind. It seems like you are someone who is a believer in heroes, maybe unsung heroes, as they're

called. 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 a 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. I'm trying to square that with the idea of Henson and Lawrence and turning them into famous figures, as they should have been, two kids. And is that not part of what you're doing is raising these people up 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? 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 kind of the curiosity or the problem that you're trying to solve and kind of reconciling that with the reality.

Right. Yeah. So a good example of that is the first successful, an only slave revolution in this hemisphere was the one in Haiti. And King Henry Christoph, 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 his scenario as an ex-slave who became a leader was 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 accept that as a part of the story also. And I think there's a certain colonial quality to the way that we've told stories over the past hundred years that I think doesn't allow for that layer of complexity. We want to tell a 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 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 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? So this episode that we're including our conversation in, we're calling it double takes, thinking that you know something and then realizing when you look again that you know nothing. Am I accurate in thinking that that's what you're doing? You're asking people to look again, reconsider their preconceived ideas. Yeah, I mean, I think it's oftentimes shocking that these stories that are sitting in plain sight just allude 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 you at the beginning of this conversation when I was a kid, I still have today, but I now just call it critical thinking. 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. That's artist Tavares 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.

Some of you may recognize me from that song. I took a pill in a Biza, but I'm not the same person I was when I wrote that. For Mike, everything changed when he decided to take a step back by ironically taking a very, very long walk. 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. Mike Posner continues from the TED stage in 2024. 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 said 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'd become famous. I would walk on the stages and people, forget about like, they would scream for me. I would take my shirt off at the concert. They'd scream even louder.

I'd go backstage. They'd 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 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.

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. 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 when ow! Pain shot up my left leg. And then I heard a sound that I didn't want to hear. 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, and 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 not had a decision to make. I could either, A, return to my life, of fame and luxury and Uber eats and unhappiness, or I could be 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 past 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 until I walked across Nevada. I kept taking steps until I walked across the Mahi Desert. I kept taking steps until the Hollywood sign was on. 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. And while I was in that water and unfamiliar emotion washed over me. And that was happiness. And that's why I learned lesson number four.

the true happiness comes from growth. And so now I had the health, I had the happiness, but I ain't at 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 11th, 2017, my dad passed away. 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. That was musician Mike Posner. You can watch his full talk and performance at TED.com. This song's for that. Thank you so much for listening to the show. This episode was produced by Rachel Faulkner-White, Katie Montalione, Kai McNamee, Matthew Cloutier, and Fiona Guren.

It was edited by Sanaas Meskampur and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes James Delahousie and Harsha Nahada. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Our audio engineers were Simon Jensen, Jimmy Keeley, and Tiffany Vera Castro. Our theme music was written by Romteen Arablewe. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Roxanne Highlash, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Balezzo. I'm Manus Zamorodhi. you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.