TED Talks Dail‪y‬ TED Talks

Debbie Millman talks to author Cheryl Strayed about her childhood, career and the value of taking a very long hike. Listen and subscribe to "Design Matters" and more podcasts from the TED Audio Collective at audiocollective.ted.com.

To futureproof your job against robots and AI, you should learn how to code, brush up on your math skills and crack open an engineering textbook, right? Wrong. In this surprisingly comforting talk, tech journalist Kevin Roose makes the case that rather than trying to compete with the machines, we should instead focus on what makes us uniquely human.

Corporations and big business have wrecked the environment, but disadvantaged communities living in "sacrifice zones" -- urban areas heavily polluted and poisoned by industry -- are paying the price, says climate justice leader Angela Mahecha Adrar. Explaining why racial and economic justice must be at the center of climate action, she takes us to the frontline communities that are leading the world to clean, innovative and just climate solutions -- like Cooperativa Tierra y Libertad, a local farm co-op in Washington that's disrupting the multibillion-dollar berry business.

In the grand scheme of history, modern reality is a bizarre exception when compared to the worlds of ancient, precolonial and Indigenous civilizations, where myths ruled and gods roamed, says historian Greg Anderson. So why do Westerners today think they're right about reality and everybody else is wrong? Anderson tears into the fabric of objective reality to reveal the many universes that lie beyond -- and encourages a healthy reimagining of what other possible ways of being human could look like.

Aliens have invaded ancient history: they've cropped up in humanity's past through popular television and movies, displacing facts with absurd yet commonplace beliefs like "aliens built the pyramids." Archaeologist Sarah Kurnick illustrates why these misconceptions perpetuate racist and xenophobic notions of history and culture -- and demonstrates how you can help debunk these dangerous, outlandish myths.

On his first day as president, Joe Biden signed a letter of acceptance that set in motion the 30-day process for the United States to re-join the Paris Agreement on climate. On the day the US returns to the accord, John Kerry, the US Special Envoy for Climate, sits down with Nobel Laureate Al Gore to discuss the make-or-break decade ahead of us. Listen as Kerry lays out how the US fits into the global plan to get to net-zero emissions, explains why the COP26 UN climate conference could be humanity's "last best hope" to build international momentum and explores the role of business and youth activists in promoting environmental justice. (This interview features an introduction from Christiana Figueres, the principal architect of the Paris Agreement.)