Chloe Shasha Brooks

Hey, everyone.

Thanks for listening to Maxwell Pierce's talk.

I'm Chloe Shasha Brooks, speaking to you from New York City.

I'm a curator at TED, which means that I help find speakers for our programs, work with them on their talks, and get them ready for the stage.

Before you go, I'm jumping in here to share some behind the scenes from Maxwell's talk, more about who he is and why we share this talk with you today.

While curating this Play at TED event, all around the theme of play, it felt super important to me to include a professional athlete, but not just any athlete.

the harlem globetrotters are inherently a playful team bending the rules of basketball doing wild stunts and laughing while they're doing it so then the question was who from the harlem globetrotters should speak funnily enough one of the main things that drew me to maxwell in particular had nothing to do with the talk i invited him to give

On his Instagram, he posted a conversation with his grandmother, who's named Lovely Hill.

She'd been a model in her youth, and their conversation was about how she had been featured on the cover of Ebony magazine in 1961, and that saying yes to being on that edition's cover is the reason Maxwell exists today.

Let me back up.

Long story short, before she got that magazine cover opportunity, a doctor had scheduled a procedure for her to remove her ovaries.

It was something she didn't actually want, but that her doctor prescribed to her, and she and Maxwell reflected on the fact that it was essentially forced sterilization.

But something fortunately got in the way.

Ebony Magazine called her to be on the cover to model a hat, so she canceled her medical procedure because of the timing of that photo shoot, and that appointment never got rescheduled.

The next year, Maxwell's mother was born.

There was something about this story and the bond between Maxwell and his grandmother in this conversation that left me with a clear, palpable sense of Maxwell's intelligence, genuine kindness, curiosity, and thoughtfulness.

It felt clear to me that he had the potential to give a fantastic TED Talk.

The main challenge that Maxwell and I encountered as we worked together on his script was figuring out how to strike the balance between his experience as an athlete and his journey as an artist.

His art is stunning and his athletic ability is jaw-dropping.

Once he narrowed in on the anchor of his talk, this idea that playfulness brings out the best in him as an athlete and as an artist, the talk structure came together more clearly so that he could really illustrate how play has been central to his personal and professional journey.