Kelly Corrigan

And Tammy, my producer, said, I'm going to send you something today.

It was also so interesting to have these lead-up conversations with Duncan because he needed zero help or support from me in shaping his talk and choosing his words.

And I need you to kind of clear your calendar for an hour after you read it, at least, because it is very affecting.

I mean, he's a complete expert.

I mean, he exceeds my abilities.

And so that wasn't the point at all.

But these lead-up conversations were so interesting to me because I was asking him to think about how AI might factor in here.

And I was delighted by his willingness to go there intellectually and have that conversation and consider those factors and features that might make family life something that is good for childhood development or that...

And she was right.

And I just read these words and totally bawled.

I could imagine ways in which you would tip your hat to... There are all kinds of roles for AI to play in my story.

So when the Ted thing came up, I really wanted somebody to speak to the kind of loss that is always possible in family life.

Here are some.

do a scan of Rory's blood type faster and give us more personalized options.

Yay.

You know where it doesn't belong right here.

And then you just do the moment.

Yeah.

AI can technically live forever.

It is totally unlimited.

It can take care of, quote unquote, millions of people at the same time.

But people, people have to choose where to spend their limited time, where to invest their limited energy.

People have to sacrifice for each other.

That's part of how we know someone loves us, is they choose us over someone else.

They choose us over work, over play.

They pick us.

And it comes out in these eulogies that we play on Kelly Corrigan Wonders.

It comes out because people talk about that time their special person dropped everything to be with them in their moment of need.

That is a feature of what love feels like.

And to me, a takeaway from this work with Ted and everything you've heard this past week is that that cannot be replicated by AI because AI doesn't have limitations and AI doesn't die, at least not in the human sense.

and what we risk when we join in relationship with one another.

And you can walk away from AI.

You can be rude to AI.

You can fail AI.

And theoretically, it will show up again the next day, chipper and ready to receive you.

So there are no stakes like there are in a human relationship where often you can't walk away.

Because to me, that risk does not exist with AI.

And it's just- Right, right.

And it's like perfecting away.

So I reached out and I felt hesitant because I didn't want Duncan to feel that I was using his tragedy in any way.

At the beginning of the week, I shared my TED Talk.

And as we wrap up this week and thinking about all the ways that AI is spectacular and terrifying, horrible and useful, and things we cannot imagine yet, I can't stop thinking about the very act of staying, which is the heart of my whole TED Talk from 2024.

That extraordinary bravery that it takes to sit with someone through their worst moment and say, tell me more.

What else?

Go on.

Like I can hear anything you want to tell me.

That loving space that's created that's so painful and terrifying cannot be replicated by a mom bot or a parenting bot.

Because the mom bot isn't afraid.

The mom bot doesn't know pain.

The mom bot cannot love you.

The mom bot does not need courage to stay.

And so Duncan's talk has left me feeling glad to be human, feeling glad to be living inside the tremendous risk that comes with deep human relationships.

There's nowhere I'd rather be.

I have had loss.

I've suffered it.

And that suffering feels a lot like love, just in a different form.

Duncan put humanity in the absolute center of the conversation.

I just wanted to say, I have an opportunity.

He put our deepest humanity, our most human moments, dead center.

And I know not everyone agrees with me or the questions and thoughts that we've explored here this week.

I'm Kelli Corrigan.

And of course, that's great.

But for me, in the wake of all my speakers, I find myself feeling strongly that I am just so team human.

If it's interesting to you, terrific.

I believe what I said in my own TED talk more than ever, which is that the reward of all this interpersonal bravery is a full human experience.

Knowing every emotion, even the worst ones, at maximum dosage.

If it's not, don't give it another thought.

That's what I signed up for.

That's what I'm here for.

And he was interested.

He was game.

and i knew that he would need absolutely no help from me and he did not i didn't change one word of this it was so right there what he said on stage it was like on the tip of his tongue and he was so ready for this moment he gave everybody in that audience and now for you listening an unforgettable emotional experience like an insight that we will carry with us until the days we die

I'm a writer.

And how, like, Duncan is sublime.

I mean, he's transcendent.

He's otherworldly.

He's so calm.

I couldn't, I mean, I was like... No, because there was no noise.

Oh, yeah.

And that's it for today.

Elise Hugh will be returning tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.

I loved doing this work from start to finish.

So thank you for listening, for sharing it with your friends, for letting it be fodder for bigger, more important conversations.

That's all I've ever wanted to do in my whole life.

Start good conversations.

And I hope this set of talks and podcasts does just that.

You can find me at kellycorrigan.com or on my podcast, Kelly Corrigan Wonders, wherever you listen to podcasts.

TED Talks Daily is a part of the TED Audio Collective.

This episode was produced and mixed by Lucy Little, edited by Alejandra Salazar, and fact-checked by the TED Research Team.

I'm a podcaster.

The TED Talks Daily team includes Martha Estafanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, and Tansika Sungmar-Nivong.

Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Bellareso.

I'm Kelly Corrigan, guest host of TED Talks Daily, here for a special week where we're taking a deep dive into the topic of AI and family life.

I'm a TED Talker.

I don't know what Duncan Keegan's LinkedIn profile says and I don't care.

I met him through my podcast and ever since I have wanted more people to know him and his story and his mind and his heart.

And I am taking over for Elise Hu this week for a special series on AI and family life.

His talk is so generous and you just kind of have to hear it to believe it.

I mean, honestly, people were just pinned to their seat.

You could have heard a contact lens hit the floor.

It was so quiet.

He had the absolute full attention and also the love of every person in that enormous room.

And he gave us something sublime.

So this is Duncan Keegan's very beautiful talk about his very human family.

I guest curated a session about this topic at TED 2025, and I'm here now to share these very special talks with you, along with a lot of behind the scenes recordings and personal insights to shed some light on the process of how these talks came to life.

So at my day job, which is hosting the podcast Kelly Corrigan Wonders, we do a long-form interview on Tuesdays.

On Fridays, we do a little thing called For the Good of the Order, which is anything I learned that week that we wanted to share.

And then on Sundays, we share a eulogy sent in by a listener.

And basically it's our version of church, which is to say it's our way of reminding ourselves that we have a tremendous impact on one another over the course of our lifetimes and that there are very specific ways that we show people that we love them.

You are listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day.

And so we received this eulogy that a guy in Dublin named Duncan Keegan had written for someone he lost.

Stay with us.

For me, one of the most interesting lines in Duncan's profound talk was, you know, our story is your story too.

And when I first read it in an early draft, I thought, no, that's not true.

And all he meant was there will be a person.

You will lose somebody that you cannot bear to live without.

And in that moment, you are going to have a set of very human needs that cannot be met by anything other than another living human being, another central nervous system to meet yours.

I thought that was such a generous and poignant thing that he said there.

And it was a different category of thought and feeling and expression than we had ever seen before.

He didn't set himself off in this tiny circle of one where the thing that had happened to him, which is every parent's worst fear, absolute worst fear, made him different and separate from everyone else.

What he was saying was, it makes me just like you.

You will go through this.

And when you do, I hope you have a hand to hold as I did.

I thought that was the pinnacle of graciousness.

And we have probably received a thousand eulogies submitted for this special part of the feed.

And so we did.

It's interesting when you ask somebody like Avni to talk about AI and where it should and should not enter the parent-child relationship.

I think this talk was really a call to noticing, which is something that Danini's talk was also asking us to consider.

When does family happen in the course of your day?

Like when does intimacy blossom and what circumstances or conditions are people having the important conversations and interactions that glue them together?

Where and how does healthy attachment between parents and kids develop?

And if it's happening when you're driving carpool, then you should keep driving carpool.

And that's just a stand in for any number of activities that we might have the option of handing off to say AI, which could schedule a Waymo that could take your kids to that baseball game on Thursday.

And the thing that Avni is asking us is, are you sure you want to offload that?

But like my speaker Andy Latz discovered when his young son asked him an extraordinarily deep question while they were sitting in their car at a red light, I always found that I learned so much driving carpool because it gave me comparative data.

Like, I just knew my kids.

And then when I had a car full of kids, I understood, oh, this is how they talk to each other.

This is how much they're on the phones.

This is how many of them say please and thank you and how many don't.

And it was invaluable for me to know what was reasonable for me to expect of our kids.

And that's just one tiny activity that we could be outsourcing that maybe we shouldn't.

I didn't want to set her up to be the villain.

That means you have to have long, thoughtful conversations.

Thinking back on the process for a moment, we worked for months on her talk.

And at first, Avani's instinct was to talk to us as a mother.

And I kept saying, I didn't ask you to come and talk as a mother.

I did need her to be super direct about exactly what areas of family life her product was considering getting involved in.

I asked you to come and talk as a mother who designs AI products for families.

Like you have to bring your professional self to the conversation because that combination of professional and personal experience has given you this set of insights that you're here to share.

And it's just such an interesting conversation between the two of us about how an audience would receive her in those two different scenarios.

And so when she walked out on stage and gave the talk you just heard, she was totally owning both sides of her identity.

And I think a lot of listeners can relate to this and take inspiration from it.

And that yielded a really interesting takeaway that you'll hear in the talk.

When I was listening to Avni's talk, I kept wondering about the tremendous pressure companies might get from venture capitalists and other investors to bypass some of the subtle elements of product design that she wants and needs to blend into the offerings of her company and instead just remove all the friction that Avni talked about.

about a conversation she had with a board member who was starting to see these fascinating and potentially profitable product extensions that made Avni start to wonder what the consequences of that kind of product development might be.

And I think it just puts front and center the idea of the profit motive and getting real about this terrible truth

Whatever makes money will be made.

Whether it's good for society or not, people will make anything that makes money.

There are enough people who are not reluctant in any way to add something to society that will enrich themselves that is utterly unhealthy and will ultimately lead to tremendous dips in well-being for individuals while also enriching the companies who make these products.

There's no question that this is our history and it's a byproduct of capitalism.

Mm-hmm.

And that, I think, is an issue.

And feeling pessimistic that...

Anything could be stronger than the market or the profit motive.

Like that's where I get to is like, are we, is that what we're counting on?

That like enough people are like, yes, I know I could make a fortune here, but I'm not going to.

And all this pushes a very basic question, which is extremely relevant to parenting and AI.

Do we just let the market decide?

Or are we beholden at some other level to develop and provide products that are both what the customer believes they want enough to buy it,

but that we know will be ultimately good for the things that we say we value as a society, like strong families?

And that brought up this really interesting question, which is, is there something lost

To me, that is a million dollar question.

And that makes me think, will some company that is just giving customers whatever they want without a second thought to what's good for all, will they beat Avni's company?

Will they make 10 times the money?

of Avni's company, will they move 10 times faster into the space because they're not worrying themselves with these larger questions, because they're not getting hung up or slowed down by avoiding the same mistakes of, say, social media?

I mean, these forces will never die and they will create fertile soil for certain kinds of products.

And unfortunately, that means we, as the customers, have to be super vigilant.

We cannot defer.

And that is a heavy, very grown up thought to live with.

And a weight that I am feeling as I reflect back on Ted and my work with six phenomenal speakers you are hearing from this week.

when you are not in the weeds with your kids and their lives?

I'm Kelli Corrigan.

Is there a way in which reducing all this noise around logistics threatens some of those tiny time-sensitive interactions that you can occasionally have with your kid when you're driving them to baseball?

That's a conversation that's really worth having.

And that's the whole point of a TED Talk, to start a conversation worth having.

Avni, you did it.

Thank you so much for every one of those insane versions, the ride you took me on.

And then you got out there and you killed it.

So thanks a lot.

That's it for today.

Come back tomorrow when we share what I think of as the most unusual and spectacular TED Talk I have ever heard by a guy from Dublin named Duncan Keegan.

TED Talks Daily is a part of the TED Audio Collective.

This episode was produced and mixed by Lucy Little, edited by Alejandra Salazar, and fact-checked by the TED Research Team.

The TED Talks Daily team includes Martha Estafanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, and Tansika Sungmar-Nivong.

Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Bellareso.

I'm Kelly Corrigan, guest host of TED Talks Daily, here for a special week where we're taking a deep dive into the topic of AI and family life.

Also, please join me at my podcast, Kelly Corrigan Wonders, wherever you listen to podcasts.

I'm a writer, I'm a podcaster, I'm a TED Talker, and I am taking over for Elise Hu this week for a special series on AI and family life.

I'll be back tomorrow.

Thanks for listening.

If you remove every possible hiccup from family life using AI, does that somehow weirdly reduce the number and variety of situations you might find yourself in that are quote-unquote teachable moments?

So I was desperate to get Avni to write a TED Talk.

Now, when she sat down to do it, she had about 4,000 ideas that she was trying to cram into nine minutes.

So the process of working with her was to try to narrow her field of vision on this thing and ask her if you could only say one thing.

If people listen to your talk and then they walk down in the hall and their friend said, oh, I missed that one.

What was it about?

What would they say?

What do you want them to say?

And that's really hard.

And I totally empathize with it as someone who tried to do it the year before.

There's this terrible inclination to try to boil the ocean.

And it's very painful to let go of the opportunity to say three things or four things.

But it's unwise to bite off that much.

And so the process with Avni was to continually refine.

What do you know that no one else knows about designing AI for family life?

Scientist and serial entrepreneur Avni Patel Thompson has created three startups to support family life, including her most recent effort, which has much to teach us about the future of our most intimate and consequential relationships.

And finally, with like no time to spare, she came up with a really brilliant point that is specific and memorable, and you'll hear it now in Avni Patel Thompson's TED Talk.

I guest curated a session about this topic at TED 2025, and I'm here now to share these very special talks with you, along with a lot of behind the scenes recordings and personal insights to shed some light on the process of how these talks came to life.

So last year, after I gave my TED Talk, I was invited to this women's dinner.

And there were probably 25, 30 women there.

And they all had incredible jobs.

Many of them had spoken before on stage.

Many of them had written books.

You are listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day.

Many of them run their own companies.

And Avni Patel Thompson was one of those women.

She had started to develop a product that parents would use to manage the onslaught of logistics involved in family life, such that the parents could be more engaged when it counted.

That was Avni Patel-Thompson from the TED stage.

Don't go away.

We'll be right back for more of a deep dive on Avni's work and what did and did not make it into her TED Talk and why, right after a short break.

And I knew that if we were going to pull this session off, we were going to need somebody who was actually designing AI that parents would use to manage their families.

So the idea that Avni put to the audience that I think is really interesting is how much will we, as the consumer of these AI products designed for family life, be able to tune them to our values?

Which hopefully will be the impetus for talking explicitly about what your values actually are and how they might be evolving over time.

Like, it's not a bad thing for parents to talk to each other about how do we want to communicate about grades?

Like every single school now has a way for parents to track homework assignments and quizzes and tests and essays.

And, you know, it's a choice that parents should make in the context of their values.

Like, are we going to keep our eyes glued to every little thing that happens in the lives of our kids?

Are we going to use something like Life 360 to track their every step?

Do we believe our kids should work part-time and starting at what age?

All of those values are worth talking about.

So if there's a product that you've let into your home to help you, say, reduce friction that is actually somehow forcing that conversation,

You know, are we living our values or do they kind of live over here on some shelf and we don't really apply them and they're not really showing up in our schedule or our budget, which is where the rubber really hits the road.

That could be a very good thing.

And that's what Avni is asking us to consider.

And it's also what she's asking tech designers and developers to consider.

Specifically, how accommodating is your product to the values of the families that will be using it?

And should it be customizable?

So I followed up with Avni and I said, what are you working on?

And she said, oh, we were just trying to lighten the load for parents using AI.

And that's the tricky space we find ourselves in.

That's what Avni opened up for me on stage.

And that's what I heard people talking about.

in the halls after she spoke.

This terrible tension between an AI that can be customized to values, but still somehow adhering to what is known to be true about the world and reality.

And I was like, hmm, what'd you just say?

What I think we want from tools, especially from software, is to simplify our lives.

But with something as powerful as AI and something as consequential as the parent-child relationship, it actually requires that we keep our thinking caps on, that we stay very involved and conscientious about the ways that we're using tools and what might be downstream of facilitating certain activities digitally versus the old-fashioned analog way that we were raised.

I think we better jump on the phone and have a conversation.

And that it's on us to notice and measure the impact of what we might be tempted to offload to AI.

In the years since she's died, Andy and I have had conversations, the likes of which I have never had with anyone.

But I want to tell you, when he was giving that talk, I thought two things.

One, she was so robbed.

And two, I am so happy to put her name into circulation.

And when he got off that stage, we hugged so hard.

We were both crying into each other's chests.

And it was like this incredible swirl of relief and adrenaline and missing this person who was so good.

She was so good.

It's such a sin to have lost her and so satisfying to see him honor her on that stage.

And one of the things he said that always struck me

At one point during the process, Andy said this very vulnerable thing to me.

He said, do you think I would be giving this talk if I wasn't your friend?

And I said, no, you wouldn't.

But not because you're not worthy of the TED stage, but because they never would have found you.

They don't know what I know about you, which is that you learned some really hard, really useful lessons that could be to the benefit of a much larger audience.

and I think it's relevant to this conversation about AI and parenting, is that he used to be a dad, but then he became a mom.

And maybe that was hugely helpful to you because you were head to toe bathed in fear and knowing that she wasn't really any less fearful and yet had done the job in a way that you could tag in.

And he was finding out every day all the things that he didn't know as a dad and that he didn't know he didn't know.

Yeah.

That's nice to know.

It's nice to know that people are afraid.

and still doing it.

So, you know, obviously I, like everyone else, am reading about AI.

Almost every day, an article or two comes up in any number of my feeds or newsletters about some application or advancement or fundraising round.

And I must say, at the risk of getting myself into a little trouble here,

I am not always convinced that the people who are running these AI development companies are great at what I think is the most important thing, which is human connection.

I think they might be great at engineering, and they might be great at raising money, and they might be great at using very complicated tools to create products that could be incredibly profitable.

But that does not mean they understand what connects people to other people in meaningful ways.

And if you don't understand that and you are making the thing that's going to define the world, I am scared.

I would much rather have people who are super good at relationships and love be in charge of some of this stuff.

If you want to make rockets, sure.

If you want to get involved in the parent-child relationship and the development of another generation, I want you to be a proven expert in human relationships, not engineering.

And it made me think about who is behind all of this AI development and whether those people, that handful really of people, know what they need to know in order to be involved in these tender, consequential relationships between parents and children.

And that's what I was thinking about as Andy finished his talk on stage.

You know what I mean?

The question that's still hanging around for me after Andy's talk has been released is, will they listen?

Will they make sure that the N through Z parents, the people like Liz, who knew the things that Liz knew, will the designers and the developers and the profiteers listen?

Will they integrate that point of view, that softest point of view, that softest, most well-earned point of view of

about what families need.

I suspected in picking Andy and imagining him on stage that certain people would listen to what he was saying because they were coming from a guy like Andy.

And to be completely transparent, I am afraid, and maybe for very good reasons, that most moms are invisible.

I'm Kelli Corrigan.

And you know, it's so funny.

We've been dearest, dearest friends for, I don't know, almost 30 years now.

But we've never worked on a project together.

And I loved collaborating with him.

You know, we just never interacted on that level before.

And it was fun to try to help him make his point and make his mark.

I don't think that we are taken seriously as a group of people that are contributing in a very meaningful way to society.

He's a worker, so it was a joy to shepherd him through this super intimate project.

And I feel closer to him than ever.

Andy, you did it.

I knew you would.

I saw your folder of all 40 versions of your talk that's like nine inches thick.

So thanks for never stopping.

I mean, you were rehearsing at 2 p.m.

yesterday for a 5 p.m.

talk, like for never saying good enough, I'm wrapped, but like seeing if you can squeeze just the right next word out.

That's it for today.

Tomorrow we'll be with a woman who is a new friend.

She started a company that is making AI tools for parents.

Her name is Avni Patel-Thompson.

I'm a writer, I'm a podcaster, I'm a TED Talker, and I am taking over for Elise Hu this week for a special series on AI and family life.

I think we get used to buy things that are developed without any input from us.

TED Talks Daily is a part of the TED Audio Collective.

This episode was produced and mixed by Lucy Little, edited by Alejandra Salazar, and fact-checked by the TED Research Team.

The TED Talks Daily team includes Martha Estafanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, and Tansika Sungmar-Nivong.

Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Bellareso.

I'm Kelly Corrigan, guest host of TED Talks Daily, here for a special week where we're taking a deep dive into the topic of AI and family life.

Also, please join me at my podcast, Kelly Corrigan Wonders, wherever you listen to podcasts.

I'll be back tomorrow.

Thanks for listening.

And so watching Andy grow into this new life as a mom and a dad instead of just a dad, it made me wonder, what would he say AI is possible of doing in the context of these profound relationships between parents and children?

what was his point of view about what we or ai could offer to strengthen this fundamental building block of society so i reached out to andy and i said i have this super weird idea and just let me explain i'm doing this session at ted about what a mother's for in an ai world and it's quickly evolving into what is a parent for in an ai world

And I wondered if you had thoughts about that.

And so we started talking.

The thing about Andy that's striking to me is his intellectual and emotional humility.

He's a lifetime learner.

He does the research, whether it's figuring out how to crack into the surf and snowboard market with these watches that he makes or trying to find a clinical trial that might be a match for his wife's ovarian cancer.

He's a guy who knows how to study.

So I knew if he said yes to the talk that he would not stop working on it until it was an A. He is not a person who wants to get an A-.

And so the work began.

And I have to say, the very best version he ever gave was the one he delivered on stage.

And even that day, our session was at five o'clock, but at two o'clock, he was like, hey, do you want to go to one of the practice rooms and just do it one more time?

And I was like, of course, if you want to do it one more time, I'm all yours.

And so they have these little rooms with the red circle rug and they have a countdown timer, just like you're going to have on stage.

I guest curated a session about this topic at TED 2025, and I'm here now to share these very special talks with you, along with a lot of behind the scenes recordings and personal insights to shed some light on the process of how these talks came to life.

And even from two o'clock to five o'clock that day, his talk got a little bit tighter and a little bit better.

Andy Lotz is the co-founder and CEO of a watch company called Nixon, which has absolutely nothing to do with Richard Nixon, although the tagline is, no other watch comes closer to the truth.

I was so nervous when he was on stage that my leg was shaking and my husband, who's his best friend, was sitting next to me and he was like pinching my wrist.

I mean, we were like the crazy parents at the Olympics who are like emoting so insanely while their gymnast is on stage doing her routine.

But all that is neither here nor there when it comes to his talk.

Andy is here as a lifetime learner and a model of intellectual and emotional humility.

And then as soon as Andy started, we were like, oh my God, he's got it.

So here is Andy Lotz on the TED stage.

When I sat down to map out this six part discussion about AI and parenting, I kept coming back in my mind to one of my very best friends.

You are listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day.

His name is Andy Lots and he's like a brother to me.

He is my husband's best friend from business school.

He's been a CEO.

He founded a watch company called Nixon.

We've known each other for 25 years.

We've spent every Thanksgiving with him and his wife.

his whole family.

We've gone on family vacations.

And over the course of that, his wife became a very important friend of mine.

And then she died.

I was a part of Liz's memorial.

So her sister gave a talk, I gave a eulogy, and then Andy spoke.

Thank you.

That was Andy Lotz speaking on the TED 2025 stage.

And in the process of that, I started to see that he was learning things that other people needed to know.

Stick around for a deep dive into what went into making this talk with Andy, the questions that are still lingering for me, and why I think we should all work with our friends more.

Coming up after a quick break.

When I was watching on stage, I felt like Liz Latz, my friend, his wife, was coming alive a little bit.

Towards the end, they showed this picture of Liz and the kids.

It's like one of the best pictures I've ever seen of motherhood.

So the kids are jumping up and down on a sofa and she is both delighted at their joy and also terrified that one of them's gonna fall and break their ankle.

And it's just one of the best photos of Liz that's ever been taken.

And then Andy came off stage to this enormous standing ovation and we just lost it.

Our interactions around Andy's talk were so emotional.

I mean, we both cried every time we talked.

But Andy's so good at crying.

He's just gotten so good at it that he just takes off his glasses and pats his eyes dry.

And you can tell that he's having a little moment, but he just keeps moving.

And so we've learned how to talk through our tears over the last nine years.

So when I first went to the Maasai village, we were being presented with their way of life.

And of course, mental health in Masai villages is strong because it's doing all the things that research tells us lead to strong mental health, which is quite different than the way we do things here in very modern America.

where giant sections of every bookstore are dedicated to self-help that is promoting these very basic ideas of more movement, more outside time, more time in relationship, more agency, more contribution to a community, all of which takes you to this greater sense of belonging, which is a core human need.

And to be totally honest, my reaction was pity.

And it's just interesting to remember that that's the way it was for most of time.

Do you, I mean, this is way too simplistic a question, but is it better for your kids or the kids who stayed in the village and are one of 45?

I felt sorry for the women who were one of many wives.

Like health care.

Danini, like Sarah Herdy, brought a depth of history to the conversation.

So she was such an important element to every conversation because she reminded us of those very old ways of being that most people have abandoned and dismissed as irrelevant or luxuries for time-rich people.

And that is not necessarily true.

You know, one of my favorite things about your story is that—and you didn't say it on stage, I just happened to know it—

is that when your kids come back, the first thing they do is go to the village.

I thought this seems so hard.

So she used to take them to the village, you know, and travel the ground along with them.

But now they can get there themselves and they go home.

I don't think I would like it at all.

I think I prefer the way that modern life goes.

Something I keep thinking about, thanks to Danini, is how many people live a very different adulthood from their childhood versus how many of us just kind of roll on and do it more or less the same way it was done to us.

But even just over the hour and a half that we spent listening to their stories, I started to rethink my initial reaction.

So why did you not want to repeat your childhood?

I started to see that in this community, no one ever gets lost.

Because that's what this moment is going to take.

I mean, we are going to have to potentially be counterintuitive in our moves.

We're going to have to make up a different future where the future is just going to roll over us.

It's just going to smother us.

Our individuality and our special values that we hold so dear are just going to get snuffed out by this giant AI blanket that's going to come down on top of all of us unless somehow we can dodge it.

And it got me thinking, what is progress?

Is it this monochromatic step forward where every bit of it is to the good?

I don't mean to sound like this naive white person from America, but I would love to have raised my kids like that.

All these other women that I love and

fact and count on and all that interdependency and all that like all those little kids running everywhere and just like the which is completely different than being in an American neighborhood like as you said at the top it's not you don't know your neighbors I mean thinking of AI sort of puts me out of the the whole idea why are we discussing AI in relation to motherhood

Or is it more of a mixed bag?

Because at this moment, when AI seems to be surrounding us and ready to come in any door or window we happen to leave open, we should know what world we're leaving behind and what world we're choosing to enter.

Danini is asking us to move forward carefully.

I mean, we are in a tidal wave that is going to want to take us into this big future that is being designed for us by some tiny subset of humanity that may or may not be great at the most important pieces, like, for instance, human connection.

As these forces are rushing us into the future, we have to find a branch to reach out and grab so that we can pause and decide, are we going to go with the flow or are we going to step out of the rushing water and find our own dry ground?

Are we going to try to live a life that's a little different than the one that's being offered to us?

This is a moment for conscientious agency.

And that's, I think, what Danini was saying to us on stage at TED.

Thank you, Danini, for coming all the way from Tanzania and reminding us that there's stuff to hold on to, that we shouldn't be so quick to dive into modernity and leave it all behind.

I'm Kelly Corrigan.

And we should do that carefully.

And that's it for today.

Come back tomorrow.

We'll be with Andy Lotz, who is one of the best friends I have ever had.

He is a humble lifetime learner who has walked a hard road and has something important to tell us.

So my experience of absorbing the truth of this very old Maasai culture, for better or worse, and what modern life has improved upon and maybe what parts of modern life are a terrible degradation of what was, of how this woman grew up, made me want Nini to come to TED and just tell the story of her childhood versus the way she's raising her own children now in the city.

TED Talks Daily is a part of the TED Audio Collective.

This episode was produced and mixed by Lucy Little, edited by Alejandra Salazar, and fact-checked by the TED Research Team.

The TED Talks Daily team includes Martha Estafanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, and Tansika Sungmar-Nivong.

Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Bellareso.

I'm Kelly Corrigan, guest host of TED Talks Daily, here for a special week where we're taking a deep dive into the topic of AI and family life.

Also, please join me at my podcast, Kelly Corrigan Wonders, wherever you listen to podcasts.

I'll be back tomorrow.

Thanks for listening.

I'm a writer.

I'm a podcaster.

She had the power to decide, live as I was raised or live in a new modern way.

I'm a TED Talker.

And she had to work hard to figure out what would be lost if she stepped forward into non-traditional individualistic living.

And I am taking over for Elise Hu this week for a special series on AI and family life.

And then she activated her own great agency to see what parts of her childhood she could somehow replicate in the very modern world where she finds herself living now.

And that is a challenge to all of us.

So ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Danini Kimsera Sikar.

I guest curated a session about this topic at TED 2025, and I'm here now to share these very special talks with you, along with a lot of behind the scenes recordings and personal insights to shed some light on the process of how these talks came to life.

So in February, 2024, a couple months before I gave my own Ted talk, I went to Tanzania with Christie Turlington Burns, who has an organization called Every Mother Counts, which is working to reduce maternal mortality around the world, including here in the United States.

And as part of that trip, we went to a Maasai village and we met this woman.

So 25 years ago, Danini Kimsera Sikar founded the Maasai Women Development Organization to help Maasai girls stay safe and get a great education and pick their own husbands.

That was Danini Kimsera-Sikar on the TED 2025 stage.

But don't go anywhere.

We'll be right back for more reflections and behind-the-scenes conversations with Danini right after a short break.

Danini's talk was all show, no tell.

She just laid it out for us.

This is how I lived as a child.

This is what happened after I left the village.

You, the listener, have to decide which one was better or what parts we should try to bring with us as we evolve into new ways of living.

You are listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day.

He's got fables for everything.

And then, as they became Maasai women, helped them start small businesses and manage their money and buy land.

More and more, I think the super skill is noticing, is being observant.

And I, as a longtime writer, am constantly trying to force myself to do the same with my pages, with my manuscripts, show don't tell, let the story be the message.

And I feel like she did that better than almost anyone on stage this year.

It was so interesting to think through Danini's talk with her over the course of a couple different sessions, because in my other life, as a podcast host of Kelly Corrigan Wonders, I'm often talking to people who are espousing and evangelizing these ironclad moves for better mental health.

Danini is also one of those rare people who has the respect of both government officials and village elders, artisans and policymakers.

All of these great psychologists talking to me about being outside more, walking, being in community with others, staying off your phones, making things from scratch.

I mean, this is exactly the lifestyle that Danini comes from.

You live outside.

You walk to a watering hole.

You milk the cows.

You are enmeshed in nature, which is the most neuroaesthetic place there is.

And you are ensconced from sunup to sundown in community.

Everyone,

in your village knows your name.

What if you were to create the mom bot?

Someone who does know about love and human emotion.

What if someone just like you would be, it would be amenable to the job.

The other huge takeaway I had from Sarah is that, of course, once you settle into her talk, you're thinking we're always changing.

We're always moving into a slightly different version of our species.

And so it helps to know what is the defining feature.

And in Sarah's telling, it's being other regarding.

It's the only way that we could ever survive.

But to my ear, other regarding sounded kind of beautiful and special and something that we should be preserving.

When I listen to you, the thing I feel lifted by is that this other regardingness is, to me, deeply encouraging.

And there's something about Sarah, really.

She has such a twinkle in her eye.

I mean, this is a talk to linger on that.

It's as simple as responsiveness, that that's what the connection, the attachment is based on is who is responding to this baby.

She's such a happy girl.

That is really a stop and stare moment for me.

Like we have to look at that squarely, accept the fact of it and operate accordingly.

academic.

This is what she was born to do, was take on really big, weird questions like this.

Because if we set up a bunch of AI robots that give a baby and a toddler everything he or she wants along the way, we will for sure be changing the species.

Okay.

Let me ask this.

The thing you taught me is that we are an other-regarding species.

That is like this definitional thing about us.

My head is exploding.

So if that's true, could we count on it to save us from this like... No, because it's not innate.

So over the course of this whole project, my little cohort of speakers, these six people, really fell in love with each other.

This is such a fun project.

If you were to convince the audience that a baby's number one slot is up for grabs.

And Sarah was like the leader.

You know, she was like the emotional, moral center of Team Corrigan.

And she was so gracious about saying how much she learned from the rest of us.

And I think that is really humanity at its best.

Sarah, you mischievous.

You're like 18 at heart.

Don't you feel that way?

So thank you for bringing so much credibility and background and history and research into our team.

And that's it for today.

Come back tomorrow for a conversation and a talk with a woman who has led two very different lives, Danini Kimisera Sikar.

TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective.

This episode was produced and mixed by Lucy Little, edited by Alejandra Salazar, and fact-checked by the TED Research Team.

I'm Kelli Corrigan.

The TED Talks Daily team includes Martha Estopanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, and Tansika Sungmar-Nivong.

Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo.

She's probably most famous for surfacing this idea of alloparents, which means other parents.

I'm Kelly Corrigan, guest host of TED Talks Daily, here for a special week of content around the topic of AI and family life.

Thanks for listening.

And please join me at my podcast, Kelly Corrigan Wonders, wherever you listen to podcasts.

I'll be back tomorrow.

Thanks for listening.

I'm a writer, I'm a podcaster, I'm a TED Talker, and I am taking over for Elise Hu this week for a special series on AI and family life.

So there was this sort of resting belief that infants were completely attached to their mother in a singular way.

And the idea that she introduced is that can't possibly be true.

They'd never have survived.

They're very needy.

They're very expensive little creatures.

It takes them forever to stand up on their own and move into the world.

And because of that, there's no way that there weren't other mothers involved in the rearing of these children, which means that children can attach themselves.

to people who are not their mother.

Sarah is so fun to work with because she wasn't thinking about AI at all.

When we first called her, I think she thought, oh, I'm going to talk about the things I typically talk about.

I mean, she goes around the world giving talks.

Yes.

And it's, you know, what's a human for?

In an AI world, what's a human for?

And so our block is kind of what's a mother for?

And I put this idea in front of her, like, can you imagine a reality where AI is involved intimately in the rearing of children?

I guest curated a session about this topic at TED 2025, and I'm here now to share these very special talks with you, along with behind-the-scenes recordings and personal insights that shed light on the process of bringing them to life.

Could they attach to an AI?

We wondered if you might be interested in teaching the audience something about mothers and allomothers and why...

This is the ultimate job for humans that can never be replaced in any meaningful way by any other type of intelligence.

That's a good scientist.

Not never, I guess.

Not never.

She had this huge smile in the column.

She said, interesting.

And then off she went.

And within, it felt like minutes, she had delivered back a draft of a talk.

So here is Sarah Hurdy giving us six million years of human evolution in nine minutes.

Sarah Blaffer Hurdy is such a delight.

She's almost 80 years old.

She takes no guff from nobody.

And she is a true expert in her field.

She's an American anthropologist and primatologist.

She's made huge contributions to evolutionary psychology and sociobiology.

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day.

She won a Guggenheim.

She went to Harvard, blah, blah, blah.

But she really, really understands evolution and the way mothers and fathers have over time been understood, misunderstood, and re-understood.

So I learned that when you're working with a scientist, a serious scientist, they are very conscientious about exactly how they phrase things.

And so my efforts to make her talk more ready for a generalist audience rather than an audience full of academics are

had to accommodate her very high bar for specificity and there couldn't be a single overstatement.

And so, you know, you have that situation where you're trying to marry something fairly detailed with a very general audience, especially the online audience.

who are bouncing around in the middle of their ordinary day and then they might fall into this talk.

You don't want to lose them at the top by going into excruciating detail about the history of Homo sapiens.

So when I first started talking about this fundamental question, in a modern world, in an AI world, what is a parent for?

So the work with Sarah was really about

What is the basic scaffolding that we can offer at the top such that we can get into this bigger, weirder question of what defines our species in terms of how we interact and develop?

And then how might that change and create like a new species?

So for all of you who weren't there, I want you to know that the audience gasped.

when she showed this slide of a little baby making eye contact with a mom bot.

Because right before that, she had set up this very basic truth, which is babies will respond to whomever responds to them, whether that person or that thing is man or machine.

I knew that we needed somebody who could give us the broadest possible view, you know, like the six million year look at us as a species and our evolution and the way that we have typically raised children.

Couldn't it be that three speakers later, the AI guy would say, right, and if it's up for grabs, if it's not written in the code of our beings, then the number one slot could be taken by MomBot.

Because the non-bearer has no perspective.

We have much more after a short break.

So 12 minutes is not a very long conversation.

I have to say that from the start.

And so we were so constrained.

I don't think I've ever done a 12 minute interview in my life.

I was like, oh my God, this is the last thing people need.

And I've interviewed probably six or 700 people over the years.

So it was my job up front to reduce the number of questions from like 18 was the number that I really wanted to ask in a perfect world down to something like four or five so that she could really open up the topic.

That's Lucy Little, my producer.

Lucy was one of several TED staffers who gave feedback on earlier stages of the conversation.

People need people.

This is like, I'm on team human.

I want everybody to be connecting with each other way more eyeball to eyeball, heart to heart.

Right.

So I think...

We want to say get to this really good note.

There's two things at the top, which is it's based on CBT and it's scripted.

It's not generative.

Yeah.

And that's quite a lot of heady thinking.

If I can only touch on four or five ideas here, what are the most salient, essential ideas such that as you go through the rest of the session where you're going to meet these other five speakers, you are positioned in the best possible way to process what people are putting in front of you.

So the first thing that Allison clarified for me that I thought was essential and doesn't get talked about enough, honestly, is who pays for the product and how will the product be evaluated in terms of its efficacy?

I wanted Allison to go first because I thought that...

Because if the profit motive involves keeping people on the app longer so that you can, say, collect more data or place more ads, the app will be designed in one way, which could be enfeebling.

It could be creating this terrible dependency where.

A person becomes less strong and less independent and less confident in their own instincts and more addicted to this little assistant who's going to tell them what to say or do every time they have a strange interaction with somebody in their life.

As my initial reaction to the whole idea of AI and parenting was kind of like, sure, like they can sort through your schedule stuff, like they can do logistics, but they're not going to get involved in the deeper interactions that help kids come into themselves as adults.

But when it comes to Wobot, I was relieved to know that they are paid by insurers based on well-being metrics.

The biggest shift in my feelings, thanks to talking to Allison, is this possible partnership between people and AI.

Like one thing that she said during one of the pre-calls was that for some people, the way that Wobot is talking to them is a model for the ways they could be talking to the people in their own lives.

It's very helpful.

to be in a healthy interaction and see how that flows.

which is basically like asking follow-up questions, making sure that you understood what the person said and meant.

All of that gets modeled in these AI conversations so regularly that it does seem reasonable that a person might start using those same techniques, follow-up questions, confirming that you understand what they really meant in their live interactions with other people.

And that would be a tremendous step forward.

I mean, if people talk to each other that way,

with more intention to understand, less determined to be understood, people might get somewhere.

Relationships would change.

Another huge takeaway from being with Alison throughout the prep period and then also sitting across from her in front of all those people was that we should know who's behind AI.

Because when you meet somebody that lovely, charming, and conscientious, you feel very differently about AI, which is so anonymous in its nature.

But the way that Alison was talking about it, it's not at all that.

It's something that Alison and the people that she has recruited, based on their knowledge of cognitive behavioral therapy, what those techniques are and what makes it effective, what they're putting in front of us.

So it's nice to put a face behind these big, huge letters that seem to be like towering over everything, A.

One of the things I've been thinking about since TED, in terms of everything I learned by getting to know Allison and Wobot, is could there be a really smart, effective way to use an ingestion AI to observe, if you will, a family interaction or a couple's interaction or an interaction between a parent and a child and give notes back to all involved?

I'm Kelly Corrigan.

Like that's just territory that will never be touched.

And then all of a sudden it was like, oh no, of course that will be touched.

Right, because like one eye roll is louder than all the words.

What about if Wobot or another AI is treating all the members of a family?

If impartial, unbiased Wobot was talking to me and my brothers and my parents, maybe it could help me by saying, here's what your brother's really mad about from that vacation in 1978.

Of course there are cases where AI will be better than some parents at some conversations.

I'm a writer.

The only tension I felt was like, was it to the greater good that there was an AI that could walk you through some of your cognitive distortions at two in the morning?

Or is it important in some way that we learn how to do that moment alone?

I think at the end of the day, maybe the most important takeaway from talking to Alison is a process point.

It's like, how are you evaluating AI options that are going to come across your desk?

Like, could we be smarter consumers and advisors to one another as options become available?

I wonder if AI is going to be a great new receptacle for very scary thoughts like, I tried cocaine.

Or my boyfriend wants to try choking.

Oh, yeah.

That there's no way my children are going to come to me with that.

And they never would have.

And so I turned to Alison to say, tell me everything about the 1.5 million people who have used Wobot

Yes.

But will they come to you?

And then what is the responsibility of a company who's in that conversation?

I'm a podcaster.

And I think we're getting smarter through Allison's talk and the talks that are coming up about how we evaluate what questions would we ask of the developer and the designer and the company?

that's offering us these certain products, how would we know who to work with and who to let in?

And help me understand how that might end up looking in the context specifically of family life.

Because we begin the interaction.

We say yes to something and it enters our home.

And I think it's already been clear that we were asleep when we let social media enter our lives.

And I think many people were asleep when they let something like

alexa into their lives like i think you have to know exactly what is in those terms and conditions that we're all clicking okay okay okay before you open the door to your most private spaces well i i think it is interesting i think that a lot of people aren't comfortable

That's Chloe Sasha Brooks, the TED curator who was my guiding light through this entire process during my first exploratory call with Allison.

I'm a TED Talker.

To disavow the audience of this separation that they might have in their mind as I did.

And that's it for today.