Kiah Williams

speaker

130 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 28 Feb

Kiah Williams’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

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TED Talks Daily · What to do when you’re told there’s nothing left to try | David Fajgenbaum and Kiah Williams · 28 Feb 2026 podcast

I think for me, it was, yeah, when I was young, my family just fell apart and we were teetering at the edge of poverty.

And I remember going outside one night, I grew up in West Philadelphia.

I remember going outside one night and literally saying to myself, like,

I have to be the one that saves myself, that creates a new path for myself.

And so I had always focused on school and trying to do well, but I made this decision at a young age to just say, I was like, I need to get out of here, and I need to do something and have a better life than this for myself.

And the only one who's going to do it is me.

That obviously wasn't true.

I had a ton of help from like teachers, even my parents, et cetera.

But I remember being very young and 15 years old and saying, like, I got to do something different.

I need to do something different and better and was able to like work really hard, buckle down in school, got a full job.

need-based scholarship to Stanford and essentially that was the beginning of me recognizing like I could harness my own power and try to make something of myself.

And I think fast forward years from then when I was actually working in clinics and medical clinics and was going to be the first doctor in my family and would see patients

who weren't getting better.

Doctor leaves the room, it's just me in the room as a health coach, talking to patients about whatever they want to talk about and learning that sometimes people weren't getting the medicine that they needed because they couldn't afford it.

So that's why their blood pressure is still high, their cholesterol is still high, their diabetes is not getting better.

And I realized that I wanted to do something that could address that at a root level.

for those patients who were trying to take care of their health, and just all of these external factors were blocking their ability to be well.

I think...

There's a really good quote that one of my co-founders used, and I love this because I think it so speaks to me, is sometimes motivation follows motion, not the other way around.

And so I think sometimes literally just by putting one foot in front of the other, you don't have to have 100% of the answer.

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