A parent's guide to raising kids after loss | Andy Laats (Kelly Corrigan takeover)
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You are listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm Kelli Corrigan. 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 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.
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. 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. And in the process of that, I started to see that he was learning things that other people needed to know.
In the years since she's died, Andy and I have had conversations, the likes of which I have never had with anyone. And one of the things he said that always struck me 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 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. 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 to be completely transparent, I am afraid, and maybe for very good reasons, that most moms are invisible.
I don't think that we are taken seriously as a group of people that are contributing in a very meaningful way to society. I think we get used to buy things that are developed without any input from us. 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. 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.
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