I should never have spoken at TED this year. The invitation arrived in late February, leaving just over six weeks to pull something together. The real kicker though, was that Sammy and I were expecting our third child in early March.
Six weeks to write a talk, plus birth, postpartum recovery, a brand new baby, a 5-year-old and 4-year-old, and a newsletter to keep ticking over. "No way Sammy. It's a pity, I would have loved to do it again, but obviously it's impossible. Oh well."
Even if I could go, what was I supposed to say? I'm a solutions journalist, and yet everywhere you look at the moment, it's chaos. Gaza, Ukraine, Trump, science under attack, aid budgets obliterated, Türkiye, Sudan, Mali, Haiti, the DRC, bottom trawling, seabed mining, climate change. All our worst fears seem to have come true this year.
A friend of mine probably had it right when they suggested I just stagger on stage with a black eye and a torn shirt, shrug, say "sorry, I've got nothing" and then slink off.
Sammy and I slept on it though. And slept on it again - and then she told me, "I think you should do it. If things get too hard we can always pull the pin. Now more than ever though, people need to hear other stories, and you should be there. Let's get some support in place, and start figuring out whether this is even possible."
And with that, we were off to the races.
How do you talk about progress when the world is falling apart?
My first meeting with the curation team took place on the 28th February, just hours after the Trump/Zelensky blowup at the White House. Understandably, the mood on the call was pretty bleak.
Fortunately, I had an idea. A few years ago, I came across a concept from the Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy, called The Great Turning. It's a classic example of Hegelian dialectical thinking, which says that ideas contain inner tensions that push them forward. Progress through contradiction, and then reconciliation.
Thesis. Antithesis. Synthesis.
Once I made the decision to use that as a framework, there was suddenly room for the kinds of stories we share in this newsletter.
To be honest, looking back a lot of the writing feels like a blur now, especially after our little girl, Juno, arrived in early March. Sleep got weird and time bent out of shape, but in between the cuddles and the latching and midnight scripting sessions and bleary-eyed school runs with Lola and Cleo, the talk started taking on a life of its own. I realised pretty quickly that my main job was to get out of the way.
Amidst her recovery and the crazy job of caring for a newborn, Sammy kept finding me an hour or two, Amy reminded me that when you're telling stories of doom, one word is more powerful than ten, and my curator at TED, Whitney Pennington-Rodgers, was amazing as always, providing just the right level of support.
By late March I had a good first draft. Now I just had to work out how to make it look good.
You gotta risk it for the biscuit.
How do you tell a compelling visual story on a screen the size of a small building? For my last big talk, I used all three screens as a single canvas, instead of the traditional 16:9 format. This time, I wanted to go even further: a seamless, immersive experience that would make the audience forget they were watching a presentation at all.
After the initial call with the curation team, I reached out to Jordan Knight, a motion designer based in New York. Her work has this textural, flowing quality that I knew would be perfect for bringing the story to life. The concept I had in mind was ambitious, maybe foolishly so. I wanted two contrasting visual languages: the story of collapse illustrated through ink-blot shapes inspired by the alien language in Arrival - those haunting, oil-spill forms that Denis Villeneuve used so brilliantly. For progress, we'd use the opposite motif: green shoots, growth, life pushing through.
The execution was brutal. Jordan was incredible, but we were racing against the clock, hunting down Creative Commons images because there wasn't time for permissions, animating everything simultaneously, keeping the TED production team in the loop and stretching our cut-off date to the limit.
Then, two weeks before the talk, I had what might have been my worst idea yet.
"I want to add music underneath the entire thing."
TED's response? "We really don't recommend it." The reason is that the timing has to be perfect. If you skip a word or forget your lines, get out of sync, or pause for any audience reaction, the entire experience collapses, and the video edit afterwards becomes a nightmare.
But as my friend Danny Popper reminded me in a timely phone call, you gotta risk it for the biscuit. The risk/reward ratio was massive - if I could pull it off, I'd add an entire emotional layer to the experience. If I made a single mistake, disaster.
I knew exactly who to call. Anthony Badolato has been working on our Hope is a Verb podcast for years, and is a sound design wizard. I sent him the script, with an impossible brief: create a custom piece of music that evokes cautious hope, triumph, equivocation, and then ends with a question. An entire, emotional architecture.
Naturally, he nailed it.
On the eve of my flight to Vancouver I had a script, a four-week-old baby, a ten-minute video, a seven-minute music track, and a prayer that I could hold it all together on stage.
What could possibly go wrong?
The logistics were daunting. Most TED speakers stand on the red circle, deliver a beautiful talk, and call it a day. I was about to attempt something that was almost guaranteed to fail.
The graphics were designed to unfold across the screen from left to right, then sweep back from right to left, before finally meeting in the centre. My stage movement needed to correspond with each part: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Which meant I needed to choreograph my body to match the visual flow.
TED don't usually let you move around on stage, but they made an exception here, probably because they were morbidly curious about the impending train crash.
To get it right, I asked my friend Hannah Glennie for help. She's an incredible movement coach who can zero in on exactly what you need. We really went for it this time - drew out the full stage, all 31 metres of it, in chalk on my driveway. The circle, the lights, the steps, everything mapped out like we were planning a heist.
Then we rehearsed for two days straight, up and down like lunatics. I'm pretty sure the neighbours thought I'd lost it - watching me stalk the driveway, gesturing wildly, muttering about sea turtles and World War Two.
Once I got to Vancouver, more rehearsals, this time to sync the music with the script. That's how I ended up doing laps of the waterfront for hours on a Saturday night, headphones on, going over the final three minutes again and again until each word was locked to each note.
The outfit was another stroke of luck. The lovely and very generous team at Zegna dressed me again this year - we went with this beautiful, midnight navy that was almost black, understated but elegant. With graphics that intense, the last thing I wanted was to add visual noise. The outfit arrived three hours before showtime. Squeaky.
The best part though? My mum got to come this year. She was in the final rehearsal room, filming me to try catch any last kinks. Two hours before curtain, we spotted and fixed a weird double-handed gesture. I know it sounds obsessive, but when you're simultaneously trying to land a script, visuals, music and choreography on a stage the size of a tennis court, every detail matters.
And then it was time. Out into a sea of expectant faces, right after Philippe Villeneuve talking about rebuilding Notre Dame. Collapse and renewal. Perfect.
Jordan's visuals began their sweep across that giant canvas, alien ink blots dissolving into green shoots, data points morphing into hope, Hannah's stage directions in my head, Anthony's soundtrack building underneath it all.
Everything lined up. Time to see if it was all worth it.
