On Friday 24 May the 10th annual TedX Sydney was held at the International Convention Centre. For those that don’t know what TedX is, it’s essentially a storytelling platform for speakers from a variety of backgrounds.
TedX Sydney is the leading platform for the propagation of Australian ideas to the rest of the world. When TedX Sydney began, its mission was to create and foster a sense of community amongst the people and organisations who gather around them, and to provide a focus and impetus for conversation and debate.
This year’s theme was Legacy, each speaker guided us through a story to help us either better understand our past, our present and, importantly, what we are doing about our individual and collective futures. The big question the event sparked was; at the end of the day, what will be our legacy?
The best way to give you a sense of the day and leave you with some of the inspiration the audience received is to leave you with some of the key quotes from the day. I’d love to recap all 17 speakers, but we’d be here a while!
Bridget Loudon of Expert 360 spoke about the future of work, she posed the question “If work doesn’t work for most people, why do we still do it this way?”
99 year old Holocaust survivor and self-declared happiest man in the world, Eddie Jaku said “I do not hate anyone. Hate is a disease that may destroy your enemy, but will destroy you in the process.”
Currently Australia’s most awarded author Behrouz Boochani was beamed in on the big screen from Manus Island, where he has been imprisoned since 2013. His novel, No Friend But the Mountains, was written from Manus Prison via text message. “For me, writing has always been an act of resistance.” – Behrouz Boochani
Co-founder of gDiapers Kim Graham urged us to think twice about the relentless plastic crisis, she baffled us with the statistic that diapers take about 500 years to decompose in landfill! “If we want to stop plastic pollution, how about we stop making things out of plastic?”
Albert Wiggan explored the impacts of politics and economics on our environment’s demise. “I genuinely believe that the solution lies within all of us, and capitalism, which is driven by politics and economics, it’s killing us.”
Security and cryptography researcher Craig Costello spoke in ‘different dimensions’ when discussing the future of the internet with Quantum Computers “No matter what technological world we live in, our secrets are always worth protecting.”
A professor at the Yale School of Medicine, discussed the complex developments in research of rare muscular diseases “We all carry the legacy of our ancestors in every cell of our body.“ Monkol Lek.
David Wenham spoke about why he is an actor, he said “I love to tell stories, stories make us human.”
If you want to hear more, the talks from TedX Sydney 2019 are available to watch on the TedX website.
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