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This episode is brought to you by Ambetter Health. Group health insurance can put businesses in a tough position. If you're a business owner, a CFO or an HR leader, this is probably going to sound familiar. It's fall and you find out your group health insurance premium will be more expensive next year, maybe by a lot. And as usual, you have to pick one carrier and a few plans for all of the employees. But they each have different medical needs, different budgets and different preferences for doctors. Plus, the carrier's network might not be strong where all employees live. Fortunately, there's a new approach. It's called an Ichra or Ichra and it's a game changer. ICHRAs make costs predictable with stable pre tax contributions and a larger risk pool. And they make health plans personal because employees can buy any plan that fits their needs from any carrier. You choose how much to contribute. They choose what works for them. It's about time, right? For coverage you control, plan on and Ichra. Learn more at ambetterhealth.com ichra this episode is brought to you by Cargurus. You know, sometimes I think about how good design solves real problems. And car shopping. That's a problem that desperately needs better design. The uncertainty of buying a car can be exhausting. Is this price fair? Is there a better deal two clicks away? You shouldn't need a detective's intuition to feel confident about a major purchase. That's where Cargurus comes in. They've redesigned the entire experience, ensuring a transparent and hassle free buying process. With more car listings than any other major online automotive marketplace in the US you can actually compare and find the best deal. Real data driven ratings, price drop alerts, verified dealers. It removes the confusion from the equation. It's no wonder similar web estimated traffic data shows Cargurus is the number one most visited car shopping site. Buy or sell your next car today with CarGurus@CarGurus.com Go to CarGurus.com to make sure your big deal is the best deal. That's C A r G u r u s.com cargurus.com this episode is sponsored by Framer. Still jumping between tools to update your website, Framer unifies design, CMS and publishing on one canvas. No handoff, no hassle. Everything you need to design and publish in one place. Framer already built the fastest way to publish beautiful production ready websites. And it's now redefining how we design for the web. With the recent launch of Design Pages, a free canvas based design tool, Framer is more than a site builder, it's a true all in one design platform. From social assets to campaign visuals to vectors and icons, all the way to a live site. Framer is where ideas go live, start to finish, think unlimited projects, unlimited pages, unlimited collaborators, and all the essentials. Vectors, 3D transforms, gradients, wireframes, everything you need to design. Totally free, ready to design, iterate and publish all in one tool. Start creating for free@framer.com design and use code TED for a free month of Framer Pro. That's framer.com design promo code TED framer.com design promo code Ted rules and restrictions may apply. You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host Elise Hu. Regardless of your faith, it feels safe to say we need systemic change at all levels to work towards a better future for ourselves, our communities and this planet. In this beautiful talk, ecological futurist Tarek Al Olaymi shares how he helps people rise to their best by turning to spiritual wisdom. He explores how faith communities, often overlooked in the climate movement, offer powerful tools for navigating environmental collapse with moral courage, resilience and a spiritual compass.
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There is a sound the planet makes when it asks a species to grow up. Can you hear it inside of you? Many faith traditions teach that at thresholds two paths appear, one of contraction and one of evolution. Today, 8 billion of us stand at humanity's most consequential threshold yet, and these moments arrive in many different forms. It's the families forced to abandon coastal homes because of sea level rise, its communities watching decades of memories reduced to ash. It's elderly couples choosing between cooling or eating because of rising bills. These are real experiences I've witnessed in the past year. And as political leaders make climate decisions that arbitrarily mark billions of lives as disposable, perhaps you've also felt that catch in your chest when wondering, will the future still want me? This is what thresholds can feel like loss resonating on one side, yet luminous possibility on the other. And these climate thresholds do mirror our personal ones. It's the unexpected diagnosis. It's the loss of a loved one. It's the path that suddenly closes each and every single time they ask us, who will we become when everything we know unravels? And this is what I want to explore with you today. Not just an environmental challenge, but an invitation. Can we all still rise to our best selves, even when collapse tempts us towards self preservation? Now, for Years, I believed the climate emergency was primarily about technical and systemic solutions. But in devastated communities, I found that those demonstrating the deepest resilience drew on something more fundamental. It was spiritual wisdom cultivated across generations. In each disaster zone, I found a pattern the charts had missed. It was the spiritual infrastructure all around us, church basements, mosque courtyards, Sikh godwaras, cooking tons of free dal that kept communities together until formal aid arrived. Yes, water pumps are vital, but someone must believe that strangers deserve that water. Faith, as I've come to learn and realize, is actually about the logistics of the heart. These traditions aren't relics, but living laboratories of resilience. Their rituals aren't superstition, but social circuitry routing courage. When normal circuits fail, science can give us the numbers, policy can give us the laws. But you know that the numbers don't comfort fighting children in a storm. And laws aren't the pairs that we speak at funerals. For the past decade, I've been very fortunate enough to work with global coalitions of faith communities confronting climate change and restoring ecosystems from land to ocean. And today, I'd like to share just a few of these insights from of what I learned from these traditions about how we might rise to our best selves. And I've actually already shared the first one with you. It's that faith functions as a collapsed navigation system. These traditions that are sometimes dismissed as archaic actually hold the key to civilization's continuity. Think about it. These traditions survived multiple plagues, empires, endless wars, and even mini south ages serving as civilizational black boxes. Or for these uncertain times. Times like these, when we face different interpretations about what this moment means and who it calls us to become. And faith traditions can offer us some guidance through this uncertainty. So I invite you to think about those moments when you practice in something that is actually older than markets and older than nations. Those daily practices etched into human muscle memory long before borders and currencies defined our exchanges. These traditions aren't just relics. They are your navigation technologies, tested through collapse after collapse. So ask yourself, what ancient algorithm of survival am I carrying? Because the wisdom we now need is not just waiting for us in new inventions, but. But it's also encoded in these daily practices that have sustained human dignity across history's hardest passages. Yet we also know that even the most sophisticated navigation technologies carry accurate data about where we truly stand. And this brings me to the next insight. It's radical honesty. A truth that is always surprising about climate action is that it begins with a paradox. We must look inwards before we can effectively act outwards. I love how the tradition of Hazrat Nyatan in the Sufi tradition teaches that our true work involves reconciling the irreconcilable. And climate action needs that same reconciliation. Now, let's be real. We've all become experts at identifying external obstacles. Political gridlock, corporate interests, colonial legacies, all very real. But faith traditions invite us to look at a more subtle our own contradictions. Hypocrisy isn't just a sin. It's a GPS pin that can point us to deeper transformation. Islam calls this Mahasaba Hinduism Svadhyaya. Whatever the language, the practice is constant. Hold up a mirror and name the gap between the world we dream about and the ones our actions create. Whether it's the climate activists always flying to summits or the congregation preaching stewardship while their endowment funds fossil fuel expansion, these aren't necessarily disqualifications, but they're doorways to deeper authenticity. And radical honesty should also apply to the continuous examination of are the value systems that we hold most sacred? I know that faith traditions that also birthed liberation movements, sanctified colonial conquest, and also today's climate activism, with all of its moral clarity, can still become rigid, dogmatic, and blind to its own contradictions. So tonight, let us ask ourselves, where do our actions cast shadows on the very values of that we hold most sacred? Can you think of an example from your own life? Now, this question isn't meant to shame us, but to free us. For it's precisely when we stand in these tender spaces of contradiction that moral courage can emerge. And when we apply the same radical honesty to economic systems, we arrive at our next insight. It's what I like to call the systemic sacred. It's when our deepest values and economic choices converge. Now, if you look back throughout history, you'll see that both faith and commerce together have shaped civilizations. When they diverge, cultures can tear. But when they harmonize, cultures can bloom. Judaism's Shmita cycle embeds ecological rest and debt forgiveness into economic rhythms and life. Buddhist economics emphasizes sufficiency over endless growth. Catholic integral economics recognizes forests and rivers as kin rather than commodities. Out of these traditions emerges a fundamentally different approach to economics, one that supports the three great restorations. Ecosystem restoration, healing our planet's wounded systems, economic restoration, reimagining how we exchange value without extraction and inner restoration, renewing our moral imagination when despair threatens to narrow our vision of what is actually possible. Now, in my own work advising banks and NGOs on sustainable Islamic finance, I've actually seen how this can scale. And it's pretty incredible. If just 5% of the projected $8 trillion Islamic finance market by 2030 is invested in climate resilience, that represents $400 billion for regenerative infrastructure. Now, that is not charity. That's reciprocity restored. So if you shape our economic future, especially those of us in boardrooms, institutions, try this subject your next big decision to a spiritual audit. Ask not just will this generate sustainable returns, but does this contribute to the three great restorations? Because markets, like our souls, are also waiting for instructions worthy of the threshold moment that we face. And while economics relates to our material exchanges, the final insight I'd like to share illuminates something a little bit more subtle. It's the power of beauty to guide us when certainty fails. If we read today's story of humanity backwards, it might actually just begin with us dismantling beauty. We turn forests into lumber, animals into production units. We extract wonder from children's eyes and break our relationship with the natural world. But I wonder, wouldn't it be amazing if her descendants identified a different starting point for this story when we rediscovered beauty as essential for survival? Bahai teachings teach that beauty are divine attributes made visible. Zen Buddhism, zwabi sabi, sees beauty in imperfection. Shinto honors the spirit in everything from mountains to roadside stones. And all recognize a common lesson that we rarely protect what we haven't first learned to appreciate in its true beauty. But this relationship between beauty and protection goes even deeper. Many faith traditions teach that divine assistance in times of climate crisis arrives not from above, but as a presence of hope and beauty within the human heart. Prophets didn't just predict better worlds. They spoke and acted their hope into being. Their imagination was practical, imagining paths invisible to rational thought alone. So the next time you encounter a moment of beauty, it might just be divine assistance arriving in its purest form. The 8th century mystic Rabi Al Basri from Iraq really understood this when she said to God, your hope in my heart is the rarest treasure to reflect on. What if this moment of beauty is trying to show me a more hopeful future, but desperately needs my voice and words to bring it into being? Now, none of this, let me tell you, is a distraction from our climate reality. But it's a radical act of trust in uncertain times. Because I truly believe our climate emergency is an examination of the soul. The same forces behind each ecological destruction arise from the same human heart, but also houses mercy, justice and repair. This isn't abstract spirituality. It's about who we become at the edge of everything we know. And some of you might also be wondering, must I be religious for any of this to matter? No. When despair is polluting the skies, borrowing cards from any wisdom, traditional is not only permitted, but necessary. Faith traditions are simply very old laboratories that kept the lights on long enough to record what worked. I've seen temple communities restoring the same sacred rivers that contributed to the flooding of their own homes, and mothers planting olive trees under bombardment so that their children may know what peace tastes like. So here we stand at our most consequential threshold to borrow a lesson from the book of Genesis. The heart of our human challenge is to honor our promise to the earth not to destroy the world. And this threshold moment invites all of us to rise to that promise. The door of destruction right now is very easy to find. The door of renewal is quieter. So who will we become together as we cross this threshold? Thank you for listening.
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That was Tarek Al Olaymi at the TED Countdown Summit in Nairobi, Kenya in 2020. If you're curious about Ted's curation, find out more@ted.com curationguidelines and that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact checked by the TED Research team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Greene, Lucy Little and Tansika Sangmarnivong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faizy Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Balaurazo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening. This episode is sponsored by the new all electric Toyota bz. Have you thought about going electric but worry that charging will take forever? The myth is I'll need to charge my EV all day just to get where I'm going. The truth with the new Toyota bz, charging is built for real life. With the included dual voltage charging cable, you can plug in overnight and wake up ready to go. And when you're on the move under ideal conditions, DC fast charging can get you from 10 to 80% in about 30 minutes. Just enough time to grab a coffee or catch up on a couple TED talks. That's power made practical. Learn more@toyota.com b z that's T O Y O-T A.com bz the new all electric bz Toyota let's go places.
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Hey, it's Adam Grant from Ted's podcast Work Life and this episode is brought to you by ServiceNow. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into. That's why it's no surprise that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 companies use the ServiceNow AI platform, while other platforms duct tape tools together. ServiceNow seamlessly unifies people, data workflows and AI connecting every corner of your business. And with AI agents working together autonomously, anyone in any department can focus on the work that matters Most. Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people@servicenow.com hey, it's Marc Maron from.
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