I’ve been fortunate to be on the #TEDxDetroit team since minute one. While we have had over 450 acts grace our 13 different stages over the years, It would be really impressive if I had seen them all…I end up running all around during the day. So I won’t call this a "best of" list…just the talks that really stood out to me.

I’m not going to mess around here. I’m going to start with my ALL TIME favorite TEDxDetroit talk and you can see the rest that made the list in no particular order. Kate The Chemist blew us all away with her talk about creating a female STEM army AND she taught us how to blow fire at the 2018 event:

In 2010 David Blaire delivered some spoken word poetry that still lives with me today. It was his love letter to Detroit entitled:, while I was away:

Brian Mulloy delivered a great talk in 2011 called: Detroit’s original badass; Chief Pontiac:

DAAS, also known as the Detroit Academy of Arts and science really lit the stage up back in 2014 with their rendition called: Detroit State of Mind: 

I saw Karter Johnson’s Build a kid’s library talk in 2021 from stage left. He absolutely brought the house down. How do I know? Because I got to take the stage right after him. I’m still soaking up the standing ovation he got.

It seems silly to make a list of talks and not add your own talk to the list. This was the 2nd one I did. It’s a short little ditty I called Casting a positive stone: in 2019.

Back in 2016 I had the opportunity to work with Khary Turner on his talk. Khary heads up the Coleman A. Young Foundation and I thought he would be the perfect person to dispel some of the myths around Mayor Young in his talk called: Closing the wedge on Coleman Young.

One of my favorite human beings in Leon LaBrecque. He’s graced our stage a few times. This is from his 2nd appearance and is called Expanding human bandwidth from 2014.

A great example of one of the TEDxDetroit viral talks, Melissa Butler’s "Why you think you’re ugly" has 3M views since 2019,

I know there are plenty of other great talks that could have made the list. There’s been so much from music, the arts, poetry, dancing, cool tech, NASA, Pixar and more.

What I wanna know is what are your favorites thus far?

I can’t wait to see which talks from the 9/18/24 edition of TEDxDetroit get added to this post? If you’re looking for TICKETS, click that link.

If you’re interested in learning more about participating in future events, message me.