For my TED Talk Review, I watched both Sam Harris’s TED Talk Science Can Answer Moral Questions and Malcolm Gladwell’s TED talk Choice, Happiness, & Spaghetti Sauce. The premise of Harris’s talk was to persuade the audience that science can -- and should -- be an authority on moral issues, shaping human values and setting out what constitutes a good life. Harris makes it clear that questions of how humans flourish have right and wrong answers. He also points out that values are indeed facts about the wellbeing of conscious creatures and that whenever facts are being considered, certain opinions should be excluded. One of these “opinions” is religion. Harris introduces us to what he calls a moral continuum, and tells us that we must strive to find a balance in it: we can’t be extreme in either direction. Gladwell’s talk discussed American market researcher and psychophysicist Howard Moskowitz’s search for the perfect spaghetti sauce to make an argument about the nature of choice and happiness. Gladwell starts with making the witty claim that people don’t know what they want: Moskowitz realized that pretty quickly when sitting people down and asking focus groups what type of spaghetti sauce they would want. However, searching for the universal spaghetti sauce wouldn’t work: you just can’t satisfy everyone. Gladwell asserts that the concept of horizontal segmentation changed everything. Horizontal segmentation meant that there was no good and bad. There are just different kinds for different people. He tries to make the point that having many choices can make it easier to sell your product rather than searching for an ideal recipe.

     These two talks couldn’t be more different. The only similarity I found was that both speakers used humor to their advantage and really connected to the audience by being conversational. That way, it is less like you’re being lectured at and more like you’re engaging in the discussion too. Harris used a lot of logos in his talk. He backed up every claim with examples. Gladwell was more the storytelling type. He told us an intimate story of one particular researcher’s exploration to make a universal argument that related to the audience. Harris used a lot of pathos as well. He mentioned children getting beaten and about how people out there throw battery acid at the faces of women in cloth bags. He even relates to every individual audience member by asking them what they would do if their daughter was raped. Bringing up topics that most of us are uncomfortable with discussing is a huge attention grabber in any speech. Gladwell did a great job of taking his audience on an emotional rollercoaster. He asked you to make conscious decisions and judgments as he was talking about choosing how you like your coffee and the fact that you can cluster data points for patterns. His whole speech was based off a general study so it was easy to relate to. Harris barely used any filler words and that inspired me to listen intently for every word he said. Gladwell took the more humorous and simple route: it was much easier to understand that way.

     Harris’s TED talk relates to my topic since the question of mentorship and how we got to a situation where so many kids are experiencing mental issues are based on facts. It may be a more morally grounded question regarding how we treat teenagers and social pressures, but science can provide a more definitive answer. This would come through the form of studies and neurological data. Gladwell’s TED talk relates to my topic because it shows how variability is an important part of the human persona. Most teens probably don’t know what they want in a friend, a mentor, or for themselves. It is all about options and also understanding that different people respond to stress in different ways. It could be hard to identify kids who need help because some of them seem fine: we need to establish choices when matching mentors and mentees. For my final exhibition for EMC, I will take Gladwell’s storytelling and Harris’s humor. I will take Harris’s objective view to make a wide spanning moral argument like Gladwell did. For me, that argument will come down to why mentors are the answer to obstacles in high school.