Ted Audio Collective.

Audio Collective.

I'm Elise Hugh, you're listening to TED Talks Daily.

Today, conductor Benjamin Zander gives us a heart-swelling

talk and a bit of a musical treat at the end. This is one of my favorite talks I got to be in the

room for at TED 2023, so I won't spoil it by giving too much away.

It's coming up after a short sponsor message.

Hey, it's Adam Grant, hosted the TED Podcast, Work Life. This episode has been brought to you by Destination Canada.

Stay tuned for a story about Cohen, a gifted storyteller dedicated to preserving cultural legacies.

One of the things I've noticed is that people get confused about the difference

between possibility and positive thinking.

And I thought I would just spend a moment on that because it's worth eliminating that confusion.

I'm going to tell you a story which will give you clarity about that forever. My father was a refugee

from Nazi Germany. He lost his mother in the death camps and eight other

members of his family. he lost everything that he had

and he came to England to set up life and then at the height of the war he was

interned as the Japanese were here.

And so he found himself on the Isle of Man

with 2,000 other men, all of them

in the state of shock and fear and anxiety and loss and he looked around and said there are a lot

of intelligent people here we should start a university and so they did and they had 46 classes a week and there were no paper or pencil or

blackboard or chalk just people talking to each other and that is possibility.

...