How many times have you heard it said in a brief, a brainstorm, or even at the kitchen table when a friend is stuck in a rut?

Think outside the box.

We say it like it's the highest form of creative inspiration.

But what if it is the worst creative advice we've ever been given?

What if the problem isn't that we're two boxed in, but that we don't know where the box is at all?

In my research, in my artistic pursuits, I've discovered the most innovative people don't eliminate constraints.

They embrace them, defining the edges of creative space, a frame for what's possible.

To see what I mean.

Let's go to the Arctic.

We're on a photo expedition parked in the pack ice north of Norway.

It is -40 degrees.

And for those of you who prefer Celsius, that's also -40.

We're on the northernmost boat in the world, hunting polar bears with cameras.

This is not my shot.

But it is my friend Pete.

And it's my inspiration.

I'm hoping that maybe I can get something similar so I have brought every camera and lens I own.

I am with a group of other ambitious photographers and we have a great guide.

And finally, after three days of waiting, the moment has arrived.

A polar bear has walked up to our ship and sits down right in front of it.

I'm on the bow, jostling for position, photographing the bear.

At least I think I'm taking pictures of him.

My brain freezes up and it's not the temperature I have unlimited options.

Every lens, every angle, every setting I'm chasing, every shot.

Now, they say you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.

But in photography, just like in basketball.

More shots doesn't mean better shots.

Back in my cabin, I'm sifting through thousands of photos.

I shot everything.

I got a fuzzy bear.

Yeah.

Now, later in the week, one of us gets a shot of the trip.

And her name is Renny.

But on the first day, she injured her leg so badly that she couldn't put weight on it.

So she was limited in where she could go, how long she could stand, and even what lens she could carry.

Yet she found her shot.

I couldn't stop thinking about this on my way home.

Why did Renny succeed with her limitations?

When I failed?

So I went down a research rabbit hole on constraints and creativity.

Very on brand for me.

And I found this fascinating experiment conducted by landscape architect student named Peter Summerlin.

He had preschool teachers take their kids to two different parks.

Same swings, same slides, same wood chips.

The only difference?

One park had a fence and the other tenant.

Now, where do you think the kids were?

More creative, more energetic, more inventive?

At the park without the fence.

They huddled near the teachers, stuck to the playground.

They didn't explore, but at the park, with the fence.

They went everywhere.

They went all the way up to the fence and alongside it.

He even invented games involving the fence.

They knew where the edge was, so they felt free to fly up to it.

I thought, that's Renee.

She was fenced in and found her shot.

I had no frame for what I was doing.

Unconstrained.

I couldn't get unstuck.

The fence isn't the limitation.

The fence is the freedom.

Over the last ten years, I have surveyed more than 18,000 people.

And I asked them, what are your biggest challenges and what are the barriers?

What gets in the way?

And over and over I found that with when the boundaries aren't clear, we feel overwhelmed.

We burnout and we default to the familiar ambiguity about risks and rewards creates spaces.

But when the constraints are clear, that's when we get creative.

It worked for Bank of America.

They wanted to help their customers to save more money, so they didn't tell their team to think outside the box.

Instead, they framed the problem with three limitations no new technology, no extra stuff for the customer, and no change in behavior required.

And within this simple frame, they invented keep the change.

Swipe your card for 350.

It rounds up to $4.50, slides into your savings.

1075 a quarter.

Saved a buck 89 $0.11 saved.

You don't even notice until one day you check your savings balance and there's a few hundred dollars you don't even remember.

Setting aside, parents sometimes struggle with which kid needs which boundary, but they've long known the value in them.

Think of the no phones at dinner rule within that simple boundary.

Something opens up.

Kids tell stories.

Teenagers become more engaged.

The boundary doesn't limit interaction.

It makes room for it.

It's Rennie, hobbled in a fixed position, capturing the shot of the trip.

The one I hope to get at the other end of the Earth.

Antarctica.

Another boatload of photographers for breakfast on the last day of the trip.

When we find out that there's more than a dozen humpback whales off the starboard side of the ship, and we're off from the drones eye view, it's spectacular.

The whales are circling, sounding, feeding, but down at water level.

I'm in a boat with five other photographers facing another boat with six more, and we're all chasing the same shot.

So I stop and I create a boundary for myself.

I'm not shooting crowds.

I'm not shooting chaos.

If there's a boat in the way, I'm out.

The photographer next to me leans over and says, what are you doing?

This is where the action is.

But I thought, it's not where my shot is.

Back on the ship, everyone's looking at the photos.

I'm boat in the way.

Little out of focus.

And then there it is.

My shot.

The only one like it.

So I had my failure in the Arctic and my success in Antarctica, where I stopped.

Created a boundary and found my shot.

And the playground study helped me understand why.

And my research and boundaries and constraints over and over again.

Confirms it.

When we know where the edges are, we don't feel trapped.

We feel unbound.

So what's your frame?

It's not going to be the same for any of us, but we can all use boundaries to unlock our creativity.

The next time somebody says think outside the box, don't.

The box was never the enemy.

The edgeless world was build the box, put up the fence, design the frame.

And in that space take your best shot.

I promise you it won't hold you back.

It will set you free.

Thank you.

Imagine being given the privilege to explore outer space in search of alien life.

What might you find?

I think a lot of us would expect to find something like this.

The famous little green man.

But as a biologist, let me tell you, this guy is almost definitely human.

Two eyes and nose and mouth.

Bones, musculature.

Just like us.

So now what have I told you?

There's another planet out there with truly mind blowing aliens.

These are glowing, gelatinous beings.

They are immortal.

They can clone themselves hundreds or thousands of times.

They can build structures out of their bodies.

So large it's visible from outer space.

And to top it all off, they're completely covered in toxic explosive stingers capable of killing a human on contact.

Would you be intrigued?

Because now what have I told you?

That these beings are here on earth, among us, and belong to a group of thousands of species known as Nigerians?

This includes jellyfish, corals and sea and enemies.

And their biology is simply astounding.

Now corals and anatomies are often mistaken for plants and rocks, and that's because they're sessile, stuck in place.

Their body parts are tiny and translucent, and they move incredibly slowly.

But if we zoom in close and speed things up, they're truly remarkable.

Nature emerges often in brilliant colors and otherworldly shapes.

We see that corals are collections of identical polyps, each extending their tentacles into the water at plankton drifting by, they move.

They feed their complex and dynamic, but simply operating on a frequency that we humans are not set to receive.

Tonight, I want to tell you about work being done in my lab to probe the mysteries of Nigerian biology, but also how, against desperate odds, we hope to apply what we've learned in the global effort to protect coral reefs.

In the lab, we work with a tiny sea anatomy about an inch long, called no matter Stella that tenses shown here feeding on some sea monkeys together with colleagues all around the world.

For the last 15 years, we have endeavored to build ever more precise tools with which to interrogate.

No matter Stella's biology, at the level of genes, molecules and cells.

Now, I'm going to tell you two short stories about work we've done to show what's possible.

And the first deals with the structure of the nervous system.

How does a supposedly brainless animal like this execute complex, coordinated behaviors?

To understand that question, we genetically engineered an enemies to express a bright fluorescent protein in all their neuronal cells.

Lighting up the body like a Christmas tree.

Here you see the random distribution of cells and random crisscross of their extensions throughout the body, something scientists call the diffuse nerve net.

There's no brain and no central nervous system.

However, when we change our perspective and look straight into the mouths of the anatomy, we see something striking a beautiful arrangement of enlarged neural cells set in clusters all around the mouth and wired together by circumferential nerve projections between them.

Now, we can't yet conclude that this is the brain of a sea, an enemy, but it's a level of complexity we did not anticipate.

And indeed, ongoing molecular studies are showing that no matter Stella is capable of a far more sophisticated level of neural processing than we ever would have imagined before.

Now, hopefully, this story makes, no matter Stella seem a little more relatable, a little more like similar organisms.

And here's another story to really hammer that home in ourselves and in thousands of other species.

There's a crucial group of genes called Hox genes.

They act in embryogenesis, where they specify the differences in the body along the head to tail axis.

So in humans, the genes are actually what's specified the differences in the size and shape of your cervical, thoracic, and lumbar vertebrae in a fruit fly.

The very same genes act to specify the differences between the segments of the head, thorax, and abdomen.

Now, no matter, Stella only has one opening in its body, and it's both the mouth and the anus.

They don't have a head or a tail, but they do have the Hox genes.

So what do they do?

The first key in understanding the function of a gene is knowing where and when it's expressed.

And in this case, several critical Hox genes are expressed specifically and exclusively in the larval stage.

Just before formation of the primary polyp, to understand the cellular anatomy of the larva, just think of it like a lemon.

So here's a lemon and here's our larva.

And you know that when you slice a lemon, you have an outer rind and the inner segments of fruit inside.

Similarly, when you slice through the tomatoes, still a larva, which is about the size of a pinhead, we see an outer layer of cells that's like skin or ectoderm, and an inner layer that gives rise to the insides of the body.

That inner layer is precisely subdivided into eight segments, just like a citrus fruit.

And it turns out that the Hox genes are expressed in precise patterns that prefigure the formation of those segments.

When we genetically modified the matter, Stella, to take the genes away, the segments never form.

And as this larva turns into the primary polyp, we can see how the segments contribute to the body plan, including the positioning of the initial four tentacles all together.

What this work tells us is that there's an ancient and shared logic about body patterning that is fundamentally similar in humans and our distant relatives, like the amount of Stella.

Now, just as work in my lab and in many other labs around the world has reached a new level of precision in how we study, Nigerians, the ecological crisis facing the most iconic Nigerians of all coral reefs begs for our attention.

Corals are not unlike massive apartment buildings, each containing hundreds or thousands of individual polyps, each of which looks fundamentally similar to No matter Stella.

Here you see the tube with tentacles, body plant corals are able to survive and thrive in pristine but nutrient poor tropical waters due to an unbelievable biological arrangement called endosymbiosis.

Here, tiny single celled algae literally live inside the cells of the corals inner layer out in the tropical sun.

They perform photosynthesis like a plant, enough to sustain themselves, but also enough to provide the coral with 80 or 90% of its nutritional needs.

In this way, corals barely need to eat, but they're capable of creating large, complex ecosystems in parts of the ocean that would otherwise be marine deserts.

Now, for reasons we don't yet fully understand, this relationship is incredibly sensitive to environmental stress that includes temperature.

And as ocean temperatures rise.

This leads to a breakdown in symbiosis.

The algae are lost from the coral, and without them, the coral polyps will slowly starve to death, leaving behind their bleached white skeletons.

In this way, climate change is slowly but systematically destroying the world's coral reefs around the world.

Coral reefs cover 1% of the ocean floor, but account for up to 25% of all marine biodiversity.

For humans, these reefs provide billions and billions of dollars in annual value in the form of support for fisheries, coastal protection from storms.

Sites for pharmaceutical drug discovery and of course, destinations for tourism.

Nevertheless, in a global warming event that ended in late 2025, up to 80% of the world's reefs experienced severe bleaching in the Florida reef track.

Once an abundant ecosystem, up to 90% of historical coral cover has been lost.

It seems that no matter how hard we work at conservation and protection, funding is limited.

Governments are slow to act, and our efforts to protect coral reefs may be too little, too late.

So here's the question can science help?

Specifically, can the kind of laboratory based mechanistic molecular biology that we do with the matter, Stella, have an impact on our knowledge of coral biology?

We don't have an answer to that question, but I want you to imagine a focused, intensive, international Manhattan project of coral biology where we bring together cutting edge biomedical methods supercharged by the latest advances in AI and soak up them intensively on the issues facing coral reefs.

Could that make a difference?

Again, I don't have the answer to the question, but I believe it is a path worth following.

The first major hurdle in truly transformative coral research is the development of a laboratory model organism, like we have with the Estella.

However, corals are incredibly delicate and sensitive, difficult to keep in a lab.

Moreover, most species only sexually reproduce one time per year, where they cue us as annual changes in water temperature.

Annual changes in the length of the day and the lunar cycle.

In order to select a very narrow window and just a few magical nights where they release their next generation into the ocean.

Until very recently, the idea of replicating this marvel of nature in a laboratory fish tank would have seemed like science fiction.

But thanks to advances in husbandry by some brilliant colleagues in the United Kingdom, what was recently thought impossible is now possible.

Here you see the growing coral facility in my lab at the Stowers Institute right here in Kansas City.

By raising corals in these large Next-Generation aquaria with computationally controlled temperature and illumination, we can precisely model those annual changes in environmental conditions.

Under this setting.

Our coral colonies are happy, healthy, thriving, and even growing.

More importantly, over the last two years, our colonies have successfully spawned in the lab, releasing a next generation of corals.

But even more importantly, providing our scientists with the critical experimental material they need to start the difficult work of establishing new methods for coral genetic engineering and for functional genomic analysis of coral algal symbiosis and coral reproductive biology.

What's truly incredible is that we can now do this work not at a remote marine outpost, but rather inside a cutting edge, state of the art research institute.

To conclude, I want to be honest, it is very likely too late for many species, and we really don't know whether a renewed, invigorated effort in coral research could eventually move the needle.

Still, I believe this is a course we must follow.

It's a moonshot, but it is one that would undoubtedly teach us new and valuable things along the way.

Well before.

And whether or not we ever see the destination and beyond addressing the economic and ecological calamity of coral extinction, I believe there's a further moral imperative to do this work.

Not for ourselves and not for our future generations, but also for our distant relatives.

The beautiful, elegant and otherworldly aliens among us.

Thank you.

Someone once asked me, what is your gift?

And in that moment, truthfully, my mind began to race because I wanted to say something poetic, something wrapped in an accomplishment or a title.

But the realest answer that I've ever given is also the most audacious one.

My gift is me.

The priest, Jasmine Taylor.

Not a version of me.

Not the one that people expect of me, but the one I had to fight to find.

You see, I come from a home where nobody knows their own name.

Generational trauma has a way of renaming you.

It tells you who to be before you ever get a chance to ask.

It has you a script and calls it love.

It has you dysfunction and calls it family.

And after a while, you played a role so long you forget it was ever a role at all.

The role to keep the peace.

The role to simply survive.

We become whatever versions of ourselves that feels the safest.

Until one day, you have to ask yourself, is this really me?

Or am I just being who I learn to be?

The hardest thing I've ever had to do.

It wasn't climbing towards something.

It was walking away from relationships that require me to abandon myself.

And from a version of sacrifice that was costing me myself.

And through that process, I learned something.

And we are only as deeply connected to others as we are connected to ourselves.

If you don't know who you are, you spend your whole life asking other people to define you.

Through who loves you.

What you've accomplished, how useful you are.

Until your identity becomes whatever earns you acceptance.

If you haven't met yourself, every relationship becomes part of that search.

So does every achievement, every promotion and failure.

Because you you ain't really looking for those things.

You're searching for yourself.

But when you when you've done the work, when you sat in the silence loud enough to finally hear your own voice, connection becomes intentional, not performative, not borrowed from some place, but real.

And and here's the part that surprised me the most.

Disconnection is an act of love to.

Because when you are so rooted in who you are, you stop holding on to people in places and roles out of fear.

And you start holding on to them because you choose them.

And that, my friend, that's a different way to live.

After all the roles I've learned to play, the greatest gift I've ever discovered is my own name.

And maybe that's the invitation to all of us to become curious and courageous enough to ask, who am I?

Who am I?

Before the world told me who to be?

So when someone asks me, now, what's your gift?

I simply answer.

My gift is me.

Discovering who you are is a gift to yourself, but becoming who you are.

Showing up is who you are walking in who you are.

Maybe one of the greatest gifts that you'll ever give to the people around you.

And so I leave you with just one question.

What is your gift?

Thank you.

Did you know a cut heals faster when we are with other people?

That's not poetry, that's biology.

We do better physically, mentally, emotionally, in the presence of other people.

And yet, the place we struggle the most.

The place where we feel the most understood.

Where we have the most conflict, the most heartbreak is in our closest relationships.

So what happens?

Most couples think that the problem is what they're fighting about.

It almost never is.

Real problem is what happens between two people when either or both of them is under stress or in distress.

Before we say a single word, our bodies are already talking.

Our eyes, our voices, our pupils, our posture.

All of it begins moving before we have consciously decided what anything actually means.

That's not a flaw.

It is how we are all built.

Human beings are designed to read each other.

We call each other.

We alarm each other.

And at our best, we know how to bring each other back to safety.

Quickly.

But here is the paradox.

The same person who can call you can also alarm you.

And nowhere does that happen faster than in our closest relationships.

It starts with something small.

A look.

A pause, a sigh.

A phone.

A tone of voice.

One person wants to connect and the other person glances at their phone for just a second.

Their face changes.

Their eyes go dead.

Their mouth tightens during the room.

But something leaves, and suddenly two people who love each other suddenly start to see each other as a threat.

Not intentionally, just automatically.

And that is the part that most people actually miss.

Most relationship problems are not as personal as they feel under stress.

We all become more automatic, more defensive, more certain.

The survival system is lightning fast and muscular.

It does not deliberate.

It decides and we act.

Now, the good news is that the system is usually predictable and what we can predict, we can usually prepare for and prevent.

Most struggling couples have two distinct problems.

First, they never consciously and explicitly design their relationship.

Second, they rarely figure out how to remain collaborative, cooperative, fair, and just and sensitive when they're under stress.

Without a plan, the wills are bound to come off when the load gets too high.

Also, relationships are an invention.

We make them up.

Yet partners rarely invent their relationship.

They may never answer the basic questions.

Who are we?

Why are we?

Who or what do we serve?

Do we share power and authority and responsibility?

And if so, how?

If you do not consciously design your relationship, something else will.

Your childhood, your family of origin, your old assumptions, your old survival strategies.

Nature will repeat itself unless you take control.

Most couples never really choose their rules of engagement.

They inherit them and then stress exposes the design.

People say we've changed.

We don't communicate anymore.

We're not in love anymore.

But something more predictable is actually happening.

Stress changes our perception when we are under pressure.

The brain is not trying to be fair.

It is not trying to understand the whole story.

It is trying to keep us alive.

And survival requires speed, not nuance, not reflection speed.

Through memory, the brain recognizes at again, lightning speeds, dangerous faces, voices, movements.

I've seen this before.

I know where this is going.

I know what you're up to.

I'm about to get hurt.

Now, that is an extraordinary survival system.

If you were actually facing a dangerous situation.

But it can be a tragic act of mistaken identity.

If you happen to be in the kitchen with the person you love, the moment the brain thinks it recognizes danger, it stops looking for new information.

Curiosity disappears.

Certainty takes over.

And certainty is dangerous in relationships.

Because the moment I become certain about you, I stop being curious.

Under stress.

Our minds also tilt toward the negative.

This is normal for all of us.

Psychologists call this the negativity bias.

Bad news will grab us faster than good news.

Threat gets priority over love.

And if you have ever spent much time alone with your mind, you probably already know.

It's not exactly Disneyland.

It's not the happiest place on Earth, folks.

And when threat signals are coming from everywhere, connection goes offline.

The system says get safe first, love later.

Now, memory plays a major role in this.

We tend to think of memory as an accurate recording, and it is most definitely not.

Memory is selective.

It is constantly being reconstructed and it pays special attention to pain.

Negative memory accrues, especially when perceived wrongs are not quickly righted.

The first time okay.

Painful thing happens.

It's an incident.

The second time not.

That's a concern.

The third time it's becoming evidence.

With enough repetition, it becomes a projection.

That is why couples will say you always.

You never.

Here we go again.

Those are not just complaints.

Their predictions in the past will intrude on the present.

And eventually the future begins to disappear.

Your partner may be standing right there in front of you, but you.

Your brain has invited yesterday into the room.

More often this happens, the more automatic it becomes.

One face hardens, the other steals, one voice sharpens, the other gets really defensive.

One person pursues and the other person disappears.

After enough repetition, neither person feels like they chose this.

That's because the pattern moves faster than choice.

Now what's the advantage over?

The couple really has only two jobs.

Repair.

What's happened?

Prevent it from repeating.

Repetition leads to inflammation and relationships, just as repeated injury leads to inflammation in the body.

Over time, which should have been a team sport is now a solo sport.

Adversaries no longer allies.

Which brings us to something people generally don't like to hear.

Nature is not pro relationship, at least not when we're threatened.

Nature is pro self-protection.

When a threat signal is coming from all over the place.

The system orders protection over connection.

The system says protect yourself.

Fight.

Defend.

Shut down whatever.

Whatever will stop this threat.

That is why love is not enough.

Folks, love is real.

Love matters.

Love can be profound, but love does not automatically organize behavior under stress.

If it did, none of us would be having this conversation.

So if love alone doesn't protect us under stress, what does shared purpose, shared principles?

Agreements.

Preparation and quick repair.

Do.

And a relationship needs purpose, not just love.

Purpose.

Love answers the question, how do I feel about you?

Purpose answers a different question.

What are we building together?

Who are.

What are we protecting?

Who are we becoming?

What's the point of us?

Feelings matter, but feelings change.

And feelings do not protect.

Feelings.

A shared purpose does.

For my wife, Tracy and me.

One part of that purpose is really very simple.

We have decided we remain allies, especially under stress.

Adversaries belong outside of the relationship, not inside.

The world is dangerous, uncaring, unpredictable.

Our job is not to become another threat to each other.

Our job is to remain on the same side.

Now purpose becomes practical through principles and agreements.

A principle is something I've decided matters more than my immediate impulse.

An agreement is what we decide in advance to do what we're going to do when predictable trouble arrives.

Plan for your devils, not your angels.

Do not plan for the person you think you are today.

Plan for the person you might become.

When there's enough load bearing.

When you are disappointed, angry, frustrated, scared.

Don't like each other.

Every agreement must be built for the moment you least feel like keeping it.

That is why we decide in advance.

Predict it.

Planet.

Practice.

Rehearse it and revise as necessary.

Take something ordinary.

A family vacation before Tracy and I leave.

We say something's going to go wrong.

It usually does.

The plane may be late, and lately, it usually is.

Luggage may disappear.

We may get lost.

Kids on the flight may get unruly, noisy.

One of us may get tired or hungry.

So we decide now.

When that happens, we do not turn on each other.

We turn toward each other.

We may hold hands.

Look in each other's eyes and say we are still having a good relationship.

We're still having a good vacation.

Not because we're pretending, but because we're prepared.

Design does not eliminate stress.

It changes what stress does.

Instead of becoming enemies, partners stay teammates.

Instead of adding another layer of threat memory.

They create another layer of trust that's secure, functioning, not a relationship without conflict.

A relationship that knows what to do when conflict arrives.

So back to that vacation.

The plane is late.

Bags really are missing.

Someone is tired.

Someone is getting really cranky and grumpy.

But this time, the couple is prepared.

One partner reaches for the other and says, we knew something like this could happen, but we're together and we are still on the same team.

Same stress, different system.

Nothing magical happened.

Nobody lost.

Nobody won.

One person decided to protect the relationship over protecting themselves.

And that is repair.

Repair isn't admitting defeat.

It's not pretending nothing happened.

Repair is protecting the relationship before the relationship becomes the next casualty.

Insecure functioning repair is not an emergency procedure.

It's actually built in.

So you might have gathered.

This is not only a talk about couples.

It's a talk about being human.

Because every one of us here becomes more automatic under stress.

Every one of us mistakes.

Prediction for reality.

Every one of us carries yesterday into today.

So before your next difficult conversation, do not only ask how do we stop fighting?

Ask a better question.

How do we protect each other when stress arrives?

And if you remember nothing else from this talk, remember two things.

After a perceived injury, bring relief quickly.

Within 30 minutes or earlier.

Not litigation.

Not an explanation of intent.

Repair.

Then, when both of you.

And only then when you are settled, you can decide how to prevent either of you from doing this again in the future.

Repair the injury.

Prevent its repetition.

Love matters.

It always will.

But love by itself is not a plan.

Love does not automatically slow us down or make us curious or override our fears.

Those things require intention.

Practice.

Design.

The goal is not a relationship without stress.

The goal is a relationship that works even when our brain doesn't.

And when two people decide that protecting the relationship matters more than protecting their pride, being right, the relationship stops.

Depending on luck.

And love actually becomes something you can build.

Thank you.

So I was born in Santiago, Panama, and over the course of the last decade, my parents, who raised us here in Kansas City, they went back to Panama to help take care of my grandparents.

And in that decade they passed on.

And I think that journey in that time in my life became a moment to reconnect with where I come from.

And I fell in love with this instrument.

Instruments called the Maharana.

And in order to get this Majorana, I had to go from Santiago to a little mountain town called Santa Fe.

And that photo taken from that journey.

And as I get up to that mountain at this point, my grandfather and grandmother on my father's side and my grandmother had also passed on my mother's side.

And so I'm there and there's a gentleman named Oscar that my Majorana teacher introduced me to, one of five makers of metal down his left on this planet.

See, this is an instrument that was made when folks in Panama, indigenous folks saw European instruments but didn't have access to them, weren't allowed to play them.

And they just said, well, you know what?

We're going to make something of our own devising.

And the instrument still retains that energy is still made out of one piece of wood and can't be bought at a store.

Somebody like this gentleman, Oscar has to make one for you.

And as he handed me this instrument, his wife came out in service.

Some juice.

And she goes, is your name Enrique G. Yeah, that's my name.

Are you the grandson of the doctor, doctor Enrique G. Yes.

That's me.

Oh, I worked with your grandfather for many years.

He was an amazing man.

And at that point, I teared up and I realized this instrument is for me.

And this instrument.

You're unlikely to see it performed.

I think I'm the only person who tours one in the United States.

So for the first time, maybe in human history, a maharana from Panama is a part of a TedTalk.

And when I play this instrument, it's a reminder that no matter if the world is being ugly to you, like, hey, you can't play that instrument, you're not allowed to do these things.

You can still make beautiful stuff.

This is a song I wrote for a new album on this instrument called Anabel.

♪ May you always shine.

The earth will turn and watch you climb.

The mountain as they turn to sand.

And if you can understand.

You will find.

You will find.

Peace of mind.

Not better.

Here than the needs.

The trees.

The atmosphere.

Or cool off to the east.

And if you remember in your.

That you're like a spider.

This.

You'll be far.

You'll be far.

Down.

You will find.

You will find.

Some peace of mind.

♪ May you someday see.

The sky is blue only for the sea.

The waters surround you and me.

The ebb and flow.

You know memory.

You'll be fine.

You'll be fine.

You will shine and you will shine.

And in time you will find.

Peace of mind.

♪ ♪ Where to watch you die.

Swallowing all my pride.

She was just out of reach.

Quote.

So hard to let it be.

If you leave anything behind.

Let it be.

Love.

She turned me down when I had to watch her die.

There's reason to lose your mind.

Let it be, love, love, love to turn.

Oh.

Side.

This might be.

Oh, I side.

♪ Note.

Got all the.

No girl on the.

Alleys.

Oh, is this some decision.

Oh, that will be, will be this.

♪ To turn.

Some is one side.

♪ And that is the end of our show tonight.

Please go be human together.