The unexpected wonders of my son's short life | James G. Robinson | Your Body on Tech

**Manoush Zomorodi** (0:03)
You are listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day.
Hello, I am Manoush Zomorodi. I'm a journalist, an author, a two-time TED speaker, and you may know my voice because I host the TED Radio Hour podcast over on NPR. This week, I've been taking over for Elise Hu with a special series of talks and conversations all about how we can live a healthier life in our high-tech era.
That topic is a personal obsession of mine, and I had the honor of guest curating a session at the recent TED 2026 conference all about tech, the human body, and what is keeping us human in this digital age. Today, my final speaker from the session and now in this series, James G. Robinson. So I have known James ever since our boys were in kindergarten together. I quickly learned that he and his wife, Tali, also had toddler twins, and that one of those twins, a boy named Nadav, was very sick.
But we lived our lives. We took the kids to school. We talked about our jobs. James was until recently the Director of Data Products at the New York Times. Our boys had sleepovers. But then, a few years later, James and his family took a trip that went very wrong. And Nadav's health took a turn for the worse. You'll hear the story in a moment. But I just want to take a sec to explain why it was really important to me to include a talk in this series about something that could never be quantified, analyzed, or optimized. And that's the love a parent has for their child. Humans are imperfect. And James would have it no other way. You'll hear more and you will hear why in his talk and our conversation. Coming up right after the break.
And now, our TED Talk and conversation of the day.

**James G. Robinson** (2:17)
Hi, my name is James. I live in Brooklyn, New York with my wife, Tali, and I'm a dad. And when people hear that, they always ask me the same question. How many kids do you have? Well, the answer is three. Three amazing boys. And then they say, how old are they? And that's where things get a little complicated, because one of them, Nadav, was born with a heart defect and died nine years ago at the age of five.
When I tell people this, they always have the same reaction. That's the worst thing I could ever imagine. In fact, some of you are probably feeling that right now.
But they don't realize what a privilege it was to be his father and how grateful I am for having had that experience. And today, I'm going to explain why. Nadav was born with a single ventricle, the result of a condition called heteroxy. It required three surgeries before the age of four. The first one at only five days old. But there was no fixing his heart. These operations were merely palliative, a series of sophisticated hacks designed to stabilize his circulation. The hope was to get him to teenage years where he might be eligible for a heart transplant. Let me tell you what it is like to get that news. It is absolutely terrifying. Because it makes you realize how little you know. I didn't know whether these operations would be a success. I didn't know whether Nadav would live or die. And worst of all, if he did die, I didn't know how I would tell his brothers.
Parenting is all about making choices. We wrestle with the unknown as best we can, hoping that things will work out for the best. We hope that the decisions we make are the right ones. And when things go wrong, we worry that there are no right decisions at all. We simply do not know.
But there is also wonder to be found in the unknown. When our first son was born, I left the hospital giddy with awe that we had somehow conjured a new life into the world. And when his brother was born with a heart defect four years later, it made me realize how truly remarkable this actually is. When we were first conceived, just a bundle of cells, perfectly symmetrical. On the outside of the embryo are tiny hairs called cilia. Their job is to beat the amniotic fluid around the embryo. This lays out the proteins that tell our organs how to form. If the cilia are not working quite right, and this is what happened with Nadav, the flow is erratic. The proteins are in the wrong position, and our organs are malformed. This happens in the span of three hours.