Interview with Logan Smalley, Founder of TED-Ed

Logan Smalley is the founder of TED-Ed, TED’s award-winning education initiative. TED-Ed creates one hundred engaging and informative animations a year, which are freely accessible for teachers, students, and anyone else who wants to learn. Smalley’s journey to creating TED-Ed began when he directed the multi award-winning nonprofit film Darius Goes West about his dear friend with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, Darius Weems.

Click here to read a MY HERO story about Logan Smalley.

Logan SmalleyLogan Smalley, with permission

MY HERO was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to speak to Logan about his journey so far.

The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Your story truly is an incredible one. Could you outline your journey so far?

I grew up in Athens, Georgia, alongside my friend Darius and his older brother, Mario. Mario and Darius were both born with a fatal disease called Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). When we were in high school together, Mario passed away and he asked me to look out for his little brother. I worked at a camp for kids with disabilities and Mario was part of my group and then Darius started attending the camp too, so I knew them both well.

The way that Duchenne muscular dystrophy progresses is you're born with the ability to walk and then you slowly lose the function of your muscles, the last muscles being the heart and lungs. When you're in high school, it's quite uncommon to lose someone; it had a really big impact on me. I made it a big priority in my life to hang out with Darius which wasn't hard, because he was the most fun and most hilarious person ever.

There was always this dream of taking him outside of Georgia because he had never been. Then eventually we thought, “We should do a road trip.” One day we were sitting at his house, and we were watching MTV's hit show Pimp My Ride. We sort of jokingly said, “We should get your wheelchair customized on that show.” The credits for the show roll and it says, “In order to participate in this show, you must live or be in the greater Los Angeles area.” We were like, “This is the road trip! Let's see if we can make this happen and do some worthy things along the way, including raising awareness for Duchenne muscular dystrophy and wheelchair accessibility across the country.”

We raised a modest budget through local fundraisers. We weren't really filmmakers. I had made student project movies in high school, using in camera editing and iMovies. So, we climbed a steep learning curve but luckily, we were able to put together a successful, feature length nonprofit film called Darius Goes West. The film won twenty-eight film festival awards, ended up being distributed on Netflix, and screened in over a thousand schools. We raised about $3 million for Duchenne muscular dystrophy research. We built a movement, and it was the movement part that really led to the next chapter of my life, which is TED-Ed.

Darius and I both won TED fellowships and got to attend the TED conference. When you're a TED fellow, you get to pitch a project. Based on my love of education—I had been a high school special education teacher—and my love of filmmaking, I pitched TED-Ed. They liked the pitch and invited me to come on and start. Now we're a team of more than twenty. We’ve made approximately one thousand seven hundred TED-Ed animations and they've been viewed well over six billion times. We also have a student voice and educator voice programs that we use to spark and celebrate the ideas of teachers and students throughout the world.

Was there a single light bulb moment that inspired TED-Ed?  

I was passionate about watching TED talks prior to winning a TED fellowship, and the only way you could watch TED talks at the time was through podcast downloads. When we were traveling for the film, I would download video podcasts for my iPhone. I was obsessed with them.

At the time, I was getting my graduate degree in technology, innovation, and education at Harvard Graduate School of Education. I’d also had this amazing experience where Darius’ film changed the lives of all of us involved and the millions of people that it reached. Observing that video, as a medium, was becoming increasingly accessible in classrooms and schools, it was a tantalizing question to say, “How can we leverage the power of video to unleash innovations in education?”

Could you speak a little bit on the importance of getting kids involved in digital storytelling and filmmaking?

In the case of Darius Weems, him sharing his story on video led to the first FDA approved treatment for Duchenne muscular dystrophy in history. He helped fund it. His life and mission were proof that telling a story can have a life changing impact on the world.

More generally, I think telling a story and capturing a story is the most human act that a person can undertake. Telling stories is what humans are uniquely capable of. Insofar as making the most of this life that we have and connecting with each other, I think that storytelling is one of the most enchanting and amazing acts that we can do as a species.

Giving kids the tools to do that provides them with more and more creative opportunities. If you're in the position to tell stories that could improve people's lives, it's a wonderful thing to do and also one of the most powerful ways to have an impact on the world.

Are there any films that have resonated with you or inspired you across your journey?

I've loved movies my whole life. A big one for me in high school was, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest starring Jack Nicholson and many other incredible actors. A lot of the antics that the Darius Goes West crew engaged in in terms of exercising fun and freedom and friendship and a joy of life, I could see in that film. A big theme of that film is standing up against systemic oppression: we were advocating for wheelchair accessibility and advocating for people to care about a condition that they wouldn't otherwise care about. To be an effective advocate requires some rebelliousness. I learned a lot from both the book and the film.

There's also a recent documentary that I really enjoyed watching called Spaceship Earth. It's this incredible retrospect on this wild science experiment from a few decades ago in which a group of performance artists sprinkled in science tests in their setting up what they hoped to be—and sometimes dishonestly portrayed to be—self-sustaining bio domes. It truly was performance art. The experiment was designed to explore how we might survive on other planets all right, if we were able to get there. The experiment was absurd, but also quite artful and extremely interesting.

What has been your proudest achievement so far?

I think playing the role in helping Darius affect the lifespan of all future people with Duchenne muscular dystrophy by virtue of him helping fund the first FDA approved treatment for DMD has to be the thing I'm most proud of. In more simple terms, I'm just so proud to have known Darius and to have been able to help tell his story, and for that story to have a life extending impact on people.

I'm also really proud to have built a distribution channel with TED-Ed where we can reliably publish lessons written by experts that have been visualized by professional animators, scored by professional musicians, and spoken by professional voice actors, none of whom have ever met each other. We reliably produce and distribute 100 videos a year and the average viewership for those videos is well over 1.5 million views per video. To have played a leadership role in helping build something that's promoting someone's curiosity and the spread of knowledge throughout the world and having it last for over a decade is something that really means a lot to me.

What are the issues that are most important to you in general and why?

Something I care a lot about is the health of the internet and information, especially with some of the antics that both bad faith publishers and bad faith organizations are using to flood the zone with misinformation. Doing what we can to inoculate against that feels very important to me. Also increasing accessibility to the internet and to information in the first place.

Then the third or first tier, depending on how you look at it, is advocating for equal access to education throughout the world. There are places where it's coded into law that everyone must receive a free and high quality education, and then there are places where it's actively denied to small and large groups of people. There are many issues that I care a lot about, but I think those are the ones that I have the most likelihood of impacting, so I tend to focus on them.

Are you currently working on any projects aside from TED-Ed?

I have another project that my wife and I run that is all about storytelling. It's called Call Me Ishmael. “Call me Ishmael,” is the famous first sentence of Moby Dick, and we gave him a real phone number. People call and leave messages about books they love, and we share the best, most compelling messages online.

It's not like, “Hey, you should read Matilda!” It's more like, “When I was a child, I was from a broken home, and my parents were really mean to me, and when I discovered Matilda, it made me feel seen.” It's someone I've never met sharing a powerful story. Some are earnest, some are funny, but they're all compelling. It's also a really neat way to discover books.

We also build rotary phones that we place in bookstores and libraries and schools where you can hear people's stories through the phones. We published an interactive phone book too. It's this wild, weird side project that keeps growing, and I just love it because it's an artful way to celebrate books and life.

What do you think might be next for you? What are your hopes for the future?

I'd like to continue making free, high quality educational resources with TED-Ed. In terms of enhancing that, we're excited to continue innovating the format and trying to make even more high quality, free educational resources for students. I'm quite motivated to make it so that regardless of where you are and who you are you have access to an educational video that could conceivably be shortlisted for an Oscar. I'm saying that's a goal, but we've come close! We made an animation that qualified for the long list for Best Animated Short. It was an animated poem, and it's called The Opposites Game. The idea of making something that could be celebrated by the movie industry and then giving it away to all kids in all languages for free forever is an extremely exciting thing, as opposed the proliferation of low-quality educational resources. It negates that thing of, “You're just a kid. It's not worth it to put quality into these educational materials. That's only for people who can afford to rent stuff or buy stuff.” I think the internet makes that dynamic feel obsolete. We're in a time where making one great evergreen video can serve and inspire students for forever, for free.

Do you have a mentor or a personal hero? And if so, who are they and why are they your hero?

It's a hard question to answer because I think the folks who are most heroic—I think their names are probably not known and they're doing things that are a lot more hidden. That could be teachers, that could be documentarians, that could be good parents, or good siblings.

I do want to say that upfront, but in terms of folks who are celebrated as heroes that I would love to strive to be like or emulate in some way… I think somebody who comes to mind is Adam Savage. He's one of the stars of MythBusters but he's also so much more. The reason I like him is he's hyper curious about everything. He helps build great things and helps tear bad things down. He promotes education and equality, and he does it in a way that's inviting and fun and contagious. I even had the pleasure of working with him on one of the first TED-Ed animations that we ever made. That’s the model for me—approaching things with curiosity, joy and a contagious sense of hope.

Where can people watch Darius Goes West?

It was distributed on Netflix but we're excited to have put the whole film on YouTube now so that it can be accessed for free.

Find the film here: https://www.dariusgoeswest.org/

Learn more about TED Ed: https://ed.ted.com/

Learn more about Call Me Ishmael: https://www.callmeishmael.com/about

View Logan’s website: https://www.logansmalley.com/