A slate of speakers, including political analyst Chuck Todd and Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority general manager and CEO Randy Clarke, presented talks at the 2025 TEDxFoggyBottom conference at the Dorothy Betts Marvin Theatre Saturday.
The event included a lineup of 10 speakers, including Todd and Clarke, Founding Farmers co-owner Dan Simons, the conference’s host and 2026 chair-elect of the Arlington Chamber of Commerce Bismah Ahmed and journalist Michael Scott Moore, who was kidnapped in 2012 and held for 32 months by Somali pirates. TEDxFoggyBottom, a student-run group officially licensed to hold independent events by the educational nonprofit TED, organized the event, which has taken place annually since 2011.
At TEDx events, speakers give short talks consisting of 15 to 20 minutes in which they present their ideas, experiences and stories.
The theme for this year’s conference was “Please Do Disturb,” which Ahmed said is supposed to inspire people to “break through the silence” and “challenge the status quo,” during her introductory remarks for the event.
“The very mission of TED is to spread ideas,” Ahmed said. “So it forces us to break out of those bubbles, never stop chasing knowledge and find comfort in the uncomfortable.”
In her talk, Ahmed said minorities should not fear walking into rooms “not designed for you.” As the first woman of color set to chair the Arlington Chamber of Commerce, she said many environments are not made to “feel comfortable” for minority groups.
“Don’t be afraid to walk into that room, take that risk,” Ahmed said. “Because the world is not going to wait for anyone. They’re not going to wait for you, you have to take that leap.”
Todd, the host of NBC’s “Meet The Press” from 2014 to 2023, spoke about how the U.S. House of Representatives’ membership should be expanded because it has not grown with the country’s population. He said the country’s founders intended the House to represent the “average person” and give them a “seat at the table” for power.
“Our politicians need to get closer to the people, they’re not going to do it on their own,” Todd said. “We can do it if we uncap the house.”
Todd said the House should be expanded because it will help solve other current political problems, like gerrymandering, because less populated districts make it harder to draw irregular boundaries. He also said it will help decrease political polarization, because more seats will allow more grassroots candidates to break up the “two-party duopoly” in Congress.
He said the House should expand from its current 435 members to 881, or about one representative per 400,000 people.
“Believe it or not, more politicians is a good thing, not a bad thing,” Todd said. “Because it means there would be more voices representing more people. It’s called democracy.”
Randy Clarke, the CEO and general manager of WMATA, discussed how he taught himself to be a “professional extrovert,” someone who is “comfortable in the uncomfortable,” especially in the workplace.
He said moments throughout his career, like the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, when he was the director of security and emergency management for Boston’s transit authority, forced him to become a better communicator and leader by confronting unfamiliar challenges. He said he observed former President Barack Obama address Boston after the bombing with empathy and humanity, which taught him to “be bigger” and act as a leader for people that need it in the moment.
“Life is short,” Clarke said. “Be passionate about what you want to do, the things that really matter to you, and really think through who are great leaders and who are not good leaders, and they both can teach you things.”
Simons, the co-owner of Founding Farmers, a D.C.-area restaurant chain with eight locations, including one in Foggy Bottom, spoke about how businesses should treat their employees. He said he disapproves of workplaces making certain subjects taboo, like how employees can talk about physical injuries but not about mental health issues like depression or anxiety.
He said stigmatizing the personal issues of employees “crashes directly” with the goals of having an “optimized and productive” workforce because it creates a negative environment for workers.
He said one of the keys to the restaurant chain’s success, including growing the business since 2008 to serve more than 3 million diners per year, was never asking employees to leave their problems “at the door” and instead embracing each employee as a “whole person.”
“Person by person, this is about changing the world one workplace at a time,” Simons said.
Moore talked about his experience being held hostage by Somali pirates and said human smuggling has become increasingly efficient and profitable in the last 20 years. He said new technology has enabled smuggling gangs to use fake social media profiles to lure and traffic people fleeing war, climate change and other crises.
He said the key to reducing human trafficking is to lower demand by improving conditions in low-income countries, so people are less likely to attempt to emigrate elsewhere and get caught in trafficking rings while traveling.
“All over the world, there are underground networks everywhere, and they’re willing to exploit people simply for the sale of a person,” Moore said.
Andrew Garrett, the academic section chief for emergency health operations and an associate professor for the School of Medicine and Health Sciences, discussed how the overuse of lights and sirens in ambulance transports increases risks for patients, drivers and pedestrians.
Garrett said inappropriate use of lights and sirens can triple the risk of a “bad outcome” for patients, because ambulances exceed speed limits and run traffic signals. He said usually the time saved by using lights and sirens to pass traffic has no “clinically significant impact.”
“This is a significant public health emergency that’s happening right in front of our faces, and about which we’ve done little to mitigate for quite some time,” Garrett said.
Other speakers included Kimberly Jenkins, the founder of a fashion academia company that powers platforms teaching fashion history and cultural awareness, Sheena Franklin, founder of K’ept Health, a company focused on using data to improve healthcare outcomes for women and Jake Levenson, a marine biologist at the U.S. Department of the Interior Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
Radha Rajkotia, the CEO of Building Markets, a nonprofit organization that creates market-based solutions for small businesses and economically vulnerable populations, spoke about integrating small businesses into global supply chains and how it helps owners in conflict-affected countries pursue economic opportunity and the “American dream” without emigrating.
“After you’ve done this work for a little while, you’ve come to see that actually the American dream really isn’t that unique to America,” Rajkotia said. “It really is the dream for humanity.”
