It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

I'm Manoush Zomorodi.

And I hate to do this to you, but we are going to start the show back in the painfully awkward days of middle school.

If you think about a cafeteria, there was the cool kid table, there's the athlete table and maybe the edgy alternative table.

But there was always a table of nerds.

This is Ty Tashiro.

The socially awkward kids, who were the furthest thing from cool, who were maybe a little physically clumsy, who dressed frumpy.

And yeah, that was Ty.

I sat at that table.

So it was the first week of school.